Maybe it’s just me, but the new Three prices don’t seem that bad for a punting phone... Look at it this way, it’s £10 for an unregistered phone.
Three instituted a ridiculous 5-fold price hike, for nothing. I hate paying more than necessary, and my entire strategy is to shave all expenses down as much as possible so that I have more funds to put towards punting. It might not be
that much, but it's £120 per year for the fixed plan, when it was previously only around £30 or so. That's a decent punt per year, that now goes to enriching their CEO. (Their PAYG rate is so high, that I estimate is would cost around the same per hear as the fixed plan.) Another reason to not support
Three, is to not encourage greed.
I got a Lebara sim, which gives me 1000 texts, 1000 minutes, and 2GB data; far more than I need at a price of £5/month (£60/year). So I just cut my phone expense by 50% by choosing a better carrier. Unfortunately this needs to be renewed monthly, but at least I can purchase their top-up voucher anonymously using cash.
Thanks to a tip from Escortman, I also bought a couple new O2 PAYG classic sim cards off Ebay. They were 99p and arrived brand new. The only issue is that O2 will only honour their PAYG classic plan as a legacy agreement, and could discontinue it at any time.