Thrifty iPhone bill trick lets you save £335 a year – and it only takes a few seconds
THERE’S an easy way to cut down on your monthly bills if you’re an iPhone owner.
Apple offers a special bundle scheme that lets you pool together some of your subscriptions – potentially saving you £28 a month, or £335.88 over a year.
It’s called Apple One, and there are a few different ways of using it.
There are three different tiers of Apple One, each with a different price tag.
And the savings you get depend on which tier you buy, and what you’re already paying for.
You can sign up to Apple One in four taps on an iPhone, just by going to Settings > [Name] > Subscriptions and selecting the Apple One option.
APPLE ONE – INDIVIDUAL TIER
The first option you’ve got is the Individual Tier.
This will set you back £18.95 a month, and includes four Apple services.
Here’s how much they’d normally cost each month:
- iCloud+ (50GB) – £0.99
- Apple TV+ – £8.99
- Apple Music – £10.99
- Apple Arcade – £6.99
That adds up to £27.96 a month, which means you’re saving about £9 a month with Apple One.
That’s equivalent to £108 a year if you were already paying for those services.
If you’re not familiar with the services, Apple TV+ is a TV streaming service like Netflix, and Apple Music lets you listen to tunes just like Spotify.
Apple Arcade gives you access to loads of exclusive games with no in-app purchases.
And iCloud+ gets you cloud storage for your files, plus other benefits like Hide My Email to keep your email address private.
APPLE ONE – FAMILY TIER
The Apple One Family Tier costs £24.95 a month, and has two extra benefits.
First, you can share the perks with up to five people (which potentially makes for huge savings).
But you’ll also get four times the amount of iCloud+ storage.
Here are the bundled services and their usual monthly fees:
- iCloud+ (200GB) – £2.99
- Apple TV+ – £8.99
- Apple Music – £16.99
- Apple Arcade – £6.99
HOW TO SET UP FAMILY SHARING
Here's what Apple says...
“Family Sharing makes it easy for up to six family members to share music, films, TV programmes, apps, books, subscriptions including iCloud+ and more, all without sharing an Apple Account,” Apple explains.
“You can set up an Apple Account for kids, set permissions remotely with Screen Time and approve spending and downloads from a parent’s device with Ask to Buy.
“One adult in the family – the family organiser – can set up Family Sharing for the group from their iPhone, iPad or Mac.
“If purchase sharing is turned on, the family organiser will pay for family members’ purchases and must have a valid payment method on file.”
Just follow these steps on iPhone:
- Open the Settings app, then tap your name
- Tap Family (or Family Sharing), then tap Set Up Your Family
- Follow the on-screen instructions to set up your family and invite your family members
That adds up to £35.96, so you’re saving around £11 a month.
And over the course of a year, you’d save £132 versus paying for those services individually.
APPLE ONE – PREMIER TIER
The biggest benefits and savings come from the top plan: Apple One Premier.
This plan includes family sharing, but adds in 10 times more cloud storage plus two extra services.
You’ll get Apple Fitness+ for over 4,000 at-home workout videos hosted by professional fitness trainers.
And you’ll also get Apple News+ for access to a vast selection of premium news content, including magazine subscriptions.
Here’s how the costs of those services break down:
- iCloud+ (2TB) – £8.99
- Apple TV+ – £8.99
- Apple Music – £16.99
- Apple Arcade – £6.99
- Apple Fitness+ – £9.99
- Apple News+ – £12.99
That comes to a grand total of £64.94, so you’re saving £27.99 a month – or £335.88 a year.
SAVE ON SUBSCRIPTIONS!
Here’s what The Sun’s tech expert Sean Keach says…
Subscriptions seem impossible to escape these days.
You’ll probably got half a dozen or even more – and it can be hard to give them up.
So bundling subscriptions is a very easy way to cut down on some costs.
Apple One is a great option if you’re already subscribing to Apple services.
And if you’re using Spotify, maybe switching to Apple Music via Apple One is a decent way to save some money.
More important is not overlooking the family sharing aspect of these subscriptions.
You can share services like Apple Music and Apple TV+ with up to five other people in your household.
That’s a potentially enormous saving that you definitely don’t want to miss out on.
If you’ve got multiple people in the house paying for the same Apple subscriptions, you’re literally throwing away money.
Grab an Apple One family plan and cut those bills right down.
And if you decide that you don’t like it, you can cancel at any time and go back to the old way.
So it’s worth trying, if only to see if you do end up saving any money.
If you can make use of the family sharing with up to five extra people, you could massively increase these savings.
The technical saving if you were already paying for all of those services for six people would be more than £2,000 – although it’s very unlikely you’d have a situation like that.
Still, don’t ignore family sharing – it’s an easy way to slash your monthly bills.