Say No to 0870 review

We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been faced with a larger-than-expected mobile phone bill only to discover that making essential calls to service providers and other companies has cost us precious cash. The reason is the infamous 0870 (or 0845) number, and the amount of seemingly reputable firms resorting to using such nefarious tactics is on the rise.

0870 numbers are usually not included in your allowance of mobile free minutes, which means you get charged a hefty fee whenever you call them. The most galling thing about all this is that the companies are intentionally using these numbers to make cash – they often take a cut of the profits made from the calls themselves.

Such commercial skulduggery is enough to make your blood boil, but thankfully there’s a way to fight back. Although your gas company, credit card firm or telecoms provider might not tell you about it, there’s usually a way of contacting them without using a costly 0870 number, and this specially-made Android application is here to help you find it.

You simply insert the 0870 number you’ve been given and the app searches the database for alternatives. We tried several examples and each one returned a valid alternative number – all of which started with 01, which means they would be included in our free minutes should we make a call to them from our handset.

Say No to 0870 is therefore worth its weight in gold, but it’s not a perfect application by any means. The website on which it is based allows you to browse for alternative numbers using a company’s name, and this is something that would prove very handy with this Android app.

We also noticed that the app is rather inconsistent when it comes to results. A few times it told us that no results could be retrieved due to a network issue, which we assume has something to do with the high demand being placed on the central Say No to 0870 website.

Despite these technically teething troubles, there’s no denying that Say No to 0870 is an indispensable tool in this cutthroat world of commercial profiteering, and represents the ideal way to win some power back for the consumer.