Your mobile network has been trying to give you a free sausage roll for years, and statistically you've been ignoring it. Every big UK operator runs a rewards app for existing customers, loaded with weekly freebies, discounted cinema tickets and gig presales — and the networks' own problem, which they occasionally admit in marketing pushes, is that most customers never open the thing.

This is the rare corner of the freebie world with no trap in it. You already pay the bill. The app is free, tied to your existing number, and asks for nothing new — no card details, no fresh sign-up data of any consequence. The only cost is remembering it exists.

O2 Priority: the benchmark

O2 Priority is the app the others copied. It's free for O2 and Virgin Media O2 customers, and it runs on two engines. The first is weekly food freebies — Greggs items have been a fixture for years, with free breakfast rolls and sausage rolls rotating through, alongside coffees and snacks from other chains. Claim a roughly £1.20–£1.60 item most weeks and you're £60–£80 a year better off for tapping a button in a queue.

The second engine is quietly worth more: Priority presale tickets, typically 48 hours before general sale, for shows at The O2 and the O2 Academy venues around the country. For anything that sells out — and in 2026, everything half-decent sells out — early access is the difference between face value and the resale sites. That's not a freebie in the strict sense, but it's money saved that no other app on your phone can save you.

VeryMe: Vodafone's version

VeryMe Rewards lives inside the main Vodafone app and works on the same rhythm — weekly offers that refresh whether you claim them or not. Free high-street coffees turn up regularly, along with chocolate bars, snack vouchers and the occasional bigger draw. The tone is slightly more raffle-like than O2's, with prize entries mixed in among the certainties, but the certainties are real: claim the free coffee even semi-reliably and it's another £40-odd a year off your actual spending.

The habit that makes it pay is the same in both apps: a fixed weekly look, Friday morning being the traditional slot since that's when the best food offers have tended to land, and claiming things before you're standing at the counter — vouchers usually stay valid for a window after claiming, but the offer itself can run out.

Three+ and the rest

Three+ is Three's entry, and its historic strength is cinema — cut-price tickets that have at times undercut every other route in Britain, including the famous meerkats, plus rotating food and coffee offers. If you're on Three and pay full price at the cinema, you're donating.

Around the edges:

  • EE skews its perks toward discounted add-ons and bundled subscriptions rather than outright freebies — less relevant to this article's purposes, but check what your plan already includes before paying for any streaming service separately.
  • Sky VIP, for Sky customers, has periodically included free cinema tickets and prize draws — worth opening if you're in that ecosystem anyway.
  • Tesco Mobile pays its loyalty in Clubcard points, which is less fun than a sausage roll but compounds better.
  • giffgaff and most budget MVNOs offer nothing of the kind — that's part of how the SIM stays cheap, and it's a perfectly fair trade.

The maths, and the one rule

Let's be clear about what this is and isn't worth. Nobody should switch networks for a rewards app — a £5-a-month gap between tariffs is £60 a year, which swallows the entire freebie haul before you've eaten a single roll. The comparison sites remain the way to pick a network; the rewards app is a reason to open an app, not to sign a contract.

But if you're already on a network that runs one, the arithmetic is embarrassingly good for the effort involved:

  • A weekly claimed food item: £60–£80 a year.
  • A couple of free coffees a month you'd otherwise have bought: £40–£70 a year.
  • One presale that saves you buying resale tickets: £30–£100 in a single evening.
  • Total effort: one app, one weekly glance.

The standing rule for this category applies here too, mostly as a formality: nothing in a network rewards app should ever ask for card details, and if some partner offer inside one does, that's a paid subscription in a party hat — close it. The genuine freebies redeem with a code or a barcode at the till, end of story.

The offers expire fast, usually within days, and the apps will try to sell you things on the way through — accept both as the cost of doing business. You're paying the phone bill anyway. Let it buy you breakfast.