SaveCompare Guides

How SaveCompare guides work

The job of each guide is to explain how a UK consumer market actually works in 2026, what's changed since the last revision, and where the cost falls on the consumer rather than the supplier. Guides sit alongside the comparison tools but answer different questions. A tool tells you which broadband deal is cheapest this week. A guide tells you why the cheapest deal has a £3-a-month rise pencilled in for next April under Ofcom's new pounds-and-pence price-rise rules.

We update guides on a quarterly cadence by default, and more often when a regulator publishes a material change. The energy and mortgage guides moved several times in 2024 alone — Ofgem reset the default tariff cap quarterly, Ofcom's mid-contract rules took effect in April, the Bank of England held the Bank Rate at 5.25% through the summer before the November cut to 4.75%, and lenders re-priced fixed-rate products faster than the broadcast media kept up. A guide that doesn't move when the underlying numbers move is a guide that's quietly wrong.

Verticals we cover in depth

The current published guide hubs are: business energy and home energy (the original two SaveCompare verticals from 2008); credit cards, with sub-guides on how to choose, eligibility soft searches, the 0% intro APR mechanic, balance transfer mechanics, and credit-builder cards; broadband, covering One Touch Switch, FTTC versus FTTP, social tariffs and no-contract options; credit score, with explainers on how to pull all three bureaus free, the factors that actually move a score by weight, and what to do when a default lapses off your file; and mortgages, including the 2026 rate environment, first-time buyer mechanics and remortgage timing.

We deliberately don't cover everything. There are no guides on cryptocurrency, no get-rich content, no debt-relief funnels. Verticals with thin public data are kept out — if we can't source the numbers from a UK regulator, a public-filings dataset or a recognised industry survey, we don't publish a guide for it. The full list of sources we use across all verticals is on the About page methodology.

Who writes the guides

The site is owned and operated by TheMediaFlow Ltd, a UK private limited company registered with Companies House under number 06769171. The editorial team commissions and edits each guide internally. We don't run guest-author placements or accept partner submissions. Where a guide reflects a specific qualification — for example a mortgage adviser's view on whether to overpay versus offset — we name the adviser and link to their authorisation status on the FCA register.

How a guide gets reviewed

Before a new guide publishes, it goes through three checks. First, every number must trace to a public source, with the source and the date the source was accessed noted in the working copy. Second, every product or supplier named must be checked against the current register — Ofgem for energy suppliers, Ofcom for broadband providers, the FCA for regulated financial firms. Third, every page that contains a recommendation is sanity-tested against three reader profiles — an existing customer, a switcher, and a first-timer — to make sure the advice doesn't quietly assume one of them. It's a slow process by content-mill standards. It's the part we don't compromise on.

What you won't find here

No paid-for "best of" lists. No content sponsored by a single supplier and labelled as editorial. No clickbait headlines that promise savings the underlying numbers don't support. If a product can save the reader meaningful money in a specific case, we say so and we show how. If it can't, we say that too — and we say what to do instead. The site exists to be useful, not to maximise click-through. We've turned down enough partner placements over the years to know that's a sustainable position.

Common questions about our guides

How often are guides updated? Quarterly by default; faster when a regulator publishes a change. The energy guides moved four times in 2024 because Ofgem reset the default tariff cap quarterly and the cap level moved meaningfully each time. The Ofcom pounds-and-pence rules from January 2025 triggered an immediate broadband guides revision. Each published guide carries a "last reviewed" date in the byline.

Do you publish guest posts or sponsored content? No. The editorial team writes and edits internally. We don't accept partner copy, we don't run paid-for "advertorial" pages dressed as editorial, and we don't allow sponsors to review copy before it publishes. The few sponsored placements we have run in the past have been explicitly labelled as such; the editorial archive doesn't contain hidden paid placements.

What if a guide is wrong? Email [email protected] with the URL and the correction. We respond to factual corrections within 5 working days and publish the change with a "corrected on [date]" note where appropriate. Reputation is the asset; we'd rather fix a number publicly than leave a wrong one in place.

Why do you not cover crypto or get-rich content? Because the public data needed to compare those products honestly doesn't exist. We can compare credit cards because issuers must publish a representative APR; we can compare insurance because the ABI publishes premium trackers and the FCA publishes complaint statistics. Cryptocurrency has none of these checkable disclosures, so any comparison we published would be unverifiable. We'd rather not publish than publish guesswork.