Every December, I do something I probably shouldn’t. I sit down with a cup of tea, open my banking app, and scroll back through the year looking at every tech purchase I made. It’s part forensic audit, part therapy session. Some of it makes me nod with satisfaction. Some of it makes me wince. And some of it genuinely baffles me, because I have no memory of buying it whatsoever.
2025 was a year I went in thinking I’d be disciplined. The cost of living isn’t exactly forgiving at the moment, and with three kids at various stages of needing things that cost money (school, university, general teenage existence), I was very aware that every pound matters. And yet. Here we are. Let’s go through it honestly.
I’m not going to pretend this is a pristine financial breakdown. It’s more of a reckoning. Because I think a lot of families are in the same boat, spending money on tech without ever stopping to ask whether they’re actually getting value from it. So this is me asking that question, out loud, for all of us.
The Subscriptions: The Slow Leak I Should Have Fixed Sooner
This is where it hurts the most, and where most people are quietly haemorrhaging money without realising it. Barclays research reckons over 40% of Britons underestimate what they spend on digital subscriptions each month. I can absolutely believe that, because I was one of them.
Here’s what we were running for a significant chunk of 2025: Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Sky, Spotify, Apple TV+, and a couple of smaller ones. The numbers stack up fast. Netflix Standard is now £12.99 a month after yet another price hike. Disney+ Standard sits at £8.99 a month. Spotify Premium Individual went up to £12.99 a month this year, a 30% increase in just over two years. Apple TV+ is £8.99. When you add Sky on top of that, you’re looking at a genuinely uncomfortable monthly outlay.
The average UK household apparently spends between £60 and £80 a month on streaming services. We were comfortably in that bracket. That’s up to £960 a year before you’ve bought a single piece of hardware.
My verdict on subscriptions this year: I finally got ruthless. Apple TV+ got cut. ITVX and Channel 4 are free with ads, and you don’t even need a TV Licence to use them for catch-up, so there was no reason to be paying for content we could get elsewhere. I moved Netflix down to the Standard with Ads tier at £4.99 a month. Yes, there are ads. No, it’s not as painful as I expected. We rotated Disney+ rather than keeping it year-round, because the kids aren’t watching it constantly enough to justify £8.99 every single month. Spotify stayed, because prying that away from anyone in this house would cause genuine civil unrest.
The saving? Around £40 a month by the end of the year. That’s £480 over a full year. Real money.
The Big Purchases: Where I Got It Right (And Where I Didn’t)
The Samsung Galaxy Ultra. Every year, I buy the latest model. Every year, I tell myself it’s justified because I use it so much. And every year, it’s still a lot of money. The average monthly cost for a flagship like the iPhone 16 Pro Max on contract runs around £58.40, and the top Samsung Galaxy contracts sit similarly. Over 24 months, that’s well over £1,400 just for the handset deal.
Was it worth it? Honestly, yes, for me personally. I use my phone for photography, video review, content creation, and as a secondary screen when I’m working away from the desk. But I’m aware that for many people, a mid-range phone offers 80% of the flagship experience for roughly half the price. The market is moving that way, and I don’t think anyone should feel pressured into a thousand-pound phone unless they genuinely need what it offers.
One thing worth knowing if you signed a new contract in 2025: Ofcom brought in a new rule from January banning providers from tying annual price rises to the inflation rate for new customers. Instead, they have to tell you the fixed increase at sign-up. That’s a genuinely useful consumer protection, and it’s worth factoring in when you’re comparing deals.
On the gaming side, the Nintendo Switch 2 arrived in June 2025. Current prices start from around £375 for the console alone, or £399 with the Mario Kart World bundle. I’ll be honest. With a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X already in the house, I didn’t buy one. But I watched the launch closely. If you’ve got younger kids and you don’t already own the gaming ecosystem, the Switch 2 is a strong pick. For our house, it was a spend we didn’t need to make.
The Impulse Buys: Honestly, What Was I Thinking
Every year there’s a category I try to gloss over in these reviews. The impulse buys. The things ordered at 11pm that seemed essential and turned out to be completely indulgent. I won’t name all of them, but there were accessories for kit I already owned, a gadget that promised to solve a problem I’d already solved differently, and at least one item that arrived, got used once, and now lives in the garage near the 3D printer in a kind of tech purgatory.
The 3D printer, to be fair, is not an impulse buy. That gets used constantly. I’ve lost count of the things I’ve printed this year, from practical household fixes to parts for RC builds. If you’re handy and you enjoy making things, a good printer genuinely earns its place.
The impulse purchases, though, added up to probably £200 to £300 over the year. Not catastrophic, but not nothing either. The honest lesson: if I’d waited 48 hours before clicking buy on half of those, I probably wouldn’t have bought them. I’m implementing a 48-hour rule in 2026. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Comparison: Was It Worth It?
Here’s a rough breakdown of the main categories and my honest verdict.
| Category | Approx. 2025 Spend | Value Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Subscriptions (peak) | £960/year | Poor, cut significantly |
| Subscriptions (after cuts) | £480/year | Reasonable |
| Flagship smartphone (contract) | £1,400 over 24 months | Good, if you use it fully |
| Gaming (no new console) | £0 on hardware | Smart, existing kit sufficient |
| 3D printing materials and upgrades | £150 approx | Excellent value |
| Impulse gadget buys | £200–£300 | Mixed to poor |
| Smart home bits | £100 approx | Generally good |
Hype Cycle Check
LIKELY TO LAST: Subscription trimming and the shift towards ad-supported tiers. This is a structural change in how people consume content, not a temporary trend. The savings are real and the quality gap has narrowed.
WATCH CLOSELY: Mid-range smartphones eating into flagship sales. The gap between a £400 phone and a £1,200 phone is shrinking every year. If that trend continues, the case for upgrading to the latest flagship gets harder to make.
VAPOURWARE RISK: Any wearable that promises to revolutionise your health but requires a subscription to unlock the data. The UK wearables market is expected to reach around £1.29 billion in 2025, but a lot of the value claims remain unproven for everyday users. Buy the hardware only if the free tier does what you actually need.
CES 2027 Angle
If 2025 taught us anything about tech spending, it’s that the industry is slowly waking up to the fact that consumers are pushing back on value. Heading towards CES 2027, expect to see manufacturers doubling down on longer software support windows as a selling point, more aggressive mid-range positioning, and a likely battle between streaming bundles as platforms try to stop the rotation behaviour households like mine have adopted. The smart money for CES 2027 is on announcements that lead with cost-efficiency as much as performance.
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What to Watch
- Ofcom’s fixed-increase rule in practice. We’re now in the first year where new mobile contracts must declare fixed annual rises upfront. Watch how providers use (or abuse) this to structure deals.
- The refurbished phone market. With around 25% of upgraders already choosing refurbished in recent years, the major manufacturers are going to have to respond, either by extending support or by making refurbished programmes official. Both are good for consumers.
- Streaming bundle consolidation. At some point, the fragmentation has to stop. Watch for UK platform bundling deals in 2026 that make subscription management simpler.
- Mid-range dominance. If a £400 Android handset starts winning mainstream benchmark comparisons, the flagship pricing model faces a genuine reckoning.
If any of this sounds familiar, and I suspect it does, I’d love to hear how your 2025 tech spending stacked up. The best place to continue that conversation is the Tech Dads Life newsletter, where I go deeper on family tech decisions, practical spending advice, and the kind of honest reviews you won’t find on sites that need to keep manufacturers happy.
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