Back in February, Safaricom announced a new subscription plan for its subscribers. Dubbed “All In One monthly bundles”, the new plan allowed users access to bundle together calls, texts and data instead of having to pay for calls and text off-plan then buying data bundles separately as had mostly been the case.
Since then, the All In One monthly bundles, which are priced from as little as Kshs 500 to as much as Kshs 10,000, have become more prominent and picked a few add-on features along the way in a bid to net more subscribers.
At some point, Safaricom dangled them to subscribers of its Flex product as its replacement. Later, in order to add more value to existing subscribers as well as entice new ones, it also included some free YouTube data, separate from the data users were already paying for, on top of the free WhatsApp it had been offering from the first day to all users upon exhaustion of their allocated data.
It turns out that the free YouTube access, capped at 5GB, became such a hit with subscribers that the company is keeping it permanently. While that is good news to All In One monthly bundle subscribers, there is a catch. Safaricom has slashed the free YouTube data by over half to just 2GB.
“We introduced Free YouTube as a promotional offer and as part of our continued innovation to meet our customer’s needs. Based on the great uptake from our customers and feedback received, Free YouTube will now be offered as a permanent feature of our monthly bundles at 2 GB per bundle,” was the response we got from Safaricom when we enquired about the change as soon as we noticed it.
In an interesting move, Airtel Kenya has just announced that it will be giving subscribers of its Amazing data bundles 5GB data to access YouTube for free.
Early in the month, Safaricom announced a new promotion running all the way to October that sees prepaid subscribers who opt in get a 200MB free YouTube bundle upon hitting their daily targets on top of the usual bonus airtime that they have been getting.
