Capitec Connect says it has the cheapest data on the market — we test its claim

Capitec has released its results for the financial year ended 28 February 2023 and claimed in its annual report that its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) “arguably” has the cheapest data on the market.

A MyBroadband analysis shows this claim is false, except for very generous readings of the qualifier “arguably”.

The bank launched Capitec Connect on 26 September 2022, offering competitive prices for less data-intensive users with no bundle expiring bundles.

Capitec Connect runs on Cell C’s MVNO platform.

Our initial analysis revealed that Capitec Connect offered excellent out-of-bundle tariffs. However, its data starts getting expensive when you use more than 500MB per month.

Just over six months later, Capitec announced in its financial results that it had issued 500,000 SIM cards to subscribers to date.

It also made a questionable claim regarding its pricing.

“Capitec Connect data is arguably the lowest-priced data offering in the market and does not expire,” it stated.

“The cost per unit of data, voice or SMS remains the same — whether a client buys a little or a lot,” stated Capitec.

“Our flat rates mean no out-of-bundle rates and therefore our clients don’t need to convert airtime to use it as data, voice, and SMS.”

Those familiar with mobile pricing know it is doubtful that an operator can offer flat rates and provide the best prices across the board.

We compared Capitec’s prices to prominent MVNO Afrihost Air Mobile, and Shoprite’s aggressively-priced K’nect Mobile service. We also included South Africa’s major mobile network operators: MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, and Cell C.

From the outset, Capitec’s claim is disproved by Afrihost’s offer of 1GB of free mobile data on Air Mobile to anyone with an MTN SIM.

Air Mobile’s promotion requires that subscribers claim the free 1GB every month in the Afrihost app.

Disregarding Afrihost’s free data offer, our analysis confirmed that Capitec’s prices were competitive at the lower end of the usage scale.

However, from 250MB per month, Shoprite K’nect becomes cheaper if you recharge using a Shoprite Money Market account.

K’nect Mobile can be even cheaper if you recharge in-store and present a Shoprite or Checkers Xtra Rewards card.

From 1GB of usage per month, Shoprite K’nect becomes outright cheaper than Capitec Connect, regardless of whether you use its Money Market account or not.

Beyond 2GB of monthly usage, MTN and Vodacom offer special prepaid price plans that are significantly cheaper than standard prepaid bundles.

These are the MTN BozzaGigs and Vodacom Prepaid LTE price plans.

To compensate for the cheaper data bundles, Vodacom stipulates that you can only make out-of-bundle voice calls using airtime on this price plan — no voice bundles are available.

From around 20GB of monthly mobile data usage, Capitec Connect’s prices rank stone last.

While it is accurate that Capitec’s data does not expire, one can argue if that feature is valuable enough to make up for the price differential.

Our comparison is summarised in the table below.

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