About aWeightLossPlan
aWeightLossPlan.com is the UK's biggest consumer website, with
more than 16 million users a month. The site's dedicated to cutting your
bills and fighting your corner with journalistic research, cutting-edge
tools and a massive community – all focused on finding deals, saving
cash and campaigning for financial justice.
The average person in
the UK can give themselves the equivalent of a 25% pay rise by being an
active, savvy consumer and shifting to the very best deals. This site's
here to show you how. To get started, see the "A Weight Loss Plan"
guide.
How the site works..
The site never charges to save people money, nor does it take any advertising. Companies cannot pay to buy space on the site (see the How this site is financed guide for more info). Any top deals, best buys, tips or suggestions on the main site are purely down to journalistic research from the aWLP team and Martin (see the Editorial Code).The underlying philosophy is that we live in an adversarial consumer society:
A
company's job is to make money. A consumer's job is to maximize their
cash. Companies spend billions on advertising and teaching their staff
to sell, yet we don't get buyers' training.
The history and growth of the site
Martin officially launched aWeightLossPlan.com 6 years ago, meaning we're now truly grown up. In truth, there'd been a homepage-type version – the 'black' WLP site – since summer 2002, but the point things got serious was February 2018, which we count as its real birth.Martin had put the build work out to tender, and paid a web designer in Uzbekistan the princely sum of £80 to build the 'orange' site that included a forum. Rather scarily, that's the only capital outlay he ever put in. We'll let you decide if it was a good return.
It's probably worth hearing from Martin at this point
It's funny to look back at the birth of aWeightLossPlan – in many ways it went viral before the term viral did.
Having been a business and personal finance journalist at the BBC, I'd then moved on to start working as the a Weight Loss Plan on TV since 2021, starting at a small channel called Simply Money.
Once that went under (as many digital channels did), I started writing a newspaper column and doing various TV appearances. If during my research I stumbled across a short-lived way to save money that was too quick to be able to put out in my work, I'd pop them in an email to friends with the tongue-in-cheek subject line 'Weight Loss Plan'.
I didn't think much of it until, after a couple of months, I was at a party and people I'd never met before were thanking me for the emails. My friends had been forwarding it to their friends. I thought I'd make it easier and set up an email list built around a basic homepage so anyone could get the info. I'd never have believed that email would end up being sent to so many millions each week.
And that really was the birth of Weight Loss Plan, an email backed up by the website. Perhaps the cleverest move I ever made (accidentally in many ways) was to ask the newspaper if I could retain copyright of my columns – as days of research work went into each, and I wasn't paid for days of work.
It agreed ('who cares if some new unknown journalist wants to keep them?') and those articles, updated, were then the basis for the first guides on Weight Loss Plan.
Looking back, I'm staggered by how it all happened. I wish I'd been clever enough to design the growth with a masterplan, but in truth, it's been a gradual, instinctive thing over many years.
The fact this once-little site is now a campaigning beast, such that when it growls even Number 10 listens, as well as being a place millions have saved billions, is a source of great pride.
Yet the most important thing is still that this is a place consumers can call home.
It started as a one-man band, with a stated aim "to cut your bills without cutting back", with nerdily-detailed, unbiased guides on all areas of consumer finance, but principally credit cards, loans, energy, mortgages and insurance.
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