Quick-Start Checklist
- Download Too Good To Go – Check daily for local Surprise Bags, especially around 3-4pm
- Join Olio – Browse what’s free in your neighbourhood before buying new
- Install PetrolPrices or Roadtrip – Check before every fill-up, avoid motorway services
- Get a library card and download Libby + BorrowBox – Cancel the subscriptions you’re not fully using
- Bookmark Trolley.co.uk – Compare your weekly shop before defaulting to habit
Time to set up: 15 minutes
Annual savings potential: £500-800+
Too Good To Go – Surplus Food for a Third of the Price
Restaurants and supermarkets face a daily problem: food that’s perfectly edible but won’t sell tomorrow. Rather than bin it, over 40,000 UK businesses now sell their surplus through Too Good To Go as “Surprise Bags”—you pay around £3-5 and get food worth £12-15 or more.
Costa, Pret, Greggs, Morrisons, Aldi, Booths—they’re all on there. The app hit 40 million Surprise Bags saved in the UK as of August 2024, with users collectively saving over £95 million in 2023 alone. Booths managed to save 100,000 meals through the platform since joining in early 2024.
The catch, if you can call it one, is that you don’t choose what’s in the bag. It’s whatever they’ve got left. Sometimes that’s brilliant; sometimes it’s three croissants and a brownie when you were hoping for sandwiches.
How this works in practice: Say you’re finishing work around 5pm and you’ve got nothing sorted for dinner. You check the app on your lunch break—there’s a Morrisons Surprise Bag available for collection between 7-8pm, priced at £3.09. You reserve it, swing by on the way home, and walk out with a carrier bag containing reduced-price ready meals, some bread, yoghurts, maybe a pack of mince. That’s dinner sorted and tomorrow’s lunch covered, for less than what you’d pay for a meal deal.
The timing matters here. Bakeries and cafés tend to list stock around 3-4pm when they’re working out what won’t sell by close. Set notifications for your favourite spots and you’ll catch the good ones before they go.
Olio – Free Food From Your Neighbours (And More)
Olio takes a different approach entirely: everything on it is free. Neighbours share surplus food and household items with each other, and volunteers collect unsold stock from supermarkets to redistribute locally.
The app has over 8 million users globally, with more than half of all listings requested within an hour of being posted. Food Waste Heroes—Olio’s volunteer network—collect surplus from shops like Iceland, Co-op, Morrisons Daily, and Spar, then list items for collection. You message the volunteer, arrange pickup, and that’s it.
Beyond food, there’s household items, furniture, children’s clothes, gardening equipment. The Borrow feature lets you loan items from neighbours temporarily—useful if you need a pressure washer for one afternoon rather than buying one that’ll sit in the garage for years.
How this works in practice: You’re clearing out before a house move and you’ve got half a bag of pasta, some tins that won’t fit in the removal boxes, and a working toaster you’re replacing. Instead of binning them or hauling them to a charity shop that might not even take food items, you photograph everything, list it on Olio, and within a couple of hours someone’s messaged asking to collect. The stuff’s gone, someone else uses it, and you’ve not added to landfill. Works the other direction too—I’ve picked up everything from bread and eggs to a desk lamp that just needed a new bulb.
Fair warning: quality varies. Most people are sound, but occasionally you’ll see something that makes you question humanity’s judgement. The rating system helps weed out the dodgy ones.
PetrolPrices / Roadtrip App – Stop Overpaying at the Pump
Fuel prices vary wildly even within a few miles. An RAC investigation in March 2024 found a 27p per litre difference between two stations a short drive apart. If you’re filling a 50-litre tank, that’s £13.50 difference on a single fill-up.
PetrolPrices claims their average user saves over £200 a year just by checking before they fill up. The app shows real-time prices at stations near you or along a planned route, filters by brand and fuel type, and lets you compare before committing. The Roadtrip app does something similar but also calculates exact trip costs based on your specific car model—just enter your reg and it works out consumption automatically.
Supermarket forecourts consistently undercut branded stations by 5-10p per litre. Motorway services? Add 20-30p on top of normal prices. Monday and Tuesday tend to be cheaper than weekends, though that’s not a hard rule.
How this works in practice: You’re planning a weekend trip that’s about 200 miles each way. Before setting off, you check Roadtrip and see there’s a Sainsbury’s five minutes from your route that’s 8p cheaper than the Shell near your house. You fill up there on the way out instead. Over the course of a year, if you’re doing 10,000 miles and filling up roughly every 400 miles, those 8p differences compound into real money—easily £150-200 saved without changing your driving habits at all.
The government’s PumpWatch scheme is supposed to make real-time fuel pricing even more accessible by requiring stations to report within 30 minutes of changes. Until that’s fully live, these apps remain the best option.
Libby & BorrowBox – Your Library Card is Worth More Than You Think
Audible charges £8.99 per month for the standard plan. Kindle Unlimited runs £9.99. If you’re listening to one audiobook a month and reading a couple of ebooks, that’s potentially £230 a year on digital content.
Libby and BorrowBox are free. Completely free. Both apps connect to your local library’s digital collection—ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers—and all you need is a library card, which is also free.
Most UK libraries offer both services, and the catalogues differ slightly between them, so using both gives you a wider selection. You can download for offline listening, sync across devices, and adjust playback speed. Loans automatically return themselves after the borrowing period, so no late fees either.
How this works in practice: You’ve been meaning to read that bestseller everyone’s talking about, but £14 for the hardback feels steep and you’re not sure you’ll even like it. You check Libby, find your library has the ebook available, and borrow it for three weeks. If you love it, great—you can buy a physical copy later for the shelf. If it’s not for you, no loss. Apply this to a dozen books a year and you’ve avoided spending £150+ on things you might have abandoned halfway through.
The practical tip: if a book has a long wait list on one service, check the other. Different libraries have different numbers of digital copies, and sometimes BorrowBox has availability when Libby doesn’t, or vice versa.
Trolley.co.uk – Supermarket Price Comparison Without the Cashback Faff
Trolley compares prices across 16 UK supermarkets—Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Aldi, Waitrose, Co-op, Ocado, and more. It’s not a cashback site trying to earn affiliate commission on your shop. It just shows you where things are cheapest.
The app has a barcode scanner for in-store price checks, shopping lists you can save and reuse, price history so you can see if something’s genuinely on offer or just cycling through “sales,” and price alerts for specific products. Nearly a million UK shoppers use it to compare their weekly shop.
The average family of four spends over £6,500 on groceries annually. Trolley claims users can save up to 30% by shopping wherever their specific basket is cheapest, though realistically most people see 10-20% once you account for convenience and not wanting to visit four different shops.
How this works in practice: You’ve got a weekly shop list—milk, bread, pasta, chicken, some veg, household basics. Rather than defaulting to Tesco because that’s where you always go, you plug the list into Trolley and see the total at each supermarket. Turns out your exact basket is £12 cheaper at Asda this week, and three items on your list are currently half price at Morrisons. You adjust accordingly. Over 52 weeks, those £12 differences add up to over £600.
The Chrome extension is useful too—it automatically checks prices when you’re browsing a supermarket website and flags if something’s cheaper elsewhere.
Game Price Trackers & Free Weekly Games
Gamers figured out years ago what most shoppers still miss: the sticker price is rarely the real price.
IsThereAnyDeal compares game prices across 30+ legitimate stores – Steam, GOG, Humble Bundle, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming – showing you exactly where the cheapest key sits. A brand new £60 release often appears for £25-35 through authorised resellers. The site tracks price history too, so you’ll know instantly whether that “50% off” banner represents a genuine historic low or just marketing noise.
GG.deals takes it further, monitoring nearly 60 storefronts and letting you set alerts for your wishlist. When your target price hits, you’ll know.
Then there’s the Epic Games Store approach: skip paying entirely. Every Thursday, Epic gives away at least one game for free – no subscription, no catch, just a free Epic account. Past giveaways include GTA V, Death Stranding, Control, and Football Manager 2024. In 2024 alone, Epic distributed 89 free games worth approximately £1,855. That’s nearly two thousand pounds of entertainment for the cost of remembering to click “claim” once a week.
The gaming world learned this lesson years ago: never pay full price without checking alternatives first. Whether you’re comparing CD key prices across storefronts, claiming free weekly games from Epic, or following a step-by-step guide to non-GamStop registration to access welcome bonuses unavailable on UK-licensed platforms, the principle stays the same – the best value rarely comes from the most obvious source.
Quick tip: Set a Thursday phone reminder. Claim the free game even if you won’t play it immediately – once claimed, it’s yours permanently.
Why Comparison Beats Loyalty
There’s a common thread running through all these tools: compare before you commit. The petrol you buy at different stations is essentially identical, yet the prices vary by 20%. The audiobook on Audible is the same audiobook available free through your library. The food in a Too Good To Go bag is the same food you’d pay full price for twelve hours earlier.
Supermarkets, petrol stations, and subscription services all bank on you not checking. They rely on habit, on convenience, on the assumption that a few pence here and there doesn’t matter. But pennies become pounds, and pounds become hundreds over a year.
None of this requires giving up anything. You still eat, still drive, still read, still do the weekly shop. The only difference is you’re paying less for the same things—or in Olio’s case, getting them for nothing. That’s not about being cheap. It’s about not paying more than you need to.
