Phone expert Chris Hall has crunched the numbers on the iPhone 17 Pro – and shoppers could save hundreds with the right deal
We’re well into the Black Friday sales, and stores are lining up loads of deals and discounts. The good news is that there are lots of great discounts, but the bad news is that those discounts are not always on what you want to buy, like the iPhone 17 Pro.
The latest iPhone from Apple is the must-have device of 2025, but it’s also one of the most expensive. There are big savings to be made with some smart buying decisions, where shoppers could get the phone for as little as £37 a month from Sky Mobile, but would be better paying £42.06 a month to GiffGaff.
For shoppers looking for the cheapest iPhone 17 Pro with data, GiffGaff is the best option, offering the 256GB iPhone 17 Pro with 25GB data for £42.06 a month, with £25 upfront. I’ve examined a range of iPhone 17 Pro buying options – which I detail below – but here’s a quick glance:
READ MORE: O2’s excellent Pixel 10 deal beats Sky and GiffGaff this Black Friday
READ MORE: Apple’s 7 best Black Friday 2025 deals on iPhone, MacBook, iPad and more
The iPhone 17 Pro is Apple’s top model, with the most power and the best camera, and a fresh new design introduced for 2025. The handset itself costs £1099 when bought SIM-free and there are no discounts on this – but there are considerable savings to be had if trading in an old phone.
Through GiffGaff, shoppers will actually pay £1179.16 for the phone over 36 months, so it’s £80.16 more expensive than buying SIM-free – but the advantage is monthly payments, with this deal really working because of the low cost of GiffGaff’s data, which comes through the O2 network.
Apple iPhone 17 Pro
£42.06
GiffGaff
See the deal
The iPhone 17 Pro is Apple’s latest flagship with a new design, great camera, loads of power and an excellent display.
There are no mid-contract price rises on GiffGaff, although because the data contract is 18 months, the price might be different after a year and a half – but shoppers are then free to choose a new deal.
There’s the option for a 20GB monthly rolling contract for the same price, which means shoppers aren’t tied into the data and could swap to a cheaper SIM if they wanted. The handset payments are on a 36-month contract, however.
The downside of GiffGaff is that there’s no combined trade-in for an existing device, although the company does give shoppers the option to sell their phone, however, it can’t be used to bring the price of the iPhone 17 Pro contract down.
The absolute cheapest network deal
There’s a big winner when looking for the cheapest deals – Sky Mobile. One of the reasons is that Sky Mobile offers a £0 SIM with 100MB data. It’s not a usable amount of data – it would be gone in minutes once surfing online. But it does allow that £37 a month price for the iPhone 17 Pro.
The downside of Sky Mobile is that, compared to other deals, the price of the phone is higher – it’s £1344 total – so while the monthly payments with almost no data are lower, the overall cost of the phone is higher. However, add a 1GB data plan at £2 a month, and it’s cheaper than GiffGaff, but there’s still very little data.
For those who plan to use the phone mostly on Wi-Fi, this might work, but for anyone wanting decent mobile data, then GiffGaff is the better option.
Cheapest ‘big four’ deal – EE, O2, Three, Vodafone
Big networks have the advantage of controlling the signal that customers connect to, so they may get preferential data rates at busy times, as well as having more perks associated with the contract.
The cheapest deal from a big network is the iPhone 17 Pro from EE at £44.54 with £30 upfront and 10GB data on the No Frills plan – only a couple of pounds more than GiffGaff. However, it’s limited to 10Mbps speeds. The 50GB Essentials plan is faster, but takes the price up to £46.64 a month. There will be mid-contract price rises.
That’s still cheaper than the next best offer, which comes from Three, offering the iPhone 17 Pro for £48 a month with £40 upfront and 5GB data. There will be mid-contract price rises.
Vodafone appears to be offering some great deals, but they are skewed by a 6-month 50% discount on Airtime Plans. These start cheap, but then double in price, at which point they are really expensive.
Best deal for big data
There’s a winning deal for those looking for lots of data – and this is the only deal that’s actually because of Black Friday, and it comes from Mobiles.co.uk, which is offering 5x data, landing shoppers with 500GB.
Mobiles.co.uk has the iPhone 17 Pro for £49.99 a month with £29 upfront and 500GB of data. There are mid-contract price rises, but this is a 24-month deal on iD Mobile – and it’s the cheapest route to the iPhone 17 Pro with lots of data.
The absolute cheapest way to get an iPhone 17 Pro
Here’s the crunch. Buying the iPhone 17 Pro from any retailer on a contract means paying more than the £1099 price. The absolute cheapest route to ownership is to buy the phone SIM-free and pair it with a cheap SIM-only deal.
Currently, all retailers are selling the iPhone 17 Pro for £1099, for example:
All those retailers also offer some sort of trade-in, although Apple only offers payment for Apple devices. Apple offers payment over 24 months at 0% (£45.79 a month), Argos offers 0% instalment options, as does Amazon, while Currys offers 6 months interest-free flexpay. Shoppers looking to buy the device could consider these, but read the small print, as outside of the limited 0% offers, the interest rates are high.
Those looking for a great SIM deal might consider the 60GB for £8 a month from iD Mobile, which also has a £120 cashback offer on it.