This £2.99 purchase saved me from iPhone slowdown

Do you remember a band called Busted? Whether you were a fan yourself, your kids were part of that trend, or you look at them with dewy-eyed nostalgia, I'm sure you do. I was a massive fan of them back in the day, forming some of my earliest friends over a shared love of all things a little bit boyband.

Recently, I saw them live again. But disaster struck when about 15 seconds into my favourite song, my phone froze. Queue internal screaming. See, I'm not really one for filming at live events – live in the moment, I say – but I was determined to snag a bit of this track.

My haggard iPhone 13 had other plans. The music played on. The lyrics rang out. And my phone was – as we say in the industry – borked.

The issue, it turns out, was that I'd maxed out my on device storage. That was mainly thanks to my photos and videos, but the issues weren't resigned to just the storage of files. Things were running slowly, apps were shutting down at random. 

That had me almost instantly looking for an alternative. With the recent release of the iPhone 15, I was sizing one up. That stunning pink hue had my brain excited. The eye-watering outlay did not.

But I didn't need to make the upgrade. See, instead, I made a £2.99 payment and got myself an iCloud+ subscription. That ported all of my images and videos into a seamless cloud-based storage system, freeing up gigabytes of data for other uses.

Now I'll be honest, I was never a big fan of these kinds of subscriptions. I try my hardest to steer clear of the recurring payment model wherever possible, opting instead to pay outright. But this has been a godsend, and saved me from having to shell out the best part of a thousand pounds on a new iPhone.

I also never intended for this to be a long term solution. In my head, I'd use it to collate everything and then do some spring cleaning. Now though, I can't see myself ever getting rid of it. That £2.99 a month is arguably the best value purchase I've made, and I smile every month as the payment leaves my account. I certainly don't do that for other things, I can promise you.