Your iPhone bill might be rising. Stop it in one easy step.

There’s nothing worse than getting to the end of the month and realising that your pesky bills are way more than you expected. With the winter months coming, gas and electric bills are certain to shoot through the roof, which means that you might need to find ways to pull back on your outgoings.

When you’re on a mobile phone plan with any of the leading tariff providers, you may expect your bill to be the same every month, but what if that’s not the case? We’ve all been there. You check your bill online the moment it comes through and find that there’s an extra tenner or so tagged onto it. When you try to figure out why, you get some vague jargon-filled explanation from your provider.

So, how can you stop your iPhone bill increasing? Well, it may surprise you to learn that one of the main reasons your bill is likely rising is because of an iOS setting.

Now, credit to iOS first and foremost, it's packed full of all sorts of wonderful features. One of the most popular being the slick messaging system, iMessage. It now incorporates more multimedia than ever, encouraging users to send GIFs, use message effects, and send ‘digital touch’ messages.

Stop sending MMS

If you’ve started using all of the above, you may be in for a nasty shock when your bill comes at the end of the month. You see, these forms of media all count as MMS messages. That means that you could end up paying through the nose for the fun features if you don’t have a plan that includes this type of message.

First of all, it’s worth knowing that if you’re sending these messages to other iPhone users, you should be OK, so long as iMessage is available. That’s because iMessage uses your WiFi or data to send the message and there are no additional charges.

However, when you send a message to a non-iPhone user, or iMessage is unavailable, you could start racking up some unwanted charges. If your plan doesn’t cover MMS media, you may find that you’re paying for every single picture that you send. So, how can you avoid this issue? Well, there are three things you may want to try. I found the first fix does the trick, though you the other two methods will help too. So, here’s how you can reduce your iPhone bill:

1) Turn off MMS messages

You could turn off MMS messaging capabilities so that you never accidentally send them to people without iPhones. To do so, you need to go to:

Settings > Messages > MMS Messages > Toggle Off

Turn MMS off

Note that once you’ve turned off MMS messaging, you’ll only be able to send picture messages via iMessage. In other words, you won’t be able to send any to non-iPhone users. But that’s what WhatsApp’s for.

2) Stop sending these messages to people without iPhones

You could avoid sending multimedia messages to people who don’t have an iPhone. You can tell which messages are iMessages by the colour they appear in your phone. iMessages are blue whereas normal ones are green.

3) Buy an add-on or bundle

You can buy add-ons or bundles for your current tariff that include MMS media. Doing so means that you will still have to pay extra for the messages but at least you can control how much it costs.

Any of the above will help you to dramatically stop your iPhone bill increasing, which means that you will have one less thing to worry about. After all, while iOS's GIFs are fun and frivolous, they’re not worth paying for, right?