The cheapest grid we found, and the $200 question inside it

It is cheaper, and here is by how much

There is no useful way to write this comparison without leading with the concession. GoCheap's single-device prices are $12, $26, $46 and $70 for one, three, six and twelve months. Smartiflix charges $14, $36, $47 and $69.

At one device the two are close. The gap opens as you add connections, because GoCheap's tiers rise more gently than ours do:

• One device, one month: $12 vs $14 — GoCheap by $2
• One device, three months: $26 vs $36 — GoCheap by $10
• One device, one year: $70 vs $69 — Smartiflix by $1, the only Smartiflix win
• Two devices, one year: $96 vs $125 — GoCheap by $29
• Three devices, one year: $110 vs $175 — GoCheap by $65
• Four devices, one year: $140 vs $225 — GoCheap by $85, a 38 per cent saving
• Five devices: $50 monthly, $70 for three months, $100 for six — Smartiflix has no equivalent

The lifetime plans, and the arithmetic that decides them

GoCheap sells lifetime access at $200 for one device, $310 for two, $410 for three and $520 for four. Set those against its own annual prices and the breakeven points fall out immediately:

One device: $200 lifetime against $70 a year breaks even at about two years and ten months. Two devices: $310 against $96 is roughly three years and three months. Three devices: $410 against $110 is about three years and eight months. Four devices: $520 against $140 is also about three years and eight months.

So every lifetime plan on the page is a bet that the service will still exist, and still be worth using, somewhere between three and four years from now. Under three years you lose money; over four you start to win meaningfully.

Now weigh that against what a lifetime actually means here. The word describes the operator's lifetime, not yours, and this is a market with no licensing regime, no deposit protection and no continuity requirement. A reseller depends on an upstream supplier it does not control, in a category subject to ongoing enforcement pressure. Three to four years is a long horizon to ask of a business with those dependencies.

There is a second reading worth keeping in mind. Selling lifetime access converts future revenue into cash today, at a discount. Companies do that when they are confident, and companies also do that when they need the cash. From outside, you cannot distinguish the two, and the buyer carries the whole consequence either way.

None of that makes a lifetime plan indefensible. It makes it a specific, unhedged bet, and the minimum diligence is to check how long the operation has existed before you take it — which our verification guide shows you how to do in about thirty seconds using public domain records.

The five-connection tier, and who it is for

GoCheap is the only provider in our set selling five simultaneous connections. Smartiflix stops at four, and most competitors stop at three.

That matters more than it sounds, because the constraint people run into is never the number of devices they own — it is the number streaming at the same instant. A house with two televisions, two phones and a tablet in use on a weekend evening genuinely needs five, and a four-connection plan means somebody gets an error message.

One caveat applies to every multi-connection plan regardless of brand: the limit is enforced per account, and hitting it usually produces an unhelpful failure rather than a clear message. If you buy a tier, test it by deliberately opening every stream at once on the trial, before you rely on it.

The one claim GoCheap does not inflate

GoCheap advertises 20,000 live channels and 40,000 VOD titles. Those are the lowest figures in our entire comparison set, where claims reach 61,000 channels and 200,000 VOD.

Read carefully, that is a point in its favour rather than against. None of these numbers is audited by anyone, and we have found the same figures appearing verbatim across unrelated brands — two providers in this set advertise exactly 61,000 channels, and two share an identical trademarked feature name. Against that background, a lower claim is more plausibly a real one.

It also has no bearing on whether you will be happy. Twenty thousand channels is already two orders of magnitude more than anyone watches. The question is whether your particular twenty channels work at 8pm on a Saturday, and no published total speaks to that.

What the low price cannot tell you

The obvious worry about the cheapest provider in a market is that something has been economised on. That may be true, and it may not — a leaner operation with lower overheads can pass on real savings, and $12 is not implausible for a reseller with modest costs.

What can be said with confidence is that the price contains no information about peak-hour capacity, and neither does anything else GoCheap publishes. Nor does anything Smartiflix publishes. This is the structural condition of the whole category: the evidence you need arrives only after payment.

Which is why the free 24-hour trial is the most valuable item on GoCheap's grid, and worth more attention than the $12. It converts a purchase decision into an observation. Use it on a busy evening, with every connection you intend to pay for running simultaneously, and you will learn more in two hours than any comparison page can tell you.

Cheaper, with one exception we would insist on

If the deciding factor is price, GoCheap wins and the margin is not subtle. A multi-screen household committing to a year saves $29 to $85 against the equivalent Smartiflix tier, and gets access to a fifth connection that we do not sell at all. Take the free trial, test it under load, and if it holds up you have found the cheaper service.

We would still steer you away from the lifetime plans specifically. Not because they are dishonest, but because their breakeven sits three to four years out in a market where nothing is guaranteed to last that long, and the alternative — paying yearly — keeps your exposure to one year at a time for a modest premium.

Where Smartiflix earns its slightly higher price is narrower than a comparison page usually admits: a published price for every combination with no gaps, and an explicit named-domain policy that gives you something to verify a checkout page against. If those matter to you, the full grid is here, starting at $14 for a month. If they do not, GoCheap is the cheaper ticket and the honest recommendation is to try it.