Unfortunately we identified the lack of top-ups as being a huge pain point and blocker that was preventing people from upgrading.
The basic aim is that we get everyone to upgrade before we shut down the prepaid. Ideally, we’ll get most people to upgrade before we have to start loudly shouting about the end of prepaid via push notifications, etc. We won’t get everyone to do it, and when that date gets set, and the 2 month period passes, and we approach that final week - customer support is going to be incredibly difficult if there’s still a huge amount of people who haven’t upgraded. That’s the scenario that we’re really trying to avoid.
We actually never intended that top-ups would be completely removed because they are incredibly convenient for a lot of people, but as per the point of this thread - that has to be weighed up against how much they cost us.
In the long term, as more and more people move their salaries to us, it won’t be as necessary, and with Open Banking/PSD2, we may be able to implement a solution that pulls in money from another account that way, at no cost.