About MoneySavingExpert

Founder and Executive Chairman Martin Lewis created MoneySavingExpert in February 2003 for just £100. The site's ethical stance and consumer revenge approach have made it the UK's most popular money website, one of the top 20 most popular of all digital services among Brits, and the UK brand most recommended by consumers, according to YouGov. It's won many awards and is now a constant port of call for consumers and policymakers alike.

In September 2012, the site joined the MoneySupermarket Group (see Martin on joining MoneySupermarket). This has boosted the technology resource and secured MSE's future, meaning even more people will benefit from its unbiased, campaigning stance. Yet the site continues to operate as an entirely independent entity, and its stance of 'putting the consumer first' is protected by an iron-clad legal Editorial Code.

The site's honours include Radio 2's Most Useful Website of the Year 2003, the winner for New Media at the 2005 Bradford & Bingley Personal Finance Awards and being named number one for business information in the 2010 Hitwise Awards. It was also commended by a parliamentary motion in 2005.

In 2018, MoneySavingExpert won Brand of the Year at the Drum Online Media Awards, Organisation of the Year at the Protection Review Awards, and a gong for blogging at the Shomo Awards. MSE was also named Personal Consumer Website of the Year at the Santander Media Awards in 2015, and was runner-up in the Financial Consumer Website of the Year category at the same awards in 2016.

We are regular winners of Headline Money's Consumer Finance Title of the Year, having won most recently in 2023. And we've come top of YouGov's poll on the brand most people would recommend to their friends every year since 2020. 

The site never charges to save people money, nor does it take any advertising. Companies cannot pay to buy space on the site (see the How this site is financed guide for more info). Any top deals, best buys, tips or suggestions on the main site are purely down to journalistic research from the MSE team and Martin (see the Editorial Code).

The underlying philosophy is that we live in an adversarial consumer society:

We want to redress the balance and aim to do it in a number of ways.

1. The weekly MSE Money Tips email

   About 9.1 million people receive MSE's Money Tips email every week. All the latest deals, guides and loopholes go into it. And as more than two-thirds of the best deals expire within a week, the email's aim is to ensure you don't miss out.

2. Super-detailed MoneySaving guides

   A good starting point's the Money makeover guide, but we've a huge range of guides, from helping you pay less interest on debt, to booking a cheap holiday, fighting for your consumer rights and many many more. Use the menu at the top of this page to get started.

3. Nifty free MoneySaving tools

   The site's brimming with clever gadgets to help you bag deals, analyse finances and earn cash – from the Income Tax Calculator to the MSE Budget Planner.

4. The MoneySaving Forum

   The MSE Forum is one of the UK's biggest social networks. It has over two million members, and at any one time, thousands of users are discussing ways to save, as well as supporting and motivating each other.

   The forum's split into different subject boards, each with its own mini community, including Debt-Free Wannabe (working together to get out of debt), Grabbit While You Can (top bargain spotting), Old Style MoneySaving (thrifty ways from older days) and Freebies (free stuff grabbing).

   New to the forum? If you're unsure where to start or find it daunting, read our Forum intro guide to help you find your way around.

5. Campaigning work

   MoneySavingExpert has a small campaigns team, who work alongside Martin to liaise with charities and politicians to put the consumer's point of view across.

   We lobby over issues such as financial education, payday loans and claims management regulation, as well as making sure the consumer's voice is heard in the corridors of power.

Watch Martin's Money Rant video

It's probably worth hearing from Martin at this point

It started as a one-man band, with a stated aim "to cut your bills without cutting back"​, with nerdily-detailed, unbiased guides on all areas of consumer finance, but principally credit cards, loans, energy, mortgages and insurance.

But it was also about finding and exploiting product loopholes, leading to the aggressive motto: "A company's job is to screw you for cash, our job is to screw 'em back". As the site – and, as he says himself, Martin – matured, these thoughts merged into our long-standing mission: "Cutting your costs, fighting your corner".

Things took off at speed, with the site helped as its launch coincided with Martin's own profile growth on Radio 2, This Morning and elsewhere. By the end of February 2003, 5,300 people had added their emails to get the weekly Martin's Money Tips. By April 2003 it was 10,000, and little more than a year later 100,000.

In late 2003, the first MSE team member, Brendan, a part-time webmaster, came on board. By 2005, then a team of eight, our first big campaign – reclaiming bank charges – started, including the now-famous template letters. That campaign resulted in over £1 billion reclaimed from the banks, before a legal quirk kiboshed it.

By 2007, there were a million people on the email list. Do take a look at the Internet Archive to see what the site looked like when you joined. Not long after, in 2008, the MSE Charity was set up. And soon we even got big enough to do our own MSE leaders' debates at general elections, something we now do each time.

There've been many other campaigns, bigger even than bank charges. It's estimated MSE and Martin together have helped people get £12 billion back in PPI alone (while that's now closed, you can still reclaim tax on PPI payouts), while 100,000s have rebanded their council tax.

In 2012, MSE joined the MoneySupermarket Group. Part of the deal was a binding ethical Editorial Code, ensuring users' interests remained the priority ahead of making money. That back-end change substantially boosted our tech abilities, letting us build services such as Pick Me A Tariff on energy, eligibility calculators and more. These days, we even have our own MSE Open University course.

Video: How did MSE grow from Martin in his living room spending £80 on it to one of the UK's biggest websites?

To celebrate our 20th year, we hope you enjoy this special 'MSE at 20' film (including some cringe archive shots). 

Today, about 15.33 million emails have been added to our email list (though we now instead talk about sending to about 9.1 million active accounts). And even though Martin's baby is fully grown, he's still here, in his role as executive chair, one of about 65 people who work on the site – a good few who have been here for more than a decade.

Together we hope MSE is still fulfilling what it was born to do – cutting your bills, fighting your corner.