PlayStation in the UK has paired up with a company called Raylo to offer rental options for a huge range of its hardware. For a whacking £24.49 ($33) a month you can get a 1TB PS5 you don’t own, or make that £28.49 ($39) if you want a second controller with it.
Called PlayStation Flex, it purports to lease out PS5s and accessories “starting at £9.95 per month,” deliberately aimed at customers who aren’t able or willing to pay the full price up front. But the reality is much more grim.
Join your friends on PlayStation 5 with Flex. Lease a PS5 Digital Edition console starting at £9.95 per month, for a limited time only: https://t.co/7O84kquQ89 pic.twitter.com/RCeCNQfdZF
— PlayStation UK (@PlayStationUK) February 12, 2026
The “starting at £9.95 per month” claim in the promotional materials is extremely misleading. This is the price for the bizarre Europe-only 825GB digital edition of the PS5, roughly working out to $13.50 a month, but crucially only at that rate if you commit to a 36-month plan from which it is very difficult to opt out. In reality, to rent that lowest-tier console for a month without a contract would cost you £19.49 ($26.50), more than twice as much as the implied price.
For clarity, let’s focus on the 1TB standard PS5, which purports on the front page of the store to be available for £11.59 a month ($16), but for a single month would actually cost you £24.49 ($33). The same console, to buy and own outright, costs £479.99 ($654, with tax included in that figure).
If you signed up to that 36-month (three-year) commitment, which you cannot cancel, at the cheapest rate this would cost you a total of £417.24. So maybe a bargain, right? That’s £60 cheaper than buying it day one! Except, no, because at the end of those three years you’ve spent your £417 on owning nothing. You have to give the PS5 back. The person who bought it for a not dissimilar price three years ago gets—most importantly—to keep it, and also has the option of reselling it to make back a chunk of their cash.
This situation obviously gets considerably worse if you rent the PS5 for a shorter period of time. If you were unable to commit beyond a monthly rate (which of course is the case for many with low incomes looking to find cheaper access to this tech, unable to commit to 12-month contracts, let alone three-year ones), for the equivalent three years you’d have paid out £882 ($1202) for a console you don’t even own.
Oh, and let’s not forget, we did all this math for consoles that come with just one controller. Run that again with a couple of DualSense included and it’s £450 at the cheapest, £1,026 at the monthly rolling rate. That’s $1400 for a console you didn’t buy. (And just for fun, the PS5 Pro? $834 to $1840.)
If you cannot keep up payments…
This becomes more insidious when you note the ease with which these contracts can be entered into. Sony’s store states that applying for the deal takes “60 seconds,” and that “We only do a soft credit check and applying has no impact on your credit file.” Which is to say, it’ll allow you to sign up to a long-term contract costing hundreds of pounds without checking if you can afford it.
There is nothing mentioned on the store pages for what happens if you’re unable to keep up your payments years after making the commitment, and the site’s AI assistant fought hard against telling me this, but eventually revealed that cancelling early requires having paid a minimum of 18 months of charges, plus that month’s and the next. So if you’ve signed up for two years but need to cancel after 12 months, you’ll need to pay another eight months’ worth of charges to get out of the contract. What happens if you can’t? It wouldn’t tell me. I’m waiting on a human response.
Renting electronics was once a peculiarly popular phenomenon in the UK, with 1970s retailers like Radio Rentals and Granada renting out color TVs and washing machines to those who couldn’t afford to buy them outright. And of course those people would go on to spend far more in monthly payments than the item would have cost up front. There was another resurgence of this model, but far more predatory, in the 2010s with companies like BrightHouse working on a “rent-to-own” model, preying on those with the lowest income, designed to trick customers into spending five times the real price, although people did at least get to keep the product. (The company collapsed in 2020 under the weight of its own cruelty, after it was found to have deliberately sold contracts to those who couldn’t afford them.)
Raylo pushes its rental scheme as a “circular economy,” claiming renting tech is in some way more sustainable and environmentally friendly, as was declared during its partnership with Dyson last year. Meanwhile, the company has rather embraced its own model by taking on board more than £180 million of debt and equity funding in the last few years, all with a view to launching in the U.S. later this year.