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24 months is pretty standard these days, and upgrading sooner is frankly a massive waste of a perfectly good device; I would have happily kept my S6 for years longer had it not gone for a swim with the little brown fishes...
Even at £5/month, it's over £600 with the handset at its current price over the same period.
SIM-free deals also assume you have £500 to drop on something, which I don't.
Timmy2wheels-
It's not like I just throw my old phone in the bin! My missus, I think her brothers and my Mum have all had my old phones for a time. Eg. I went from Galaxy Nexus to N5, skipping the N4 which wasn't good enough and I moved away from Nexus when the N6 was too big and the Pixels too expensive (and not waterproof like the Sony).
It's also not like I didn't have reasons to update. You won't see my in a queue gagging for the newest release iTwat (see N4, N6 skipping) but if a new phone does something I want (waterproof) then I will get it and if a phone breaks (Sony, N5) I will buy a new one while the other is being repaired (case in point my XCover and another Z3 Compact)
Not having the money to spend on a SIM-free is fair enough, but I do and I don't like being tied to 12/24 month contracts when my phone rotation history indicates much more random handset swaps.
hippy
2 year contract though. I hate long contracts for smartphones. Probably less of an issue now they're all kinda good enough but in the early days on Android when stuff was changing rapidly, phones would be out of date in 6 months.
£522 for 2 years
vs.
£489 SIM-free + ~£15/month seems like a decent saving for, say, my missus who doesn't use much data and isn't that mindful of upgrades.