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Reasonable Pre-Paid Cellphones in the US?
MBCook asks: "I've been with my current cell provider for a few years, and never been terribly happy with them. They lock and cripple their phones, but their coverage has been decent. However, in the last month I have experienced having my phone telling me it had voice mail when it didn't for about 2 weeks (little icon was there, but calling in said 'No messages'). Then today (Dec. 4th) it notified me of a very important call I missed — on November 19th. Since my contract expires next month, I've been looking at pre-paid cell phones and their plans. I'm not a big talker, and it would take me a while to use up 100 minutes. All the pre-paid plans seem to like to expire your minutes relatively fast (30 days) unless you buy a large number like 1000, then you get 90 days. Add to that the daily access fees some of them want to charge you ($1 per day you use your phone) and I may as well be paying $40 a month to one of the big boys. Is there any way to get cheap pre-paid cell service in the US? I don't care about ring tones, and while I'd like to be able to get games I can survive without 'em. I can't be the only one in this boat, what have others found?"
Sure, you save a lot of money if you use your phone 1-2 hours a day, but there's people that don't. Let's say you use a phone 3 hours a month. Most plans out there start at $30. $10 an hour is not what I call tremendous cost savings.
European operators have cheap prepaid rates that are better fitted to the light phone user. Go find something like that in the US.
As others have said, depends on your usage pattern. I have Cingular pay-as-you-go, and almost never use my phone. I spend about $15 a month. The cheapest non-prepaid monthly plan I saw when shopping around a couple months ago was $40 a month.
The cost savings of going on a month-to-month plan are tremendous.
The cost savings for a prepaid plan can be much less then a month-to-month plan. Many people could easily save $100-200 per year with a prepaid plan.
I have friends and family who are paying around $100 a year with their TracFone plan. This cost include a free phone and the taxes. That's a far better deal then the budget 300 minute/month plan-- these seem to average $30/month, with another $5-10 in taxes per month.
Most people I know don't come close to using the minutes in a cheap month-to-month plan. It would be a much better deal to get a pre-paid plan from a good company.
They don't need a 300 minute/month plan when they only use 5-60 minutes per month or a handful of text messages. If they need to be on the phone for an hour, they still have that option. The minutes roll over at the end of the term if they buy new minutes.
It doesn't work for everyone, and the prepaid plans from some vendors is a complete rip-off. It doesn't work for me because my phone is a work pager, and I need the texting abilities.\
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
You must talk over four hours per month -every- month for a monthly plan to make sense at all. Cell phone companies are extreemly happy to push plans on everyone because most people don't use their phone that much or when they do they charge them 4x the prepaid rate for in overages.
determine your use case. purchase accordingly.
I use pay as you go too - usually runs me $50 for three months, about the same as you. I live in a rural area (as is most of this state) so coverage is important.
That said, I use cingulair prepaid-as-u-go because I dont trust them anywhere near my credit card or bank account. Customer service is terrible. Put my elderly father on a terible plan that ran up a bill for hundreds of dollars. Refused to make accomodations, sent it to collections, and after settling with that agency they decided the wasn't good enough, reneged, sent it to ANOTHER agency and we still get the goddamn harrassing calls - every other day for six months now.
Rot in hell, cingulair. Those fuckers are parasites.