For years our phone bill arrived every month like a small insult. Two lines, no fancy extras, and it came to $142 a month after all the taxes and fees. I asked Mike once what we were paying for, and he said, "Bars." Fair enough. But last August I finally sat down and priced out prepaid plans, and in early September we switched.
It's been six months, so here's the honest report: what we pay now, what's different, and the one thing I'd do differently.
The numbers
Our old plan was a standard postpaid family plan from one of the big carriers. Our phones had been paid off for over a year, so that $142 was all service.
The new plan is a prepaid plan that runs on one of the major networks. We each have our own line with a solid amount of high-speed data, which is more than either of us actually uses, since we're on home Wi-Fi most of the day. With the autopay discount and taxes, we pay about $64 a month for both lines.
| Old plan | New plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost (2 lines, with taxes) | $142 | $64 |
| Contract | No, but "loyalty" perks tied to it | None, pay month to month |
| Six-month total | $852 | $384 |
That's about $468 saved in six months, or roughly $936 a year. That's more than our car insurance for three months.
What's actually different
Coverage: basically the same
Before we switched, I checked the network's coverage map for our town, Mike's plant, and my parents' house. Most prepaid brands run on the same towers as the big carriers, so if your area is covered on the host network, you're likely fine. In our small Ohio town, we have not noticed a difference in normal use.
Busy places: sometimes slower
Here's the catch that's often in the fine print. On many prepaid plans, your data can be "deprioritized" when a tower is crowded, meaning people on the main carrier's pricier plans get served first. We noticed it exactly once: at a Friday night high school football game in October, my phone could barely load a text with a photo. Mike's was the same. Once we left the parking lot, it was back to normal.
For us, that's a fine trade. If your job depends on your phone working in crowded places, it's worth thinking about. Mike gets called in on his personal phone when a line breaks down at the plant, and so far those calls and texts have come through fine, day or night.
Customer service: mostly online
There's no store to walk into. Everything is handled through an app or online chat. When I had a question about a charge in the first month (it turned out to be a prorated amount), the chat took about twenty minutes. Not great, not terrible.
Smaller things
- Hotspot data is more limited. I used it once on a road trip so Ella could download a movie, and it worked.
- We lost a couple of streaming perks bundled with the old plan. We weren't using one of them at all, and we dropped the other.
- No surprise fees. The amount is the same every month, which I love.
The switch itself, and where we almost got stuck
Keeping our phone numbers was easy once we had the right information. You need your account number and a transfer PIN from the old carrier, which you usually request in their app or website. It took ten minutes.
What almost tripped us up: my phone was paid off, but it was still locked to the old carrier. I had assumed paid off meant unlocked. It didn't. I had to request the unlock from the old carrier and wait a couple of days before the new SIM would work. If I did it again, I'd confirm both phones were unlocked a full week before switching anything.
The other thing I'd do differently is time it with the billing cycle. We switched in the middle of the old cycle and still got charged for a full month on the way out. That was about $70 we didn't need to spend.
Would we do it again?
Yes, without thinking twice. I spent years assuming a cheaper phone plan meant worse phones, and for the way we use ours, it hasn't meant anything except about $78 back in the budget every month. We moved that money straight into our car repair fund, which, given the minivan's age, is exactly where it'll be needed.
Ella has started asking about getting a phone of her own. With prepaid pricing, the cost argument I used to fall back on doesn't hold up anymore, so I'm going to need a new reason. I'm working on it.
