T-mobile PAYG Plan Changed!
The fantastic t-mobile payg (Pay As You Go) plan that I’ve been using for 8+ year is gone. It was $0.10/min, no monthly minimum.
Now they’ve made it $3/month and include 30 minutes. For many years, I’d spent about $20-30/yr total, so this is about a 50% price increase to me at 12 x $3/mon = $48/yr. It won’t kill me and my prepaid account is active for 365 days still (I assume). Most people would talk at least 30 min worth in a month, which is fine.
When I’d travel, the plan would be changed to
$2/Day Unlimited Talk, Text & 2G Web. That still exists, but they’ve added $10 for 7 days of LTE data (1G max). This $10 is additional and only provides data, not unlimited talk/text.
For example, just returned from Phreaknic and enabled the 2G unlimited stuff (talk/text and 2G data) for $2/day over 4 days = $8 total. Talked about 45 min in that time and used about 60MB of data for maps, GPS, directions. The signal always said 3G, but there were many places where no data flowed.
None of these PAYG plans provide any international roaming. So sad. Looks like picking up a €10-15 SIM after landing will still be the std procedure.
Update – 2015
Took a trip and was able to enabled a 7-day $10 1G data plan on the $3/month pay-as-you-go plan. For some trips, this would definitely be useful, but not for my last trip. I visited family and knew the area a little. Using offline map too – FreeNAV and preloading a few highly-rated restaurants into the favorites removed any need for data. Basically, I used the data to check emails during the 4 days I was at a conference. Meh. Those could easily have waited until the evening. Even when driving, the data plan wasn’t very useful – FuelMyRide – a cheap gas android app has stopped providing service, so that wasn’t useful. I did look up a discount chain when on the road, but that definitely wasn’t worth $10.
In summary, t-mobile has made their add-on data plans too expensive to be useful for short trips. The $2/day plans were just right – not cheap, but I could justify it easily. $10/wk seldom makes sense for me.
I really miss the pure pay-as-you-go plan that didn’t have a monthly minimum charge. Oh well, they are still the best deal for my needs.
Update – April 2015
I feel screwed again by t-mobile. I’ll explain.
Normally, I add $10 to my PAYG plan every year. This has been working since 2007-ish. I never really checked the balance, since adding that $10 annually added to the prior balance and extended the length for another 365 days. Last fall (after I added minutes), there was $30+ on the account. My expectation was these were good for 365 days, just like they had been for years. I don’t really talk on the cell phone, not my nature.
Jump forward to March 2015 and a trip out of town so I add the $10/wk for 1G of data to my PAYG plan. Notice the account balance is $5.xx AFTER the $10 is taken out. Fine, time to add some more money, it will be good for a year after all. Looked at a retailer for a $100 card and not finding it, picked up a $50 card.
Today, added the $50 to my account and it said the minutes were good for 90 days!!! WHAT?!! What happened to 365 days? 10 minutes later and I found lots of other people like me pissed off at t-mobile – basically they remove the 365 day period and didn’t tell anyone. Further, they left all the old advertising up on their website. I can’t spend $50 in cellphone use within 90 days. Can’t be done.
So a few people are claiming that prior gold rewards accounts are grandfathered. I hope so.
Pulled this from the t-mobile website today – Apr 2, 2015
How can I get the most value for my refill money?
A: If you are a pay by the minute customer, add $100 in refills to attain Gold Rewards status. Customers who have reached Gold Rewards status get 15% more minutes with every refill and keep access to service for a full year.
When do my Gold Rewards rates take effect?
A: Once you have activated $100.00 in refills on a pay by the minute plan, you automatically qualify for Gold Rewards and will receive 15% more minutes with every future refill. And you’ll retain access to service for a full year!
