From the USA.
I know someone that uses a dumbphone and the person basically buys those $100
t mobile cards for 1000 anytime minutes. I believe they expire in 1 year and they only buy 1 card a year as they don’t use many minutes but they make sure to use it up for the year.
I had read a while back, there was a carrier named lycamobile where calls were only 2 cents a minute. Is this true? Did it only apply to dumb phones? I then read they raised it to 5 cents a minute now?
Can someone explain how that works? Could u use any dumb phone and then put that sim card in and then buy a $10 plan and thats all?
The thing is the person only uses a dumb phone and wouldn’t even know how to use a smartphone so when i heard they were paying 10 cents a minute essentially when they could have been paying only 2 cents a minute with lycamobile… i couldn’t believe this was possible.
Does anyone know any other carriers that are less than 10 cents a minute? Yes t mobiles 1000 minutes for $100 is good deal as its good for up to 1 year and its anytime, however if you like to talk long, well that cost lot of your minutes.
Have a look at the plans offered by PagePlus.
Interesting question! With a large percentage of the population “keeping up with the Joneses” and constantly upgrading their plan, it would be interesting to know how low the crappiest my-phone-is-so-dumb-it-had-to-attend-a-special-school plan is. Maybe it is substantially equivalent to one that was top of the line and uber-expensive in 1995 - but then technology costs are not strictly linear so the fact that the UnbelievableDreamPhonesThatEvenOilBaronsCanBarelyAfford of 1995 now cost $69.95 a month doesn’t mean that 1995-era technology costs pennies nowadays. There are fixed costs of simply having stuff hooked up, put together, and serviced that only go so low.
It would also be interesting to find other examples of the “cheapest X” where X is a service (or even maybe a product) that has seen a large amount of innovation. For example, is there anywhere that you can get 1980’s era non-interactive NTSC Cable TV for $1.50 a month, even if they call you every other week trying to sell you the UberTVLoversUltimateDirectFiberOnDemandMaxPackage 2.0 SuperHiDef with the QuadGaming bundle? How about barebones “POTS” copper telephone service with no features whatsoever, just a dial tone?
After a two-second search on Google, I learned that Lyca Mobile’s cheapest plan is $23 per month. I’m no mathematician, but I believe that’s more than the hundred bucks a year your “friend” is now paying.
My (very) dumb phone is on a PAYG tariff. Sure, calls cost quite a lot, but I make very few calls, so as long as I make one call or text in six months, I only have to put about £20 a year on it. The phone itself was handed down to me by my wife, who inherited it from our daughter and certainly dates back to the last century.
Also in Britain I also have a [Samsung] dumbphone on PAYG and spend around £20 a year.
My darling Motorola RAZR snapped last year and the poor sods of manufacturers don’t make any thin flip-phones, so Orange sold me a replacement for £5.
I stick with Orange since they give one broadband for £5 a month if a customer. I shall never get any phone more expensive unless it’s a flip. I’m still sulking.
Telephony seems to be the very only thing cheaper in GB than in America.
My dumbphone is a TracFone, and I pay between $6 and $10 a month for it. A few times a year I pay $20 for a 3mo card, and the rest of the year it’s $5.99/mo to keep my minutes from expiring. Dirt cheap as long as you don’t talk a lot.
Can’t you just get a cheap smartphone (Motorola e’s or G’s are brilliant and only cost £80-£120 unlocked and network free) and then get a free sim from a network and go “pay-as-you-go”?
I put £10 on my phone every other month and that gives me 400 texts, 1GB of data and however much call time £10 gets you (60-100 minutes I think)
Seconding Tracfone as a dirt cheap cell phone. You can get a very cheap, almost disposable, phone for maybe $10, plus $20 will buy you 90 days of airtime and 120 minutes depending on the phone type. Includes texting (most texts cost a third of a minute). You have to buy more airtime before you run out of days or minutes. If you are not a high utilizer, it is one of the cheapest non-plans around.
I recently upgraded from a clunker Tracfone phone - my kids put a ‘Playskool’ sticker on it, to one of Tracfone’s “smarter” models. Still very cheap (but not yet a smart phone).
I would recommend TracFone or PagePlus. With TracFone you have a lot of games you can play (double minutes, bonus codes, etc.) to maximize your savings. PagePlus is simple plans with no games but may cost a little more than playing the TracFone games.
Hey all. I want to mention a few things.
I want this phone to be a dumb phone… not a smartphone. Only thing it would be used for is phone calls… so internet or texting is not necessary at all. Thus no need at all for text as the person wouldn’t even need to text. So basically only minutes and apparently lycamobile only works with smartphones now but back then it worked with dumb phoens?
I’ve tried a pay as you go phone with minutes, and it was horrible worrying about how many minutes I was using. I hate the feeling like someone is talking too long and needs to be cut off and being put on hold is a killer.
I used a plan that was $1.99 a day for unlimited talk from Verizon and that worked better for me. I don’t use the phone every day any how. If I need to use the phone then that’s a good day to take care of all the other stupid calls I need to make. Then if someone wants to talk an hour or two then it’s no skin off my nose.
Where it can get you is if you check your voice mail then that’s a $1.99 day, even if you don’t initiate a call. That’s why I tell people to text if they want to get through for sure. It’s only 2 cents a text.
It’s $30 for 90 days and if you don’t let it lapse for too long the unused money rolls over.
I switched to TracFone (based on recommendations recieved in a thread I posted here, actually) - if you buy the larger “cards” airtime (with triple minutes) is about 5 cents a minute.
If I’m at home, and am planning on making a longer call and don’t even want to spend the 3 bucks an hour the above works out to, I use Google Voice Chat, which (currently) allows you to call any US phone number for free.
Then you would be better off with Virgin Mobile. They don’t go by minutes–just a straight dollar amount. And you have the option of linking a credit card to your account, so when your balance dips below $5, they automatically charge your card.
I have a Pageplus dumb phone.
I buy a $10 100 minute card every couple months. $5 a month or so. Includes texting, which I use quite a bit. No idea what they charge for texts. I hardly notice a charge for those.
I can’t imagine spending more.