All I can say is shop around. They are like other items that go on sale at different stores at different times, and are even advertised in sales papers. CVS, Family Dollar, Fred’s, Dollar General, all those stores (and similar stores) have them. IIRC the last time I bought a burner in a store was at Fred’s and they had a $10 4.5-inch phone but I splurged on a $20 5-inch one.
The services are sold on little cardboard cards like gift cards. You can buy a month, 3 months, a year, extra data, extra minutes, etc.
You can do that, but you don’t have to go to the store or anything. I usually buy mine on line, and you can buy them through your phone—though I’m not sure that’s available on all units. I order, keep my phone on, it updates after a few minutes, and no trees were killed.
A potentially cheaper way to go is to get a “plan” where for $20. But there’s no contract, so cancel it at the end of the month.
It also says you can auto refill.
Automatically refill your service. *Save $5/month for the first 2 months, then regular price will apply. Your credit or debit card will be charged on the service end date of your Tracfone Unlimited plan, and thereafter on the last day of the service plan cycle.
@ThelmaLou, find a kid to help you, if you can. Trade them a meal at their favorite fast food place.
Barring that, try a Target, WalMart, BestBuy. It will still be a kid helping you. I’ve always found the sales help better at BB or Tarjay.
Wish I had more to offer. I think I get it. You want a cheapest possible phone to have in your apron pocket (while your favored phone is being restored/repaired) in case you fall down and can’t get back up.
Pretty much every Tracphone or equivalent I’ve seen comes with the phone and minutes in single package. The cheapest phones usually cost about the same as it would just to buy the included minutes.
I also note that any phone that can get a signal (which would be 3G or higher, I believe) should be set up where you can use it to call 911 in the case of an emergency, even if you have no minutes or plan. Before I put a sim card in my phone, it said “Emergency Use Only,” and the settings confirmed I could have called 911 if I needed to.
UPDATE. Thanks, all. Good info all around.
I wound up back at Best Buy to get the $30 Tracfone + one month of usage for $20. Haha! Turns out that phone was on sale for $10-- and it’s a fully-equipped smartphone, almost as fancy as my Key2 (though not as fast).
Still setting up and configuring everything. But at least I can now make a phone call.
They have a deal if you buy phone plus the card (scroll down the page). I bought mine in person at a Best Buy.
Then you haven’t been paying much attention to the phones, because that is far from universal.
Pretty much all the prepaid (Tracphone and Straighttalk esp) lease bandwidth from specific carriers. In fact, sometimes the Straighttalk phones as an example will have an ‘off brand name’ like TalkMobile to give you an idea of which carrier it’s on. But they’re generally locked to that carriers network, rather than all roam, all the time.
For most carrier these days, within the US you can roam for free if you are in an area with no carrier specific coverage (in another thread I was giving the example where lots of rural areas are on their own, very local tower network), but that is on a per company and per plan basis.
Check out post #26 right above this one of yours that I’m quoting from.
Actually Verizon is in the process of buying Tracfone and the deal is supposed to close before the end of the year:
And T-Mobile owned Boost before it was sold to Dish as part of the Sprint/TM merger. Virgin was previously owned by Sprint, but is theoretically going it’s own way again after the above. So yes, a lot of the big pre-paid ‘brands’ were owned in whole or part by the big 3/4 carriers anyway. What was freaky for me when I worked for TM was that I’d have people call for help with a ‘locked’ phone only to find out it was a Boost or Tracphone using the TM network. We still couldn’t unlock it, and the prepaid carriers were notoriously bad about unlocking those phones since the ‘burner’ level phones were often sold at/near a loss. It’s not that they wouldn’t do it, but the hours those customers spent on hold trying to get through to someone who COULD do it was apparently insanely painful.