Using a Prepaid Cell Phone? Tell me about it!

I’m in the market for a prepaid cell phone, but the cell phone companies don’t make it easy to compare plans. So I’m relying on you guys for some info.

My goal is to minimize the amount I have to pay for service in the range of 30-50 minutes per month. (And have service around where I live and work, of course.) But like I said, even with the prepaids, it’s hard to figure out what the real deal is. (Example: Net10, ‘10¢ a minute, all the time.’ Sounded good, until I dug a little deeper, and found out that I’d have to buy at least $30 worth of minutes from them each month to maintain service.)

So, who’s used prepaid services, how much has it cost (and how has it been structured), and what’s the quality of the service, in your experience? This inquiring mind wants to know, so he can have a cell phone without paying for a lot more service than he’ll use.

I’m using Verizon, and I pay 35 cents for the first minute of each call, and 10 cents per minute after that (rates are for both local and long distance). The minutes expire if you don’t purchase more before they expire, and the minimum amount I need to buy each month is $15 (and any balance I have is rolled over). For me, it’s a good deal because I only use about 50 minutes or so per month.

But you can’t get it now. Verizon changed their pre-pay plan to 10 cents per minute, but added a 99 cent per day access charge (whether you use the phone or not). So it’s about $30 per month plus minutes. Not a good deal at all.

I think Virgin has a similar deal to what Verizon used to offer. If their coverage area works for you, you may want to consider it.

Thanks for the suggestion - I’ll take a look at Virgin. Yeah, I checked Verizon, and the deal you have is unfortunately history.

This is not a recommendation – just information.

I bought my brother a Trace phone at WalMart, along with with some Simple Freedom pre-paid cards.
The features are:[list=0]
[li] Within the Simple Freedom calling area: .25 per minute[/li][li]Long distance, for nationwide roaming: .50 per minute[/li][li]No hidden costs[/li][li]Minutes never expire as long as you activate a refill card every 60 days.[/list][/li]
I chose Simple Freedom because their calling area fit well with his lifestyle (where he lives, where he drives frequently). Their nationwide coverage was also pretty good (I wanted him to be able to use the phone wherever he went.)

I wanted a plan for him that did not require him to make scheduled payments, as well as a plan were there was no possibility that someone could steal the phone and run up huge charges.

I’ve had phone plans where you never knew what you were being charged for long distance and phone plans with huge roaming charges (make sure the calling area is a good match for you and that you know how to tell when roaming charges - if any - are kicking in).

Right now the Walmart site shows the Simple Freedom cards as being “out of stock”. I’m a bit concerned about this and am going to investigate.

P.S. The lowest priced Simple Freedom card is $30, which must be used within 60 days.

P.P.S. According to this, you can purchase more minutes for $20. So as long as that’s enough minutes for you, the monthly charge would be $10/month.

I use mine only in emergencies or when I really need a cell phone, so that drives my criteria. I just want to pay the minimum per month to keep it active.

So I have Virgin Mobile. You only need to put $15 on every 90 days to keep it active, which works out to $60/year. The per minute rate is a bit expensive ($0.25/min for the first 10 minutes per day than $0.10/min for any after that). But I generally don’t use my $15 anyways so what do I care.

They use the Verizon network, so the coverage should be the same as that.

Nitpicking, but Virgin actually uses Sprint’s network. It operates at a higher frequency, so building penetration ain’t so hot. If Sprint has good coverage in your neighborhood, so will Virgin.

I’d call the cell phone companies and look for unadvertised plans. I know Verizon has a $25/month plan for 100 anytime minutes. Other companies may have similar deals that you won’t find on their website or pamphlets for obvious reasons.

I had a Tracphone at one time, but didn’t like it. The minutes were expensive enough that I would never use it unless travelling, but then the roaming-use charge sucked up the time really fast. I finally just let the plan expire - what good to me was a cellphone that I would never use?

Later, my wife and her brother were getting a new phone plan, so they included me in it as well. They are the heavy users, but I now have a cellphone that I can use occasionally, and I don’t have to track minutes, or fear of running out in the middle of a call, or remember to re-up the plan on a monthly basis. You might think about trying to combine usage with a friend/family-member if that option works for you.

I too have a Virgin phone and really like it. I’ve had it for a year and a half now and no real problems. I’ve used it in the DC area, Florida and California plus a few other states that I can’t remember. I like it and it works great for me since I don’t use it that much. I have something like $60 on it right now, but that doesn’t bother me one bit.

My wife and I used Boost Mobile for quite a while up until recently. The pricing structure was very similar to Virgin’s, although they’ve varied a bit with time. Boost uses Nextel’s network and is partially owned by Nextel, so they have the push-to-talk on all their phones.

Their rates currently are $0.20/min during the day and $0.10/min on nights and weekends. Using the walkie talkie costs $1.50 per day on any day you use it. And your minutes expire after 90 days unless you buy more minutes.

Reception was pretty decent – I’ve always been fond of Nextel’s network. We got rid of ours because we were talking to each other more often, as well as with other people, and decided we’d reached a point where it would be more efficient to actually have a cell plan.

Here’s a prepaid comparison chart that someone has put together. It’s not comprehensive, but it has a detailed comparison of the major U.S. plans.

I recently started using T-Mobile’s prepaid plan after my postpaid contract expired. I’m able to reuse my old phone by buying a prepaid SIM card off of eBay for about $13 (T-Mobile stores sell the SIM card alone for like $50). The SIM card was already activated with a number, but I called customer service (611) and less than five minutes later they changed the number to the area code I wanted.

T-Mobile is a little weird. You pay in U.S. dollars, but your balance is represented as “T-Mobile To Go Dollars.” There are like 3 different rates (depending on the SIM card) to convert US$ to TM$. So, although you always get get the advertised minutes that you paid for, sending MMS/SMS messages will cost 1/3, 1/4, or 1/5 of a minute depending on whatever rate is set for your card.

I’m satisfied with the service, but I only use the phone for 5 minutes a day, if that. so I’m not comfortable recommending T-Mobile over any other service, as I haven’t used any of the other prepaid services.

Anyway, the above linked chart should help. My advice, beware the fine print.

That would pretty much describe my likely situation - if I used up all my minutes, even at those numbers, it would surprise me. (And I could always buy more minutes as needed, so no biggie even then.)

Thanks for the link! That was very informative.

I just signed up for the T-mobile “to go” plan for several reasons:

  1. If you buy $100 worth of minutes, they don’t expire for 1 year.
  2. Once you reach $100 in purchased minutes, any minutes you add will roll all remaining minutes for another year. You don’t need to purchase $100 worth of minutes right off. You can just keep adding $10/month for 10 months. I went ahead and just purchased the $100 worth when I signed up.
    Example: You buy $100 worth of minutes on 8/3/05. They are due to expire on 8/3/06, but on 8/1/06 you purchase $10 more. Now all your minutes (including the unused ones from the previous year) are good until 8/1/07.
  3. If you spend $100 you get 1000 minutes or $0.10/minute.
  4. No roaming or long distance charges.
  5. Since I have now spent $100, next year all I will need to do is spend $10 to keep the phone active for another year. That is a cost of < $0.85/month. Of course, if I use up the minutes I’ll need to buy more, driving up the cost, but even at $100/year that is still 83 minutes/month and only $8.33/month.

No other plan I saw could touch this. Better yet, no contract so I can ditch this at will.

We recently got a Virgin phone. As you’re probably already aware, this requires buying at least $20 worth of minutes every 90 days. That means that the minimum for a year is $80.

25c a minute for the first 10 minutes each day, then 10c a minute after that. We really wanted a cellphone only for emergencies, so this seemed like the best deal at the time. So far, it’s done everything we expected of it. No problems to report.

Another new Virgin phone user checking in. I’ll soon be having to do lots of driving, and I wanted a cell phone in case I have problems somewhere along the road or whatever. I hate talking on the phone, so I’m not going to be chatting on it for fun.

I got a discount phone from Virgin (about $25 USD, no bells or whistles, but see above re: hating to talk on phone). It included $20 in air time credits.

So far, so good.

TracFone.

You purchase the phone and some minutes come with it to activate the service.
One must purchase cards for every sixty days to retain service. Cards have a valur of 40, 100, 200, etc minutes. I used to buy the cards at Wal-Mart (cheapest I could find) and then discovered I could buy them even cheaper on ebaY. :smack:

I use mine maybe a few mintes every few days.
I don’t ‘chat’ on my cell.