Prepaid cell service: 5 reasons to consider it now
Prepaid cell service—as in service without a contractual obligation or early termination fee—continues to surge in popularity. If you’re intrigued by making the switch from a traditional contract plan, but haven't been keeping up with the fast-changing options to do so, here’s why you might want to try prepaid:
1. Prepaid plans offer a diversity of pricing schemes. You can buy prepaid service in three different ways:
- Prepaid bundles. These range between 30 to 5,000 minutes and cost $10 to $400;
- Pay-as-you-go plans. These charge 5 to 25 cents per minute used, with or without a $1 to $2 daily access fee or per-day-use charge; and
- Monthly-fee plans. These are much like a traditional contract plan, and range from 50 minutes to unlimited minutes per month.
2. You may save money—especially now. In the last Consumer Reports survey of satisfaction with cell-phone service, more than 70 percent of those who had switched from a regular contract-based plan said prepaid was costing them less. And that was before what’s starting to look like a price war in prepaid. The latest salvo: Two Tracfone monthly plans under the brand name “Straight Talk,” available in about half of the country. One plan offers 1,000 voice minutes, 1,000 text or multimedia messages, and 30 MB of data over Verizon’s network for just $30; the other unlimited voice and text, plus 30 MB of web access for $45.
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