Even more cell phone stuff

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30 December 2008 @ 01:15 pm

So if I'm reading things right (which I'm not sure I am, but the internet agrees with me,) if I switch to t-mobile pay as you go, then instead of paying ~$280 a year, I'll pay $100 the first year, then $10 a year for 3-4 years, then $25 a year after that.

Wow, I wish I would have done this a long time ago, if this is all true. I have a sim on the way to me so I can try things out, make sure I can do what I already do with my phone, figure out how all the pricing works, etc, then if it's all hunky-dorry, I'll get my phone number transfered on to the pay as you go account.

Yay, thank you cute little phone for making me look down this path. This is going to be much much more affordable and less guilt ridden.

Tags: cell

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kelkyag on December 30th, 2008 10:16 pm (UTC)

Iiiiinteresting. How does the $10/year part work? (I use enough minutes to run about $100/year.)

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forgotten_aria on December 30th, 2008 11:02 pm (UTC)

Well I'm really not certain about this, because the pages are pretty unclear, but once you spend $100 you get "gold status" which means that now your minutes don't expire for one year. Anytime you add money, you get to keep your old minutes, so it's my understanding (and some other people on the net has this too) that those 1000 minutes from the first $100 can be kept alive by $10 a year. Since I only use about 200-300 minutes in a year, I can last a long time on those initial 1000 minutes.

Now, I'm not banking on this being true. I'm going to experiment and see what I can learn once I actually have a pay as you go account. $100/year is still way better than what I have been paying.

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binkbink on December 31st, 2008 01:17 am (UTC)

Maybe the first year minutes don't expire for a year following but do after that?
Or maybe they don't expire for the first year, but then do expire and if you buy minutes in a certain month, they don't expire until a year and a month later?

Still an apparent win.

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kelkyag on December 31st, 2008 02:05 am (UTC)

IIRC, their dollars-to-minutes conversion rate varies with the price of the card, and only the $100+ cards are 10 cents per minute. The one time I bought a smaller card (most places don't carry the $100 cards), all of my remaining balance was converted to the higher price-per-minute of the new card. I did also do this on the last day of my old balance, which triggers a bug of theirs that drops the old balance & just logs the new card. They fixed both things (the total balance and the price per minute) after I called them and asked what was up with that, but I'm not sure what their general policy is. It's possible that if I'd used a small card earlier, I would've gotten the lower rate from the old balance ... I only grabbed a small one at all because I'd been lame about getting a larger one promptly.

I asked them to file a bug report for me on the refill-on-the-last-day problem. I don't know if that took.

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binkbink on December 31st, 2008 01:19 am (UTC)

My Tracfone minutes never expire, but I have to buy month's of time or they do and since I get minutes with every month card, they are building up.

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