Comment by ripply | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ripply | Hacker News Reader

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To add to this, all the major phone carriers in the states engineer their plans to force you to buy new phones either through discounts or "free" bonus phones from them in order to get good value for what you are paying. It is almost always cheaper to go with a cheap MVNO plan and pay for your phone outright, you will come out ahead instead of paying $80-$100 a month with a major carrier while getting a "free" phone with the caveat you have to stick with them for 2 years. Its all engineered to get you to spend more money, if you look at the prices on MVNOs you will realize you are getting scammed - I pay $10/month for my minimal cellular plan through redpocket and getting more data only costs tens of dollars more, it doesn't come close to tmobile's prices.

Yeah, it's interesting because they did that here until about 2016 (I think).

Then it reversed and it was (say) 600 for a handset or free handset and 40 more a month for 24m (960 extra total) with the handset free. Same contract either way.

But I think a lot of people just kept getting the 24m contract. I went though it with my lodger and lent him the 600 because I think it takes the piss to do this.

Here in the UK at least there are a bunch of resellers who will give you a sim only contract and use one of the big three networks. So it's easy/affordable at least to just do that. I hope the US has this too...

All of the major phone carriers have decent plans on their prepaid side now. You don't get a discount on a phone, but you usually get to pay the sticker price, tax included.

MVNO deals can be better, but there's uncertainty from having a 3rd party, and often the MVNOs don't or can't offer x GB of high speed data with low speed data for the rest of the month. But going from like $80 to $30 is good enough for me, I don't need to go all the way down to $10

Mint mobile has been a great mvno experience for me. I pay a year at a time and get 8gb a month for a very reasonable price.

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