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Comment by thomas-st | Hacker News Reader

A while ago I was helping a friend pick a cell phone plan with T-Mobile USA. If you study their plans, the "Essentials" plan does not include "taxes and fees", but their "Magenta" plan does. When contacting T-Mobile, they could not tell me what the fees were even after providing the specific ZIP code. They said I would have to sign up for the plan first, and could then see the fees on the bill. Even when I told them that the choice of plan would depend on the amount of taxes and fees, they were not able to tell me and said that I could look at the current cell phone bill with the current carrier, and that the taxes and fees should be similar.

It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.

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> It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.

Even further along the dystopic spectrum: Imagine if it worked like health care insurance. Even monthly bills would be only guesses subject to arbitrary revision.

My favorite example in this space is college tuition/room/board. This seems to be the only example of a service in which you have to share all your financial details with the vendor and then they will tell you how much it is going to cost.

Many types of loans you can take out, where approval and interest are dependent on your credit history and assets, and also your tax burden to the government, are kind of like that too. Really anything where the amount charged varies with your ability to pay.

OK, but room/board/tuition is not a loan. The college is determining a discount, not the ability to pay back a loan.

Health insurance premiums are set annually. I don’t think insurance companies can legally change premiums after the insurance regular approved them.

Not premiums, but claims.

"It was recently discovered that your procedure involved a duck, however the insurance company will only cover geese, so here is the revised bill... Er, an invoice, not the animal's."

I've tried to pay a healthcare bill for an operation and a followup that had been completed months prior, and they still would not tell me how much I owed. I just got sporadic bills in the mail and there was a single website where I could enter how much I wanted to pay them in total. I waited a couple months, walked to the hospital, and asked them for the sum. They told me they had no way to know. I paid what I thought I owed and then I guess somebody figured it out without telling me, so I ended up in collections for a two figure sum.

It's because insurance companies tell hospitals how much they'll pay for things but when you ask how much they actually cost, the hospital shrugs because no one is breaking down the prices. The various specialists may be independent of the hospital in terms of billing which only complicates things as you now have more than one bill (and they may be out of network for your insurance). The non-profit hospitals will usually work with people without insurance to figure how much they can afford to pay and just charge that. The actual costs are likely much more but no one really knows since insurance is likely overpaying to compensate the hospital's losses on caring for the poor.

It wasn't just future bills though. I waited months. I had received a bunch of bills, from them, on paper, and apparently missed some. I knew I probably missed some. Why not just tell me, in person or online, what the sum of the bills they've sent me so far is? They're calculating it at some point.

It was a decade ago, and I'm still salty about it lol. I think the hospital has a functional website now, because it's in their interest to get all of the money from customers instead of a much smaller percent from a debt collector anyway.

Regardless, I think if an organization can't tell people what they owe, it clearly doesn't need that money and should forfeit it.

Verizon has a tool online to estimate your fees for a given zip code. It’s hilariously broken - like it will return a list of the same city and county taxes listed dozens of times. It’s completely unusable. But as other posters have noted, it somehow doesn’t stop them from calculating and charging those fees every month.

At the very least the support agent didn't try to run a calculation, and cause a phantom bill you'd never know about until you get a call from collections or discover a lien on your house.

That's about the level of dystopia I'd expect.

I recently signed up for a business TMobile tablet plan. I had the option to choose taxes/fees as included or extra. The plans are identical. I have no clue why that's even an option, but I'm glad I get to pay a nice round number.

That exists because somewhere out there in the world is a category of businesses have to deal with the cost and taxes separately for legal or tax reasons. I've run into it before and it's incredibly annoying when all you have is a single line item on the bill. It's even more fun when you add currency conversions on top.

My reasoning here is this: it should not be legal to provide pricing when the customer already owes and has no choice to go elsewhere. That price should be zero.

Capitalism is playing with supply and demand. Holding people hostage is not it.

Example: I went to Hawai this month with my wife and the fires broke out. So I went to United’s website to move up my return flight. They said in order to have the option to change the flight free of charge I needed to upgrade from Economy Basic to Economy for $90 ($45/person). After I did, the site said there were no flights, however I could see the flights on kayak. So I call United, and indeed, they had a flight, but it would cost $1000 ($500/person). The return flight cost more than the entire 2 way flight as originally booked. Plus the $90 upgrade for no fee changes.

Either the $90 or the $1000 should be illegal.

> they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up

seems unreasonable for a consumer facing product, how did it come to that?

>It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.

Crazy? 2023? I would consider it 'expected'.

It's both, relative to the US. The US is uniquely horrible in this because it has no real consumer protection mechanisms. Instead a lot of US business practices are the result of litigation rather than policy.

It may be expected in the US but it seems ridiculous in Germany because we have a consumer protection agency and it has teeth. On the other hand, suing a company for damages won't get you nearly as much money here. But of course most of your medical expenses would be covered by public health insurance and you normally don't have to worry about something being "out of network" or requiring a copay etc.

used to work in a company that build and implemented BSS/OSS system for major telcos (including the one that you mentioned).

I can totally see that high level pricing for a packages is modeled globally and exposed to sales team while taxes are implemented only in billing system, because its "zip code" specific.

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