Taxes and fees not included: T-Mobile's latest price lock is nearly meaningless | Hacker News Reader

Taxes and fees not included: T-Mobile's latest price lock is nearly meaningless

arstechnica.com

43 pointshn_acker60 comments

I’m in the process of moving T-Mo to Verizon after years on T-Mo’s One Plan. Total pain in the ass.

Each number port takes 20-30 minutes (less if you do multiple at a time, but it’s a tedious process).

I had 9 lines with T-Mobile, but paid for only 6 due to promos (3 free lines). I trimmed them down to 6 initially, which was supposed to bring my bill from $250 down to $185 (this was to avoid the $5/line price hike they hit older subscribers with), according to the T-Mo rep I spoke with.

In the end, I reduced the number of lines to 5. My next bill: $315! Because they removed all line promos and wouldn’t honor them. I called T-Mo and mentioned I had been told $185 for 6, so how is it $315 for 5, and was told there is no mistake and the pricing is correct. I informed them I had recorded the call where the T-Mo rep said 6 for $185, and they said it wouldn’t matter because they don’t record calls themselves for contractual purposes, just customer service quality.

So, T-Mo managed to effectively steal $100+ from me by telling me one thing, billing me for another, and providing me no advance notice or recourse to resolve that (except arbitration).

Two supervisors at T-Mobile didn’t care, even after explaining to them the situation and asking why I would cut lines if the cost was going to be more in the end. They agreed it didn’t make much sense, but that the bill was still correct and no adjustments would be made, even though I was specifically lied to. I spent probably $25,000 with T-Mo under this contract and they happily nickel and dime me for another $100 on the way out, no effort to even retain me as a customer.

That said, it’s taken a good 5 hours and a dozen calls with Verizon to get things moved over and they’re full of bad service and hidden info, too (can’t unlock new device for 60 days, so I have to carry 2 phones to have my European number/SIM with me).

Ultimately, it’s a very weird market when the 3 carriers are poaching each others customers with offers that existing customers can’t get, and then making it super annoying to exit carriers without paying for two bills for at least a month (at least when you have 9 lines).

People need to be more open to the offers from MVNOs, who are on the same networks. Cricket for AT&T, Mint for T-Mobile, and Visible.

If you aren’t playing the promo game and upgrading your phone every time it is eligible for free, you’re wasting money with the big carriers.

If it pisses you off take them to arbitration.

You’ll claw back the 100$ they tried to steal from you and likely feel better about the whole deal while disincentivizing this kind of behavior.

I left T-Mobile because I hate their website. Google Fi, while using the same networks (at lesser MVNO priority), completely flipped that upside down. Great app with instant plan changes; no fuss.

> Besides the five-year price guarantee, there's at least one more notable pricing detail. T-Mobile's previous plans had "taxes and fees included," meaning the advertised price was inclusive of taxes and fees. With the new Experience plans, taxes and fees will be in addition to the advertised price.

One of my least favorite things about the States is how this continues to be legal. Hiding the true cost of a product from consumers is anti capitalist and violates free market principles. And no, this isn’t “too difficult” to achieve. Basically every other developed nation roll taxes into the listed price and businesses still manage to operate in those nations.

Noticed yesterday Verizon is offering a price lock also. I feel like this is just a rebranding of a way to punish you for switching companies but maybe I’m wrong? Either way, each state has different taxes and fees and sometimes even cities, burrows do too. I don’t think there is a way that could easily be fully transparent. Not defending their actions because I can’t stand all these companies who get big enough to, to your point, become overtly anti capitalist.

Many more humans live in buroughs than burrows.

Some even in boroughs.

Oof; another victim of Muphry's Law*; I even spent time to check "is it one or two r's?", then I looked up the spelling, and I still clowned it.

* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Marriott has a check box on their site to add taxes and fees. Of course it defaults off. Presumably because all other hotel sites quote ex-tax rates.

Same with airlines - it's recently become even more obnoxious for price comparison (in Canada) since base economy fares no longer include any (checked or carry-on) baggage allowance, and baggage cost is non-transparent - you basically have to go through an airline's website checkout process to figure it out.

To be fair to Marriott, it would put them at a huge disadvantage in aggregation sites where their price (including fees) would be compared with companies that are lying about their price (fees come at checkout).

This is why we need regulation. It’s really hard to be honest when everyone else is lying.

This is what happened with airfare in the States. The reason the government changed the rules recently to force airlines to include the fees for bags is because Southwest, who didn’t charge for bags at the time, operated at a major disadvantage because their prices were displayed alongside other airlines who had these hidden fees tacked on. If you ever wondered why you were not able to find Southwest’s flights on aggregators like Google flights until recently, that is why. Until that regulation went into play southwest prevented their engine to be used in aggregators for this exact reason.

Since they don't control taxes and at least some fees, it makes sense to me to exclude them from their price guarantee.

But to expect a company advertising something like a "price lock" didn't build in escape clauses for themselves is just being naive.

Mint has had flat rates from day one. T-Mobile wholly owns them now and doesn't seem to have a problem with that payment structure.

American telecom companies have been caught making up fees that don't correspond to any government-imposed tax. Sometimes they do control that portion of the bill.

Which is why I said "some" fees.

But they didn't include "some" fees in the price lock did they?

The whole "price lock" concept is a blatant marketing ploy in the first place. As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print. "Certain exclusions may apply."

https://youtu.be/AtK_YsVInw8

> As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print.

And what some of us consumers are saying is enough of this bullshit. Corporations should not be able to promise something, and then walk back the entirety of the promise in the fine print. If you want to advertise it, then it had better be true.

Fees they do in fact control, otherwise they would be "taxes." Taxes are costs imposed by government, or legislation at any level. Cellular networks like to comingle the two so that they can hide "fees" they impose by wording them like taxes/confuse consumers.

For example: "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee," "Administrative Fee," "Network Access Fee," "Telecom Relay Service Surcharge," and "Local Number Portability" aren't taxes, but they look like taxes due to the misleading verbiage. These all go straight to the networks and in their books don't offset anything specific. These are your classic "what we can get away with fee."

This comingling of network fees and government taxes, and then wording fees like taxes, has worked incredibly well to the point that people online will defend them. Maybe TicketMaster should take note.

Governments do the same thing, they call something a "fee" instead of a "tax". Go try to get a building permit. There will be a "fee" imposed, which is a tax, but they don't call it that.

Except those fees are paid to the government. Stuff like "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee" is you paying for their costs of compliance, stuff that should just be part of the price since it's their expense.

It depends. I argued on the phone with Verizon for a long time (over an hour, going up and up the chain) about why a certain “Recovery Fee” was not in their per-line costs.

The answer (eventually) was that they do indeed pay the fee to government, but it varies with usage in a complex, government-defined formula in a bill from the 90s.

It doesn't matter what a Verizon customer service representative said. Recovery Fees are not a tax and are not paid to the government. There is no justifiable reasons why they're broken out into a separate line item except to hide the total cost of service.

By that logic, why stop there? Why not have Gas Taxes, Vehicle Registration Fees, Payroll Taxes, Corporate Property Taxes, or Permitting Fees as separate line items in the cellular bill? Which may sound absurd, but that's identical logic to most of the existing non-tax fees.

Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax, in the same sense that (as mentioned elsewhere) a building permit is not a tax, but is still required by, and paid to, the government.

I'm not trying to excuse Verizon for not including them in their overall pricing, but these two in particular:

- Fed Universal Service Charge

- Regulatory Charge

are both paid to the government, and variable based on usage.

Edit: I will also note that Verizon has a $3.50 per-line fixed line item called "Admin & Telco Recovery Charge" that is utter BS.

> Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax

It actually means exactly that. A building permit is also a tax. If it is paid to the government (any government of any level) by force of law it is a tax; calling taxes "fees" doesn't make them any more not taxes.

If they said all "taxes and other government fees" that would be better, I suppose. But they don't say that, and their current fees aren't all government originating, ultimately making this price lock completely meaningless.

I hear the tax argument all the time but it doesn't make any sense to me. Taxes don't change daily. The retailer knows the final price and they can accordingly show that price to customers. In Texas the sales tax is 8.25% and it has stayed that way for years. Our receipts at any retailer will show only the sales tax as an additional charge. In comparison, the actual prices of goods and services have changed (increased mostly) way more frequently, particularly in 2021-2024 period. So the argument here is that the seller has no problem changing the price labels when they want to increase the prices but somehow printing the labels with taxes which take years to change is a burden.

The most (supposed) consumer friendly state in the US couldn’t even enforce advertising final prices before taxes, much less after taxes.

California went as far as passing legislation requiring businesses to advertise total pre tax price, and then worked overtime at the last minute to exempt restaurants. Such an embarrassment.

Apparently it’s “too complicated” is what I hear over and over which is obviously bs.

They’re just insulting themselves then, because they’re saying by proxy that they are dumber than the whole rest of the world who somehow managed to figure this out and operates on that system

Same, but it's just the culture. Not enough people in the US complains if "the actual price" ends up being 10% higher than "the price."

A $20 burger actually costs $30 at a restaurant.

Last week I was at a car dealer and they had a car priced at $24.7k which they insisted they could never sell for less than $28k.

I'll never understand why we can't all agree to just make the price the price.

> I'll never understand why we can't all agree to just make the price the price.

Not sure if you're being rhetorical or not, but the reason is very simple: Sellers want it this way because it makes their job (selling you stuff) easier. The sellers are the ones in charge of the laws about selling (there are a few scattered consumer lobbying organizations but they are nothing compared to industry lobbyists in basically every industry). As a result, the preferences of consumers do not matter, at least on the margin.

Mostly rhetorical. I do believe that if a super-majority of consumers revolted, sellers would be forced to make changes. Tipping is a good example of where social norms are playing a big role along with the law.

Sales tax I generally defend because it's not going to the business, it goes straight to the government. Removing it leads to cases where Europeans complain that the price of x is higher for them, forgetting their price includes a 20% VAT from their government. I think it's good to keep every citizen (obviously a large number do understand VAT, but it's not all) be reminded of what they're paying their government for.

But I recently was buying a vehicle and the otd price was 20% more than the price on their site, before sales tax/license fees. That practice is obviously anti-consumer.

We don't forget the price includes a 20% VAT.

We're just annoyed that you pay more than what's advertised. If you're used to truthful labels, that feels insane. And intentionally deceptive.

So if you want to separate them out, put them both on there then. In fine print right above the total of them both added together. Even more price transparency

IME that is certainly the norm in many European countries. Where I'm from the labels usually say the full price and then the tax rate next to it, e.g. "120 EUR incl. 20% VAT" meaning the actual product is 100 EUR and the 20% VAT is already included in the 120 EUR price

It really is interesting watching John Legere's impact on T-Mobile. T-Mobile was doing meh when he came in around 2012, turned it into the best of the big three, was wildly successful in both expanding the network and subscriber counts, and then left in 2020.

Mike Sievert has been slowly undoing all of John Legere's reforms rolling back to pre-2012 T-Mobile that was a middling network on the downswing. This is just yet another example of the enshittification of T-Mobile back to irrelevancy at Mike Sievert's hands.

PS - It wasn't all rainbows and sunshine under John Legere. He definitely had a "move fast and break things" approach, and broke a lot of things, often with stores hearing about promotions after customers. Plus the network had multiple break-ins during his tenure.

I enjoyed that time they got a billions of dollars from AT&T; thought that was Legere but happened a year prior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_acquisition_of_T-Mob...

This was the worst bit so far: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/t-mobile-users-t...

> ”T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan”

> T-Mobile also published an FAQ that answered the question, "What happens if you do raise the price of my T-Mobile One service?" It explained that the only guarantee is T-Mobile will pay your final month's bill if the price goes up and you decide to cancel

Loyalty means absolutely nothing anymore.

I have pondered switching but I feel it’s just the same shit, different company.

In the US, you don’t have many options. Primary carriers are ATT, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Sure you can go with an MVNO, but they use the same networks as the big three.

Plus I manage my families lines and migrating is just a pain in the ass

> Sure you can go with an MVNO, but they use the same networks as the big three.

The networks are not the issue in my experience with phone companies. Much of the negativity is associated with dealing with the support side of things. To that end, I couldn't be happier with Google Fi. I've moved my whole family over (except for my dad, who just wants to use a dumbphone and doesn't even have a google account). They're the least bad support-wise in my experience.

I keep two lines for better coverage when traveling. A few years back, I switched to Mint and Visible (T-Mobile and Verizon), and haven’t looked back.

Yes, they’re the same networks, but my experience as a customer is significantly better and I’m spending significantly less than I was before. I spend less on both lines combined than I spent with Verizon in the past.

In the years since I made the switch, I’ve often wondered why I didn’t do it sooner.

> Plus I manage my families lines and migrating is just a pain in the ass

It's not that much work.

It's easy enough that I've migrated my number to my own carrier a number of times when they've offered rates only applicable to new customers. (i.e. port my number out to a prepaid carrier, then port it back to my carrier as a "new customer".)

> In the US, you don’t have many options.

The US have three networks, I believe, Denmark has three networks as well. Both have a number of MVNOs. For some reason pricing for service in the US is just crazy.

I pay 119DKK or ~20USD for unlimited talk and SMS, plus 30GB of data (and 30GB of data abroad in pretty much any country) per month. My American colleagues starts pondering getting a local SIM, when travelling, because data is expensive, both at home and when travelling. I see people on websites commenting "Make sure you're on wifi" ... WHY, data costs almost nothing, you can get free data for 35USD. Except you can't, not in the US at least.

Why is cell service so expensive in the US? I get that it's a big country, and it would cost more to build out the network, but there's also more people and you don't exactly need to cover the middle of the desert or random fields with anything but 2G.

I was on AT&T for a long time. Was spending ~$125/mo for 2 iPhone phone lines after taxes and fees.

Now I am on Mint Mobile, and it's honestly been fantastic. I pay about $120/month (pre-paid for 6 months though) for 5 lines now (kids!), with way more cell data per line. Each line can be on a different plan, too! Very occasionally a text message will be a bit delayed, but I mostly use iMessage anyways. Have not had any other issues. Well worth it. I highly recommend the switch. You'll save a ton of money.

It's not only meaningless due to T-Mobile being untrustworthy, it's meaningless if it's for a specific network speed or volume. For example, would 3G and a 2GB plan for $50 lifetime guarantee be useful?

It's partially sleight-of-hand, but it has some value. It effectively means that you've got a couple years of leeway to find an alternate plan without price changes in the meantime if the speed/data become unworkable or a network shutdown becomes imminent.

Why aren't people just going prepaid? Cheaper and no headaches.

Unfortunately the best plans are not available under prepaid.

The problem relying on prepaid/MVNO to save us, is that MVNOs still depend on the infrastructure of the big three.

So if the big three are able to set new [higher] price standards for their own customers, eventually they will increase wholesale rates for third parties piggybacking on the network. This will of course eventually trickle down to prepaid/MVNOs.

One of the many reasons why the Sprint acquisition was anti-consumer.

Even the big three's own prepaid plans are far cheaper than their postpaid plans.

Are there any prepaid plans that have the same free international roaming that T-Mobile offers?

Prepaid plans get lower priority on carrier infra, as do MVNOs typically. Postpaid/premium is getting premium transit, unfortunately.

If there is any disruption to be had, it is an MVNO that is plugged into all US carriers, as well as satellite offerings, with the ability to pivot around whenever a carrier tries to squeeze the relationship. Google Fi with more carriers and better customer support, Airalo, etc. This enables you to keep your number while the service underneath the account can shift.

https://www.airalo.com/global-esim

Airalo’s SIMs are more deprioritized and worse than any prepaid ones I have ever used.

The prioritization is pretty straightforward, there’s a good reddit post that keeps track: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1cyfjpp/data_pr...

Agree, that's the challenge, an abstraction where you maintain the flexibility without the deprioritization. I admit, it may be impossible due to the inherant limitations of the model. With that said, from your link, Google Fi gets a high priority designation on T-Mobile ("QCI 6 goes to all branded plans, both postpaid and prepaid, besides those with Essentials in the name. Google Fi has QCI 6 as well."), so perhaps it's possible.

Anyone use US Mobile? Thinking of switching from T-Mobile (3 lines at $120) to 3 lines at $60.

But then I need a new phone... waiting for a good promotion to switch to AT&T or Verizon.

This is the company that first said it would never raise prices. Then, they said if you pay by CC, there will be an additional $10 per line fee. Users started paying by debit to avoid the fee. Now they say if you don't give them access to your bank account, you will only receive a break of $5 per line fee. These people get hacked every 6 months, and all your personal information is stolen.

I wish there were an alternative, but the other carriers in the US are just as shady, and Google Fi uses T-Mobile. Mobile plan prices are increasing and are now more than a water or electric bill for a family of 4. The Gov should break up the industry; they have facilitated an oligarchy of Telecoms like Canada has.

Laughs in Kickstart

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