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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

The fact that most telcos in US offer cheaper prepaid plans with the same resources (unlimited voice/sms/data) than their 2-year-lock-in counterparts still surprises me... Is the lockin there really just to offset the price of the subsidized device?

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The term subsidized, to me, seems misleading. On a contract you're usually buying the phone on credit and paying it off in your monthly contract charges. I wish there were more transparency in contract pricing. Ie. this is the cost of the phone this is the, data, voice etc. Then you could compare deals fairly. The sim only and pay as you go at least give you a chance to see what you're paying for the voice/data/texts without the phone cost.

If you're on a 2 year $100/month contract probably $30 a month goes to repay they phone cost the rest for the service insurance etc. If you don't upgrade straight away or get a big discount at the end of the contract you're effectively giving your mobile operator a massive profit jump.

exactly - which makes the prepaid plans A LOT more interesting: all you have to do to cancel is stop paying, and the plans are cheaper than the long-term ones. I'm not sure you can "finance" the phone directly with your credit card, though, but if you can, then it makes even less sense.

I'm saying this because prepaid plans, in every other country I lived in, were absurdly expensive, if compared to the post-paid ones...

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