I’ve lived under a rock for 10 years. I did Metro ages ago while most were still on contracts. Surely we’ve reached true capitalist open market freedom by now. Is it still total closed market, noncompetitive, privateering corruption?
I think Google Fi works like you describe.
I am on Fi and can confirm that this is how my plan works. I pay a standard rate per GB of data used, up to a cap where I will not be charged any more for the cycle.
Same. I also found that, for my usage, I wasn’t actually saving any money compared to the unlimited data plan.
We had that twenty years ago, it just wasn’t a very good deal. Nobody wants to pay 2¢ per text.
It was easier before every random website wanted to send you a text with an OTP just to log in and order a pizza or whatever.
That said, if it was $10 / mo for unlimited, or $0.02 per text, I’d take the per-text charge. I don’t use texts much and I’d probably save $8 / mo or more.
Wait, you pay to receive texts?
Do you not? I really don’t know, I don’t use texts much and we’ve had unlimited texts for like, 15+ years. I always see ‘normal carrier fees apply’ on OTP notifications, so I just assumed they counted against limited plans.
Finn here. For us, receiving SMS has never cost anything. Downloading MMS, that used to cost, but no-one uses those.
Sending an SMS could be as expensive as 20c when I was a kid. And an SMS is 160 characters. So if you wrote a long one it’d send it as three.
Then when I was about 12-13 there started being unlimited texting packages, which advertised as unlimited but after giving kids access to the service for a few months, limits were soon imposed to like a 1000 sms a month.
I can’t imagine being a teenager with only 1000 sms a month. I think at one point i was sending hundreds of texts per day
People in Europe switched to internet based messaging (mostly WhatsApp) as soon as smartphones got popular enough.
It should be more like $2 per gigabyte and everything streamlined as only data. Signal is a better service than any of the service providers offer anyways.
The closest Pay as You Go plan is Ultra Mobile. You do have to pay $3 a month but that also gives you 100 mb of data and 100 minutes, 100 text messages (data might apply). You can then pay for extra time as you would for $5 which is around $8 dollars total if you only plan to use talk and text. This plan also includes communication with other people worldwide unlike America only phone companies. So it’s a pretty good plan for low usage people.
Check out JMP chat. It’s an MVNO out of Canada but for $4.99 (US dollars) you get unlimited texts and i believe 120 mins of call time per month (800 numbers are free if you need to call your bank etc). You can pay with debit/credit/cash (literally you can mail them cash or a check) and of course crypto.
I’m on tello mobile and pay $5 after taxes. It bills PayPal too for easy payments. Very happy with the service. Can use an app to change my plan or add more data or minutes at any time. I can also do tethering and other things that some services charge extra for.
Mobilex
“like Europe”? Where in Europe. In Sweden pretty much every single subscription are unlimited calls and sms. Unlimited data is also becoming more common but you can still get a specific amount if you want. I have 100 GB but that’s way overkill for a phone. I can easily use terabytes on my computer but I have a hard time using just 50 GB on my phone.
An old friend from the UK moved to the States for awhile. They used to reminisce about buying sims at the corner store in Scotland and having reasonable rates for what they used instead of all the contract focused exploitation in the USA. IIRC they said that they had no periodicity to their purchase.
