Dorkus, all of these plans are order and go. That $19/month isn't a good deal, though, for a multitude of reasons relating to the technology used and the actual service you're paying for. But the way Republic packages it, it's at just the right price point to gnaw at you. It's a marketing trick and the allure of "unlimited", but even if it wasn't a terrible general idea, it's still not a realistic price for what you're currently needing in actual
wireless service and won't be sufficient for the data numbers that are tying you up. The other big thing here is that just because I've outlined
how to reproduce the Republic experience for less, doesn't mean that you necessarily
should. VoIP for mobile voice service on mobile data networks is a bad idea. Even if you'd rather still roll the Republic way, follow
Mr. Everyday Dollar's setup instead as it's way simpler.
Fortunately, you already know what your usage numbers are. I agree with the idea that Ting might be a good option for you, but you're paralyzed about getting a fixed price and knowing what it'll cost. That paralysis grows out of your data usage, because even with a 2000 text bucket, your voice and SMS needs are fully met without reduction and even has room for overkill at $23/month. So where do we go from here? What you need to do is become serious about your data usage, learn how it's impacting your budget, and rethink your relationship with it. Let's do so with statistically common usage generalities and math!
Odds are, I'm guessing you stream music (it might not be music - if it isn't, just swap what it is in your mind) and that probably accounts for at least
half of your data usage or more. Now, the average monthly data usage of a smartphone in this country is a little south of a decadent 1GB of data, and most of that is from streaming and social media and live data GPS service, so I think that should be some low hanging fruit to hit for anyone... so let's budget 1GB of data for our baseline at a cost of $24. By doing this, we can now put a very real price tag on this "free" streaming music service when we measure it against your current data usage of 1.5-2.5GB a month, which translates to the 2000 and 3000MB data buckets. Is getting your groove on worth $36 a month? Is it worth $18? Realistically, you'd probably even hit regularly under 500MB a month for all the non-music data used, and the price difference between the 3GB and 500MB packages is $47, and even the difference between 500MB and 1GB is still $11. Is getting your groove on even worth $11 a month?
Yes, we've completely ignored factoring in offloading data usage to WiFi, but I did so deliberately. Now that you know the price of your music habit, you're probably thinking about
where you indulge that habit, because you probably don't want to give that habit up and are asking some good questions about it: Is it at home?
(Oh good, I have WiFi there!) Is it at work?
(Does my employer allow me network access and streaming audio on their network? Is it impacting my productivity?) Is it in the car?
(Crap.) Is there another way to work around these mobile data black holes other than without data? Is this service
that important to me in the first place?
Even without conscientious usage reduction efforts on the remaining stuff, you answer those questions and enact a solution to it, you've probably just guaranteed a
massive reduction in your data usage. Next is just making sure you're on WiFi whenever possible, forcing unnecessary data hungry apps and background services to do their thing on WiFi only, using offline GPS services...
The truth is, when you restrict your mobile data use to text-based communications, even 100MB becomes
a lot of data. You kick that data habit and use WiFi at home more, that should ease things significantly. If you can then get your usage under 100MB regularly, you're officially in sub-$30 territory. I was even able to squeak in regularly under 15MB a month back with my Android phone, and I kept wireless data
on for Kik and email, and even surfed online every once in a while (though I used Dolphin and had it turn off image loading). Trust me, it's doable.
You can set hard usage caps on services with Ting so you know you'll never spend more than $XX. You can set a price on whatever that convenience is that's using so much data every month. You can do things that reduces your usage further. If you're
serious about kicking that habit but still want the occasional convenience, hard cap your available usage allotment to 100MB a month and if you run out, you run out... that'd pretty firmly fix your monthly budget to around $26 at the most, which would likely sweeten the ROI calculations considerably.
If you want this financial monkey off your back, all you have to do is kick the data habit... and it's a pretty easy habit to kick.
