Cellular plan for texting teen

[Stackfault]

A true mustachian would give their teen two cans and some string or maybe some stationary and stamps, but if that's a bit extreme for your family, you might want to consider the plan we just got for our daughter.  T-Mobile has a no-contract plan for $15 a month that provides unlimited texting and $0.10 per minute for voice.   (Sorry, no data.)

Since teens almost NEVER actually talk on phones and since our shy daughter absolutely hates talking on the phone, this seemed like a great plan for us.   We got her the "slidey keyboard phone" for $50 at Wal-Mart.  It's not the iPhone 4S she wanted (like that was ever going to happen) but she likes it and it gives her a phone for texting her friends and calling us at a much lower monthly cost than I thought possible.

[Daley]

Excellent tip there, Stackfault! For the sake of broadening the horizons, though, I'm going to offer up some alternatives.

Technically speaking, the mustachian version of a tin can telephone for "texting" for kids would be a used (cheap), deactivated CDMA WiFi enabled Android phone like the Samsung M910 with the Google Voice app installed. 100% free text messaging while home or in a WiFi hotspot, free emergency 911 services out and about.

Alternatively if you don't want to limit to just WiFi, do the same sort of Android phone setup with Google Voice and PlatinumTel as your carrier. Technically speaking, SMS text messages are just a thorough rip-off when you know how much data they actually use (info half way down the post), so Google Voice for texting is obviously the way to go, and the absolutely cheapest to maintain per month cell service in the US is P'Tel at $3.33 a month, which gives you about 33MB of data to use. Even if you figure at worst a 1kb overhead per text message with GV, $3 should still buy you well over 30,000 SMS text messages a month, and that's assuming zero WiFi access time. Added bonus? 5¢ a minute phone calls, half of T-Mo's per minute cost. In a way, it's a fantastic setup for kids as they can afford it themselves, deal with overages, learn responsibility and budget accordingly. Not an "unlimited" setup, but if a kid is spending enough time plugged into a phone long enough to send over a thousand messages a day, well....

Finally, if parents are comfortable spending $15 a month for an unlimited texting plan and 10¢ a minute talk time and also have a propensity towards caution, the handsets are more expensive, but there's Kajeet which provides not just a phone, but parental filtering software and the ability to lojack their kids. TMo is cheaper in comparison to this from a setup cost, but it's worth mentioning anyway for the filtering software as unmoderated interbutts can be a potentially scarring thing for the younger set.

Edit: One has to be careful of "unlimited" plans with cell carriers, too, as unlimited is never truly unlimited:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090427/0239194664.shtml
Given the world record for extreme SMS sending is around 182,000 in a month? Highlights the true costs of text messaging and helps put the P'tel+GV option in perspective. Even if you figure a full 1kb per message for GV overhead (which is quite high), you could probably set a world record for well under $18. No telling what Google might do to you if you tried that, though.

New edit, April 1st: The above SMS GV figures are based on pure napkin math solely off of a Blackberry and for the messages themselves. Possible apples and oranges situation with Android data usage. Reality probably won't work out quite this rosy at larger quantities. YMMV. Caveat emptor. Take my numbers with a grain of salt. Yadda yadda yadda.

[shedinator]

I pay $50/month for my phone, which doesn't sound super frugal, except that it's all androidy, and I have a tethering app that a) I picked up BEFORE my carrier banned tethering and b) has the built-in option to hide tethering usage (it slows things down a bit and makes it appear to the phone company that I'm viewing these web pages on my phone). It can be frustrating at times, particularly if I've just spent some time using free superfast WiFi (hedonic adaptation), but $50 for unlimited talk, text, web, and home internet connection seems pretty good to me :).

[Bakari]

All that tech and shopping info is useful and interesting, but I really think the most important part of this question is the whole "getting ________ for your teen"

Anyone old enough to have a cell phone, is old enough to pay for it themselves.

And as a bonus, even though they will complain, you genuinely are making them a better - and some day wealthier - person: https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/mini-money-mustaches/kids-and-college-will-you-pay/msg1735/#msg1735

We owe them food and clothes and shelter, maybe (MAYBE) gifts on birthday and christmas, but cell phones and cars?
How are they ever going to become Mustachian?

[Nephi]

I.P. Daley, I actually followed your advice and bought a Samsung Intercept through Platinumtel and have set it up with Google Voice. It is indeed completely free texting  as long as I am within Wifi, but I have found that it uses WAY more data than you had guessed. I have the data monitor app Onavo and have used it to disable all data except for Google Voice, although there are some default things for which I was unable to disable mobile data. At this very moment, my data usage by Google Voice is 8.1 mb and I haven't even had it for a month. I tested and found Google Voice to use approximately 30 kb of data per text. That is still much better than 2 cents per txt but it is still only 33 texts per mb, rather than 30,000 texts for only $3.33 per month. Not only that, but Google Voice uses a large amount of data simply syncing itself to keep the texts up to date. Do you have any suggestions of how the situation could be remedied?

[Daley]

I.P. Daley, I actually followed your advice and bought a Samsung Intercept through Platinumtel and have set it up with Google Voice. It is indeed completely free texting  as long as I am within Wifi, but I have found that it uses WAY more data than you had guessed. I have the data monitor app Onavo and have used it to disable all data except for Google Voice, although there are some default things for which I was unable to disable mobile data. At this very moment, my data usage by Google Voice is 8.1 mb and I haven't even had it for a month. I tested and found Google Voice to use approximately 30 kb of data per text. That is still much better than 2 cents per txt but it is still only 33 texts per mb, rather than 30,000 texts for only $3.33 per month. Not only that, but Google Voice uses a large amount of data simply syncing itself to keep the texts up to date. Do you have any suggestions of how the situation could be remedied?

There's a lot of techniques to minimizing data throughput with Android apps in general, Google Voice included. The first thing you should do is turn off auto-syncing on every single application you have on there excluding your Gmail/e-mail client and GV. For those applications, the less the push sync updates in an hour, the better. I have my phone set to sync only once an hour, but most people don't feel like they can go that long between updates - try 15 to 30 minutes and keep in mind that impatience costs money, and emergencies shouldn't be relayed by SMS. Now, it doesn't appear Onavo has this option (from what I've seen - don't personally use it on my Nook), but Juice Defender does: Juice Defender can turn off wireless data access entirely when the screen turns off, and only set to connect to check for push updates X times an hour (lower the better) or only when you wake the device back up. It's also important to ensure WiFi is the preferred data connection for Android and utilize it as often as humanly possible. If WiFi is available, then 3G needs to be off entirely and the apps only updating through it. For simplifying and automating connection to approved WiFi hotspots, use an app like Hideki Kato's Auto WiFi Toggle.

I do find your reported data usage level of GV on Android surprising, though. The native GV app on our non-WiFi Blackberries doesn't use but about 20-40k in a day, and that's a range between standard push updates and no other traffic to a good couple dozen texts (which is pretty close to the ~1k/text napkin math after subtracting our daily fixed push update overhead). Even if the benefit of BIS proxy compression were applicable to gaining extra compression, that's only about 80-160k a day without BIS, but still doesn't make much sense as Google tends to compress their stuff as best as possible leaving their server as well, and you can't compress compressed data further.

I do have a thought as I haven't used Onavo, and it reads as though you're basing your data usage statistics off it, and it might be reading raw, uncompressed data usage. Have you actually signed into PlatinumTel's website to check your usage balance through them yet? That's going to be your real litmus of how much data you're actually using and the only numbers that actually matter. I'm also curious to know how long you've had the phone so far. Is the 8.1MB of data in a week? Two weeks? Three days? Five hours?

Edit: Even still, if you work out to averaging about 30 texts per MB, that's $1/300, $10/3000... 1/6th the price otherwise. If you specifically went the P'tel prepaid route on my earlier suggestion using far sloppier numbers than I should have probably tossed around in this thread or based on the raw data size of real world text messaging in the other thread with high expectations of trying to actually attempt to get 10,000+ messages per $1 and specifically for doing heavy texting for cheap (which isn't necessarily unreasonable to expect given the data sizes involved and what personal data I do have, but in hindsight may have been a bit too optimistic), I don't know what else to tell you other than I'm sorry my math wasn't up to snuff and I didn't research deep enough to deliver truly accurate numbers for you and others. I can only do so much due diligence and this is free advice on the internet, let the purchaser beware and do their own to confirm accuracy before investment. If your reality works out to these numbers (which I think are still quite good numbers, even if they're nowhere near as good as they could/should be), I can only thank you for the feedback and adjust the guides and numbers accordingly for others.

[AJ]

Anyone old enough to have a cell phone, is old enough to pay for it themselves.

I totally agree with this. I told DH that I can't *wait* till our kids are old enough to want a cell phone so that I can show them how to earn the money to buy their own. Of course, the OP is free to do whatever they want in their family, but I think it provides a really good way to teach kids about money (Oh, you used up all your texts and you're our of money? I guess you need to earn more or go without.) Its the first real recurring expense a kid can pay for themselves.