What phone do you own?

[robartsd]

Well they gave you a big discount on the phone because there overcharging you for service.

If he paid $400 for a four-year phone and is calling that $100/yr, he didn't get a discount.  That's sticker price.

I took billy as responding to your post, not the one you quoted (a good reason to always quote at least a small snippet).

Yeah there have been.  We're on T-mobile and last Black Friday we did the trade-in deal with three eBay iPhone 7s for two iPhone 11s and an iPhone 11 Pro Max.  Sold the 11s on eBay, GF kept the 11 Pro Max, total out-the-door cost after the whole dance was around $200.

Sounds like you have 3 lines with T-mobile that you used in combination to get the iPhone 11 Pro Max for a net $200. Not that that is a bad deal: $900 off unlocked list price = $300/line = $25/mo/line for a year. I'm not sure how hard it would be to find a MVNO that saves you $25/mo/line on service, but it might not be more difficult than buying 3 phones on eBay, trading them in for new phones at T-mobile, and selling 2 of them on eBay.

[ketchup]

Well they gave you a big discount on the phone because there overcharging you for service.

If he paid $400 for a four-year phone and is calling that $100/yr, he didn't get a discount.  That's sticker price.

I took billy as responding to your post, not the one you quoted (a good reason to always quote at least a small snippet).

Yeah there have been.  We're on T-mobile and last Black Friday we did the trade-in deal with three eBay iPhone 7s for two iPhone 11s and an iPhone 11 Pro Max.  Sold the 11s on eBay, GF kept the 11 Pro Max, total out-the-door cost after the whole dance was around $200.

Sounds like you have 3 lines with T-mobile that you used in combination to get the iPhone 11 Pro Max for a net $200. Not that that is a bad deal: $900 off unlocked list price = $300/line = $25/mo/line for a year. I'm not sure how hard it would be to find a MVNO that saves you $25/mo/line on service, but it might not be more difficult than buying 3 phones on eBay, trading them in for new phones at T-mobile, and selling 2 of them on eBay.

Ah, totally misread that.  Yes, T-mobile makes up for subsidizing stuff like that in service charges, no doubt.  That's the game.  We're basically losing money by not exploiting every deal they offer.  I'm very aware of this.

We pay $140/mo for three lines.  GF uses her phone for her business and travels a lot (at least when there isn't a pandemic), which is often in spotty coverage areas, so any de-prioritization or not-eligible-for-certain-roaming BS (like we had on Ting before; that was a fun trip to the Upper Peninsula circa 2015) is a hard no.

T-mobile is the only of the "big three" carriers that charges anywhere close to reasonable for unlimited and hotspot data (she also edits and uploads photos from hotels all the time and often hotel wifi sucks hard).  We're paying more than your average Mustachian for cell service by a large margin, but we also get more value out of it than most.  We do the same with home internet service (two WAN connections, together costing silly money) for similar reasons.  Her business and therefore income, is tied to communication, as is the case with many these days.

[Alchemisst]

Has anyone heard of make life simple (MLS) phones? Can't find much info about them other than they are a Greek company

[ObviouslyNotAGolfer]

I own an LG K7 that I bought from T-mobile for $50 in 2016. Great phone for what I need. I only pay $20/mo for talk and text--no need for data! I see no need to replace any time soon.

I win this thread. No autographs please. ;-)

[billy]

Hold your horses I picked up your mic because I pay $5 a month FreedomPop 700 mb data only with Google voice ............Mic drop and mmm humble brag over

[Daley]

Hold your horses I picked up your mic because I pay $5 a month FreedomPop 700 mb data only with Google voice ............Mic drop and mmm humble brag over

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you literally have one of the worst possible mobile setups one could get for spending real money. Real talk here, chum. Google Voice with mobile data service only is no substitute for real mobile phone service, and it's guaranteed to fail you at the worst possible of times.

$5/month could get you 100 minutes, 100 SMS messages and 500MB of data on any of the four major networks from Red Pocket.
$6/month normally gets you 100 minutes, unlimited texting and 500MB of data on the Sprint network with Tello, but they're currently running a double the minutes and data deal.

Those are plans that are far less likely to leave you stranded or in trouble if you need emergency services or need to reach out to others during catastrophic events or in poor reception areas. Yes, one should not invest too heavily in the illusion of safety, but nobody's invincible, and the price difference for the added benefits and features is a literal wash, and there's nothing keeping you from continuing to stuff Google Voice in the middle of all your communications.

Nice try, Billy, but you're no more a golfer than he who obviously cannot golf. It is far better to be humble in one's understanding and share knowledge for the sake of others' benefit than to try and "win" on the internet.

...and even if we want to quantify a winner from this thread, it's @GuitarStv since he's been able to arrange his life to not need the fool things in the first place, making his annual expenditure on both mobile hardware and service cost absolutely nothing. That is the real badass dream.

@Man of Dudeism? You probably don't actually need unlimited talk or texting. Find out what you actually use per month, even if "unlimited" text with 1000 minutes (16 hours and 40 minutes) of talk time is still more than the average heavy user actually needs or uses these days. Get T-Mobile to unlock your phone and shop around. US Mobile offers "unlimited" talk and text with no data for $14/month plus taxes on T-Mobile's network, and Red Pocket has "unlimited" talk and text with 1GB of data on AT&T's network (which you can use once your phone's carrier unlocked) for $19/month... and both providers have even cheaper options even on T-Mobile's network if you know exactly what you need. Should be a fairly painless transition for a reasonable amount of savings.


Back on topic, and posting solely to bring a specific handset to the attention of some of the gearheads here.

The old farts know I somehow became a Windows Phone diehard a few years back, and I'm still rocking the trusty rusty Lumia 640 myself. If I don't go phoneless when it dies, about the only new handset that would actually interest me at this point would be that linked PinePhone - which I would thoroughly bastardize and load up with LumiaWoA instead of Linux once support was extended.

PinePhone running WoA instead of Linux or Android? mmmm, yes please! That with a Bluetooth keyboard, mouse, and a Miracast HDMI dongle would retire both my current laptop and my phone at the same time.

[Dicey]

I know a lot of forum folks don't read MMM's blog, but his latest post is worth a read to anyone interested in this topic.

[Daley]

I know a lot of forum folks don't read MMM's blog, but his latest post is worth a read to anyone interested in this topic.

I've looked over Chris's site, and his recommendations. I want to like his resource. However, Whistleout is far more unbiased and complete as a one-stop research website even with the obviously marked advertised referral plans, and doesn't automatically recommend providers without actually getting some usage info first, and doesn't bury or hide all the providers they don't get kickbacks from on third tier list pages way less useful than Wikipedia's MVNO list.

I stopped maintaining the guide here in the forums specifically because of how good Whistleout has gotten, and how little people seem to actually care about fair terms of service and decent customer support. If Chris is being honest with himself and actually believes what he's written, he'll either drop all referral links if he only wants to give a shortlist of plans without any thought toward the problems of blind network swapping for customers, and actually list the best plans out there for the money, network by network - or he'll withhold recommending any plan outside of editorial reviews independent of the recommendation pages without user input first, and list *all* potential plans without any weight or bias towards referrals, and blatantly flag the referral link plans as what they are, paid advertisements. I speak from experience that there's no money in the first choice, and the second is literally reinventing a wheel that Whistleout has already had more than a decade refining and been a darn good all-in-one resource for it for the past five years.

So, good luck to him. He's got a rough road ahead, and the tension between ethics and money's only gonna get harder to walk given how skeevy the mobile industry can really be.

[Dicey]

I know a lot of forum folks don't read MMM's blog, but his latest post is worth a read to anyone interested in this topic.

I've looked over Chris's site, and his recommendations. I want to like his resource. However, Whistleout is far more unbiased and complete as a one-stop research website even with the obviously marked advertised referral plans, and doesn't automatically recommend providers without actually getting some usage info first, and doesn't bury or hide all the providers they don't get kickbacks from on third tier list pages way less useful than Wikipedia's MVNO list.

I stopped maintaining the guide here in the forums specifically because of how good Whistleout has gotten, and how little people seem to actually care about fair terms of service and decent customer support. If Chris is being honest with himself and actually believes what he's written, he'll either drop all referral links if he only wants to give a shortlist of plans without any thought toward the problems of blind network swapping for customers, and actually list the best plans out there for the money, network by network - or he'll withhold recommending any plan outside of editorial reviews independent of the recommendation pages without user input first, and list *all* potential plans without any weight or bias towards referrals, and blatantly flag the referral link plans as what they are, paid advertisements. I speak from experience that there's no money in the first choice, and the second is literally reinventing a wheel that Whistleout has already had more than a decade refining and been a darn good all-in-one resource for it for the past five years.

So, good luck to him. He's got a rough road ahead, and the tension between ethics and money's only gonna get harder to walk given how skeevy the mobile industry can really be.

Wow! That's valuable feedback, @Daley. I'm an original blog reader, so I take this stuff with a grain, er, block of salt. Just like when MMM said he invested his "Last $100k" with B'ment, which looked like a bigger commitment than it actually was, plus he was in the same endorsement/referral/kickback loop. Don't get me wrong, he's absolutely entitled to make money for his efforts, but a little more transparency, especially when he "breaks up" with some one or some thing would be appreciated.

However, this might also be a case of "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If this partnership gets people to think more about optimizing their cell phone plans, it's a step in the right direction, no?

[Daley]

However, this might also be a case of "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If this partnership gets people to think more about optimizing their cell phone plans, it's a step in the right direction, no?

If Pete actually wants to help people save money on their phones and serve that end with a simple step in the right direction, he could just leave the statement that paying more than $10-40/month for your cellphone is ridiculous, tell people to find a cheaper plan on the same network they're already on, only pay for what they need, and give a link to Whistleout and provide a couple other links for MVNO research info... like I did nearly two years ago when I hung up my spurs.

This is still basically the same shortcoming I had with Pete's recommendations back when the guide was active and I actually spent the emotional bandwidth to help people on the forums here, and I know how it ends. Plans should be suggested based on who and what people already have, and not just tossed to the absolute cheapest deal or best kickback under a couple loose categories - doing anything short of that only screws the person you're actually trying to help in creative and unexpected ways. The biggest reason is due to 4G network fragmentation, hardware, and the hard push towards VoLTE only service in this country.

I was the one who spent years having to deal with the complaints and angry feedback helping others on the forum to fix their mobile service changes after blindly following Pete's one-to-two-size-fits all recommendations before finding the guide here, and these new recommendations aren't all that much better from that perspective. Realistically, there's not much middle-ground with MVNO recommendations - either you go broke recommending the actual cheapest and/or best plans who never have referral programs and pray the readers actually give a crap enough to send you donations to support your work (protip: they don't), or you have to spend the massive labor sink to maintain a price database to recommend *every* MVNO based on cost, solely for the sake of fairness if you want to make money off of referrals, and either go broke as nobody will click on the referrals as they won't be the cheapest options presented, or jockey the referrals as paid ads to the top and stop pretending to be even remotely unbiased. If you don't, any talk of "unbiased" reviews and "fairness" is just hypocritical virtue signaling. Even I had a bias, but I always tried to make sure mine was skewed towards not screwing people over with bad terms of service and lousy customer support - and my reward for that work over seven years? Barely enough donations to keep the server lights on, taking on the unpaid time and emotional labor to help individuals recover from poorly researched referral based recommendations, and taking abuse from penny pinchers and referral shills for refusing to mention or gloss over the huge negatives of their ultra-cheap or sponsored crap tier plan/provider.

The problem and reality is, the providers who can actually afford to offer referrals are rarely the cheapest, or able to offer the best service for the money. MVNO margins are thin, and that sweet, sweet referral money has to come from *somewhere*. That's why the referrals on Whistleout are shown in a collapsible box at the top of the recommendations list tagged as advertisements or special promos. You can't make money off recommending MVNOs unless you deliberately withhold or suppress options that would otherwise serve your readers' best interests for the sake of making a buck. I don't envy Chris, as his stated values and the conflicts already present aren't going to be fun to reconcile, one way or another, but that's something he'll need to figure out on his own. That's not a statement of judgement, either... but first hand experience. I wish him the best.

[Just Joe]

DW and the kids = various iPhones. They'll never change.

A deal killer for me and iPhones was the inability for their phones to bluetooth files back and forth without some sort of wifi or date connection (DropBox, Apple Cloud, etc). The hardware is there but the OS won't allow it.

Me = Asus Zenfone 3 and Asus Zenfone AR = Android.

Would prefer straight up Linux minus Apple or Google or Microsoft but I'm patiently waiting.

Cracked the Zenfone 3 carrying it my pocket. Repaired it. Did it again. Big guy problems. Switched to a used AR and liked it but cracked that screen the same way. Slow learner....

Repaired the Zenfone 3. Changed my carry habits and no further problems. Saving the AR for a future replacement. Like the smaller Zenfone 3. No old phone problems, great battery life, still get updates, love the camera. Use KDE Connect to shift files too and from my Mint Linux computer.

If I was planning to buy a new phone it would be an Asus. Just don't put it in a tight jeans pocket. We also bought an ASUS Chromebook and its be great too. Can install straight up Linux applications on it.

[Daley]

Would prefer straight up Linux minus Apple or Google or Microsoft but I'm patiently waiting.

...posting solely to bring a specific handset to the attention of some of the gearheads here.

You should check out that linked phone, Joe, if you're not already familiar with it. The PinePhone there is a sight cheaper than the Librem 5.

[zolotiyeruki]

Would prefer straight up Linux minus Apple or Google or Microsoft but I'm patiently waiting.

You might consider looking into LineageOS.  Basically "Android without google", and it looks like it supports a few Zenfone models officially.  I run it on a few devices here at home, and aside from everything else, I am particularly fond of its per-app privacy settings that give you far more control than standard Android.

[alsoknownasDean]

I stopped maintaining the guide here in the forums specifically because of how good Whistleout has gotten, and how little people seem to actually care about fair terms of service and decent customer support.

This is also why I stopped maintaining the Australia-specific guide. I don't have the time or inclination to go through all the carriers and review updated plans etc, especially when I'm but an amateur competing against professionals. Ultimately the MVNO game is a tough business with extremely low margins, and those who can't build up sufficient scale or find their own niche are going to have a tough time of it.

Also regarding networks, if changing to another network requires buying a new device, is it really a frugal choice? If someone's with, say, AT&T, surely it'd be better for them to change to an AT&T MVNO (even if it's a bit more expensive) rather than buy a new device because the cheapest carrier for their usage uses Sprint's network, and the old phone isn't compatible? At least sticking with the same host carrier means that the coverage is a known quantity. I made a point of splitting my recommendations in the old Aussie guide by which network each runs over for that reason.

Would prefer straight up Linux minus Apple or Google or Microsoft but I'm patiently waiting.

You might consider looking into LineageOS.  Basically "Android without google", and it looks like it supports a few Zenfone models officially.  I run it on a few devices here at home, and aside from everything else, I am particularly fond of its per-app privacy settings that give you far more control than standard Android.

The /e/ operating system (essentially a LineageOS fork) has potential. It's got the software compatibility of Android (because it is Android) and a whole bunch of it's own services, without the Google stuff. I've tried it on an old shitty phone I've got here and it worked alright.

https://e.foundation/

[mizzourah2006]

I use Swappa and just by gently used phones. Just paid $250 for Google Pixel 3XL. Before that I paid about $300 for an Iphone 6+. My wife likes the finer things in life, lol so I just got her an Iphone X for $375. These usually last us about 3-4 years and then we do the same thing again. Our AT&T plan costs us $54 for lines for both phones and 10GB of data that rolls over to 20GB total.

[Daley]

Also regarding networks, if changing to another network requires buying a new device, is it really a frugal choice? If someone's with, say, AT&T, surely it'd be better for them to change to an AT&T MVNO (even if it's a bit more expensive) rather than buy a new device because the cheapest carrier for their usage uses Sprint's network, and the old phone isn't compatible? At least sticking with the same host carrier means that the coverage is a known quantity.

Bingo, it's a hidden cost that should always be factored that noone ever does, and that's something that speaks to the problem at the core of any list that's primarily T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, or restricted handset/qualifier based in its recommendations. That's what Pete had in the past, and it's still what Pete has with his new partnership. If you're really going to do a limited one-size fits most "best of", either list MVNOs that offer the same or similar tier service for the price on *multiple* networks (like RedPocket), or exclusively use AT&T based MVNOs for your one-size recommendations. Every LTE phone from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile can and will work on AT&T's voice network and get decent enough data throughput (and AT&T's coverage is sufficiently large enough that most all but some rural Verizon users should still have decent coverage), but successful portability even when unlocked between each other is pretty much limited to the premium phablet market where there's enough room for the ridiculous number of fractal antennas needed to work with every carrier's LTE bands - and even then, you're still seeing a CDMA/GSM divide in many of those models, and it's mostly due to needless VoLTE band fragmentation, voice stack certification, and IMEI whitelisting... because... you know... screw keeping 3G voice networks online and intranetwork voice portability despite, you know, agreeing to actually do that.

This kinds speaks to the heart of the thread itself on handset owned, and how most low-end, sub $250 cellphones are pretty much network tied, even after unlocked from being taken anywhere else but AT&T, and that's only going to hold true for another couple years at most.

That's why I just default to recommending people to RedPocket these days. The privacy policy isn't great with them, but you can opt out. Beyond that, they basically have nearly identical plans at identical price points from $5 to $60 on at least two of the four networks they offer service on, and one of those is always on the AT&T network. The prices are competitive, the customer support decent, but there's no real referral program or advertising budget... which is why you never see it talked about much outside of HoFo, Reddit and WhistleOut.

And back to WhistleOut - Canadians, Australians, and Mexicans have WhistleOut, too. There's really no excuse to reinvent the wheel here.

[dignam]

Pixel 3a.  Favorite phone I've owned, by far (including overpriced iPhones I've owned).  Paid $300 I think?  My Google Fi bill is usually under $30

[Just Joe]

Would prefer straight up Linux minus Apple or Google or Microsoft but I'm patiently waiting.

You might consider looking into LineageOS.  Basically "Android without google", and it looks like it supports a few Zenfone models officially.  I run it on a few devices here at home, and aside from everything else, I am particularly fond of its per-app privacy settings that give you far more control than standard Android.

Thank you Daley and Zolotiyeruki! I am aware of the Pine products but haven't done anything about it yet. LineageOS is a new one for me!