Being off contract, you save the most money by the fact that you aren't forced to continually upgrade your phone to get your subsidy. I'm on a ~$25 USD/month pl

Being off contract, you save the most money by the fact that you aren't forced to continually upgrade your phone to get your subsidy. I'm on a ~$25 USD/month plan with unlimited talk/text + 2.5GB LTE, and I typically keep my phones ~3 years. Having said that, as you stated, even if I needed to have new phones every year, it'd still be cheaper than a contract :).