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There are no prepaids? Which country do you have in mind?

by trasz 4y ago

thaumasiotes 4y ago
Prepaid phone plans in the USA charge you a monthly rate just like subscription plans do. They may also charge you for usage, though that appears to have fallen off compared to the past. Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)
- Macha 4y ago
  Wow, the prepaid plans in your country suck. How they work here is: 1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account 2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data). 3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer 4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data
  - terinjokes 4y ago
    We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire. Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.
jlarocco 4y ago
At some point it just gets ludicrous, though. Is it reasonable for everybody to go buy "burner" phones to sign up for Twitter? The truth is, it's stupid for Twitter to require a phone number, and it's especially stupid that they blame the user for using their real number.

There are no prepaids? Which country do you have in mind?

by trasz 4y ago

There are no prepaids? Which country do you have in mind?

Prepaid phone plans in the USA charge you a monthly rate just like subscription plans do. They may also charge you for usage, though that appears to have fallen off compared to the past. Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)

Macha 4y ago
Wow, the prepaid plans in your country suck. How they work here is: 1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account 2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data). 3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer 4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data
- terinjokes 4y ago
  We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire. Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.

jlarocco 4y ago

At some point it just gets ludicrous, though. Is it reasonable for everybody to go buy "burner" phones to sign up for Twitter? The truth is, it's stupid for Twitter to require a phone number, and it's especially stupid that they blame the user for using their real number.