I Cut My Phone Bill by $60 a Month and Nothing Bad Happened
Heads up: this post contains affiliate links. If you sign up through one of them I get paid a commission, and your price does not go up. I only write these about things I actually pay for.
I want to start with the dumbest part of this whole story.
For years I paid a major carrier somewhere north of eighty dollars a month for a single line. Unlimited everything. I did not use unlimited anything. I am on Wi-Fi at home, on Wi-Fi at every client site, on Wi-Fi at the coffee place. My actual monthly data usage was somewhere around two gigabytes.
I was paying for a fire hose and drinking from a straw.
Why this happens to everybody
The big carriers do not sell you a phone plan. They sell you the absence of a decision.
Unlimited is not a product, it is a way to stop thinking. You never have to check your usage, you never have to pick a number, you never get a scary text on the twenty eighth of the month. That peace of mind is worth something. It is just not worth sixty extra dollars a month, which is what most people are actually paying for it.
The other thing propping this up is the phone. You got a “free” phone that was not free, it was financed, and the payments were baked into a bill you stopped reading in 2019.
What I switched to
I moved to Tello, which is a smaller carrier that runs on T-Mobile’s network. That last part is the whole thing, so let me be clear about it. Tello does not own towers. It is an MVNO, which means it buys wholesale access to T-Mobile’s network and resells it. Your phone connects to the same towers it did before.
The difference is what you are allowed to buy, and the plan builder is where that difference lives.
Instead of picking from three unlimited tiers that all cost too much, you build the plan. You pick your data. You pick your minutes. Texts are unlimited on everything. Plans start at five dollars a month for the truly light user, and you can change what you picked whenever you want, with no contract and nothing to cancel.
Build your own plan and see what it costs
The actual prices
If you do not want to build anything, there are premade tiers. Roughly: two gigabytes runs around ten dollars, five gigabytes around fourteen, ten gigabytes around nineteen, and unlimited data lands around twenty five. Every one of them includes unlimited talk and text.
Every plan also includes free calls to a long list of countries, which sounds like filler until you are the person who calls family overseas, at which point it quietly replaces a whole other service you were paying for.
Prices change. Go look at the live numbers rather than trusting a blog post, including this one.
Here is what I gave up, honestly
This is the section most affiliate posts skip. I am not going to.
Deprioritization. During network congestion, T-Mobile’s own postpaid customers get served first. Your data slows down until the congestion clears. In practice I notice this maybe once a month, usually in a crowded place. If you live somewhere permanently congested, this will bother you more than it bothers me.
The unlimited plan is not unlimited at full speed. It has a high speed allowance and then it throttles. If you are the person streaming video over cellular all day, this is the wrong carrier for you and you should stop reading.
Small hotspot allowances. If you tether your laptop as your main internet connection, look elsewhere.
No perks. No device protection plan, no streaming service bundled in, no free roaming beyond promotions. You are buying phone service, full stop.
Taxes and fees are added at checkout. The advertised number is not the final number. That is true of every carrier, but I would rather say it than let you be surprised.
Who this is genuinely for
- You are on Wi-Fi most of the day and you know it.
- You have a kid or a parent on your plan who needs a phone number and almost no data.
- You want to pay for exactly what you use instead of buying insurance against a usage pattern you do not have.
- You are willing to spend fifteen minutes once to save several hundred dollars a year.
That last one is the real filter. This is not hard, but it is not zero effort either. You check whether your phone is compatible, you order the SIM or activate an eSIM, and you port your number. It is an evening, not a weekend.
Check if your phone works with Tello
Who should stay where they are
If you burn through fifty gigabytes a month on cellular, if you need a guaranteed hotspot, if you travel internationally constantly, or if you genuinely value having a store you can walk into, keep your current carrier. This will make your life worse and you will be back in three weeks.
I would rather you not switch than switch and hate it.
The part that actually matters
Here is the reframe that made me do it.
I did not think of it as saving sixty dollars a month. I thought of it as finding seven hundred and twenty dollars a year that was already mine, sitting in a bill I had stopped reading.
That is not a small amount of money. That is a flight lesson and a half. That is a print run of a board game prototype. That is a real thing, and it was just leaking out of my checking account every month because changing it required one evening of mild annoyance.
Go read your actual phone bill. Not the summary. The itemized one. Find out how much data you really used last month. If the number surprises you, you already know what to do.
And if you decide to switch, using my link does not change your price and it helps pay for the stuff I put out here for free.
Everything on this site is free and stays free. If this saved you some money, you can buy me a covfefe.
