A few minutes ago, I installed a Cricket Wireless Prepaid GSM SIM Card (Review) in my Nexus 5 phone. The phone service should cost me $35 a month when I sign up for AutoPay. Unfortunately signing up for AutoPay gives me the following message, “The system couldn’t process your request. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later.”
Whenever “later” comes along (hey it just came along… and here it is again), I’ll save about $12 from what I was paying Straight Talk.
It seems like there’s an arm’s race in cheap cell phone service. I pulled the trigger on that, but Google’s Project Fi Mobile Service? is almost as tempting.
But yesterday things got a little more interesting.
Rick Broida of CNET’s Cheapskate blog upped the ante by noting that StackSocial has a $199 deal for a Nexus 5 and a YEAR of service. You’d pay more than that for either the phone or the service almost anywhere else and you get BOTH. The service is through Freedom Pop and it runs on the Sprint network. Those may be deal-breakers for some, but a deal this good has to have a couple of strings attached, right?
The data is limited to 500MB which isn’t a lot. I use around 1GB a month, which adds another $12.50 (2.5 cents per MB). If you use a lot of data, this may not be for you.
Between the data costs and the Sprint network, I don’t think this is a fit for me, but maybe it works for you? Let me know in the comments.