Last month I found I was paying $120 per month for Sprint service with a four year old iPhone.
Does that sound right to you? It doesn't sound right to me. It seems my friends are paying less than half that much for newer phones.
This just seemed to creep up on me. In 2014 I remember originally buying a new phone for $22/mo payments with $60 "unlimited" service, when my previous $50/mo service at AT&T was not unlimited, so I thought that was a better deal than AT&T. Original payments were indeed about $82 per month, as I had expected. That didn't seem unreasonable, consider I was also getting a brand new iPhone 6S Plus, the ultimate, with no trade in. I believed I was also signed up for "iPhone Forever" which would let me get a new trade-ins Every Year.
About 14 months later I went to another Sprint store, asking about my upgrade. They told me I couldn't actually upgrade to a new phone without paying a few hundred dollars. They said my plan only permitted "free" upgrades every other year, and I had to pay extra to upgrade Every Year. So I declined. I must have had some misunderstanding, maybe I got the cheaper iPhone Forever plan, or maybe they sold me some other kind of lease, these things are so complicated it's hard to know what you have actually signed up for. In the store, you wait around for an hour or more, and when they do see you it all goes by very quickly and the choices you have are far different from what you might have expected, and then it all comes out in an unintelligible mass of printed receipt and/or email.
Sometime in 2016, I really wanted to get an iPhone 8S Plus. It was well over 2 years since my original contract, I figured this should be easy. But it was hard. I don't recall if I did have iPhone Forever, but I recall not wanting to keep it if I did. I purchased the old 6S Plus for my electronics collection for what sounded reasonable $200 or so, and thought I would be purchasing my phone over time, which cost a little more than my previous lease. Since I was somewhat concerned about breakage, I got insurance, which I recall cost about $10. It all came to $90 something, which sounded OK at the time.
I remember this as an especially unpleasant upgrade experience, not that it took long though. I had to keep remembering passwords, which I couldn't remember. To make it worse there seemed to be both a phone passcode, and a carrier passcode. I could only remember the phone passcode. Eventually the process was completed, and I hoped not to go through it again.
My payment did go up, but I expected it to because it was purchase instead of glorified lease. Since I was no longer on iPhone Forever, or at least they seemed to tell me that, I should eventually pay off the phone and own it, or so I thought. When that had happened to me with my first iPhone on AT&T, after about 2.5 years my payment actually dropped down.
Instead, payments just seemed to go up and up every few months like cable service. I got some notice about changes in the "insurance "plan that didn't look good at all. It looked as though if I were to break my phone, I'd only get a discount on a new phone, which maybe wasn't worth that much. But, generally speaking, I had a full time job and far too many other concerns to bother cancelling a $10 (and later $15) extra monthly charge, and maybe I'd actually use the insurance after all. So I didn't make any changes, though I thought if I were a penny pincher, I would.
And the monthly charges seemed to rise and rise. So what at one point was little more than $90, I though, nearly 4 years later not only had my payment not fallen from having paid off the phone, it had shot up by $25 bucks or so, without my having changed anything.
Finally, after over 2 years of wondering why I was being ripped off so badly for cellphone service, but having far more important concerns than saving $30 next month, I finally got around to trying to get my cellphone bill lowered, by purchasing the phone outright, getting a cheaper service plan, and cancelling the "insurance."
It was a 4 hour online and text chat experience worthy of another post. Endlessly frustrating and laced with anxiety that there would be some screwup, and I'd have to start all over again, or I'd have all my phone payments forgotten, end up owing far more, or endless other mishaps. Except for COVID-19, I would have preferred to go to a store, even though I know those aren't necessarily sweet and easy experiences either. This time it seemed like my first two "chat" experiences weren't even with a real person, but it seemed my 3rd and successful time was, though there were 10-20 minute pauses between texts when you wouldn't know if anything was going to happen, or end up with a screwed up account. Ultimately my 3rd and successful series of texts spanned 90 minutes.
It wasn't at all clear the agent was trying to me much money. It seemed more like they would prefer to sell me a new phone and new contract just like before.
When I insisted on lower payments, they suggested what seemed like only a small change in my service price (which had apparently risen to $70 somehow). I insisted on removing the insurance and buying the phone.
Actually I had started this process by figuring out how to access my online account again. That took awhile, but I did finally remember my password and username. Then I saw numbers like thise:
Monthly Lease: $33/mo (ok, I can see how that would contributed to a $120 bill)
Purchase: $238
It doesn't take much math to see that the purchase price is far less than the monthly lease for another whole year. But nobody suggested this change. I insisted on it over and over and it took another 60 minutes to get the deal done over text, and even then I had to complete the purchase online on my computer, where it wasn't obvious that the $220 charge was the $198 price I had agreed to (with tax and charges).
I clicked on the box which said "purchase phone" and a little box popped up and said I had to use chat to do that. First tried the online chat, which got nowhere, it said it couldn't do that either. I then proceeded to do chat from my phone, from the phone Sprint app, which led me to texting with "agents", which took in all about 2.5 hours.
It was bad, though not quite as bad as with the old XM Radio service...
Now I think I've got it changed like I wanted anyway. I purchased my phone for $200 plus tax and switched to $50 unlimited plan with no insurance. My new payments are supposed to be just over $50 per month.
We'll see.
Actually, the Sprint website actually advertised a $35 unlimited service, and provide your phone. But the agent over text told me I could not get that plan. He said I could get the 55+ plan. I couldn't get an answer as to whether that was the cheapest unlimited data and text plan I could get. That's the way it goes, they offer something off the shelf and it's take it or leave it. And leave it means you'll have to buy another phone, most likely. (So I may still be paying a $15 idiot tax, at least. Somebody smart probably wouldn't have paid that.)
The way the industry has structured itself, you don't really have much choice, unless you really just want to keep buying $1200 phones every two years. If you have a Sprint phone you are locked into Sprint, because their radio system is not the same as with other carriers. And so on. You feel like you are trapped in John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl.
Does that sound right to you? It doesn't sound right to me. It seems my friends are paying less than half that much for newer phones.
This just seemed to creep up on me. In 2014 I remember originally buying a new phone for $22/mo payments with $60 "unlimited" service, when my previous $50/mo service at AT&T was not unlimited, so I thought that was a better deal than AT&T. Original payments were indeed about $82 per month, as I had expected. That didn't seem unreasonable, consider I was also getting a brand new iPhone 6S Plus, the ultimate, with no trade in. I believed I was also signed up for "iPhone Forever" which would let me get a new trade-ins Every Year.
About 14 months later I went to another Sprint store, asking about my upgrade. They told me I couldn't actually upgrade to a new phone without paying a few hundred dollars. They said my plan only permitted "free" upgrades every other year, and I had to pay extra to upgrade Every Year. So I declined. I must have had some misunderstanding, maybe I got the cheaper iPhone Forever plan, or maybe they sold me some other kind of lease, these things are so complicated it's hard to know what you have actually signed up for. In the store, you wait around for an hour or more, and when they do see you it all goes by very quickly and the choices you have are far different from what you might have expected, and then it all comes out in an unintelligible mass of printed receipt and/or email.
Sometime in 2016, I really wanted to get an iPhone 8S Plus. It was well over 2 years since my original contract, I figured this should be easy. But it was hard. I don't recall if I did have iPhone Forever, but I recall not wanting to keep it if I did. I purchased the old 6S Plus for my electronics collection for what sounded reasonable $200 or so, and thought I would be purchasing my phone over time, which cost a little more than my previous lease. Since I was somewhat concerned about breakage, I got insurance, which I recall cost about $10. It all came to $90 something, which sounded OK at the time.
I remember this as an especially unpleasant upgrade experience, not that it took long though. I had to keep remembering passwords, which I couldn't remember. To make it worse there seemed to be both a phone passcode, and a carrier passcode. I could only remember the phone passcode. Eventually the process was completed, and I hoped not to go through it again.
My payment did go up, but I expected it to because it was purchase instead of glorified lease. Since I was no longer on iPhone Forever, or at least they seemed to tell me that, I should eventually pay off the phone and own it, or so I thought. When that had happened to me with my first iPhone on AT&T, after about 2.5 years my payment actually dropped down.
Instead, payments just seemed to go up and up every few months like cable service. I got some notice about changes in the "insurance "plan that didn't look good at all. It looked as though if I were to break my phone, I'd only get a discount on a new phone, which maybe wasn't worth that much. But, generally speaking, I had a full time job and far too many other concerns to bother cancelling a $10 (and later $15) extra monthly charge, and maybe I'd actually use the insurance after all. So I didn't make any changes, though I thought if I were a penny pincher, I would.
And the monthly charges seemed to rise and rise. So what at one point was little more than $90, I though, nearly 4 years later not only had my payment not fallen from having paid off the phone, it had shot up by $25 bucks or so, without my having changed anything.
Finally, after over 2 years of wondering why I was being ripped off so badly for cellphone service, but having far more important concerns than saving $30 next month, I finally got around to trying to get my cellphone bill lowered, by purchasing the phone outright, getting a cheaper service plan, and cancelling the "insurance."
It was a 4 hour online and text chat experience worthy of another post. Endlessly frustrating and laced with anxiety that there would be some screwup, and I'd have to start all over again, or I'd have all my phone payments forgotten, end up owing far more, or endless other mishaps. Except for COVID-19, I would have preferred to go to a store, even though I know those aren't necessarily sweet and easy experiences either. This time it seemed like my first two "chat" experiences weren't even with a real person, but it seemed my 3rd and successful time was, though there were 10-20 minute pauses between texts when you wouldn't know if anything was going to happen, or end up with a screwed up account. Ultimately my 3rd and successful series of texts spanned 90 minutes.
It wasn't at all clear the agent was trying to me much money. It seemed more like they would prefer to sell me a new phone and new contract just like before.
When I insisted on lower payments, they suggested what seemed like only a small change in my service price (which had apparently risen to $70 somehow). I insisted on removing the insurance and buying the phone.
Actually I had started this process by figuring out how to access my online account again. That took awhile, but I did finally remember my password and username. Then I saw numbers like thise:
Monthly Lease: $33/mo (ok, I can see how that would contributed to a $120 bill)
Purchase: $238
It doesn't take much math to see that the purchase price is far less than the monthly lease for another whole year. But nobody suggested this change. I insisted on it over and over and it took another 60 minutes to get the deal done over text, and even then I had to complete the purchase online on my computer, where it wasn't obvious that the $220 charge was the $198 price I had agreed to (with tax and charges).
I clicked on the box which said "purchase phone" and a little box popped up and said I had to use chat to do that. First tried the online chat, which got nowhere, it said it couldn't do that either. I then proceeded to do chat from my phone, from the phone Sprint app, which led me to texting with "agents", which took in all about 2.5 hours.
It was bad, though not quite as bad as with the old XM Radio service...
Now I think I've got it changed like I wanted anyway. I purchased my phone for $200 plus tax and switched to $50 unlimited plan with no insurance. My new payments are supposed to be just over $50 per month.
We'll see.
Actually, the Sprint website actually advertised a $35 unlimited service, and provide your phone. But the agent over text told me I could not get that plan. He said I could get the 55+ plan. I couldn't get an answer as to whether that was the cheapest unlimited data and text plan I could get. That's the way it goes, they offer something off the shelf and it's take it or leave it. And leave it means you'll have to buy another phone, most likely. (So I may still be paying a $15 idiot tax, at least. Somebody smart probably wouldn't have paid that.)
The way the industry has structured itself, you don't really have much choice, unless you really just want to keep buying $1200 phones every two years. If you have a Sprint phone you are locked into Sprint, because their radio system is not the same as with other carriers. And so on. You feel like you are trapped in John Steinbeck's novel The Pearl.
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