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Alma asked: “I met a guy on Tinder. We went out and it wasn’t a match so he unmatched me. However, he told me about this new cell phone provider where you can pay $20 a month for unlimited everything and you just buy a phone online and port your number over and everything. I don’t know what company he was talking about. i figured since you’re so evolved, you’d probably know the answer.”
There are actually a few companies providing service for around $20, but there are usually some catches.
The biggest one is that you do get what you pay for in terms of internet speed and dropped calls. You probably won’t find unlimited data for $20 either, unless it’s heavily throttled after you get past a given threshold. FreedomPop and Republic Wireless charge $20 and they give you unlimited text and talk and 1GB of data, Walmart’s Family Mobile will offer them same but charge you $30. For those same $30 Boost Mobile offers unlimited text and talk, but with 2GBs of data instead of just one.
Virgin Mobile also charges $30 and they offer 3GBs of data and unlimited texting, but they limit phone calls to 300 minutes a month.
Your Tinder friend may have been talking about Google’s Project Fi
Your Tinder friend may have been talking about Google’s Project Fi. Fi costs $20, for unlimited talk and text (which it will try to route through WiFi absolutely anytime that it can), and $10 per GB of data used, but you get the cost whatever was left of the GB back at the need of the month. Project Fi only works with Nexus phones, but it is an interesting service and it does let you roam abroad and continue to use the same plan without paying extra (you will have drastically reduced download speeds, but if you’re patient and the page doesn’t time out, it should work).
If you do switch to any of these plans, try to test them first with a free phone, most are contract-free, so as long as you can borrow a phone or use the one you already have, you should have no trouble dropping the service if you don’t like it. There is a chance that you won’t, these are discount services and they generally do perform as such, but they’re also cheap, so it doesn’t seem fair to fault them for that!