Our main cell phone is a little black flip phone that we’ve had forever. I love it because it is tiny and a single charge can last up to a week! It is a prepaid AT&T phone that costs $100 (+tax) for 1000 minutes.
Anyways, a couple of years ago, we decided to get a smartphone to be able to use services like Uber and Google maps. Our research back then, led us to FreedomPop. We bought a used Samsung Galaxy 5 Android phone through FreedomPop, and then our smartphone data plan literally was free! It gave us 500MB of data a month, and that was fine for us, for the times we were away from WiFi.
So thanks FreedomPop for 2 years of completely free data!
But now, FreedomPop is cancelling their free internet plans for Sprint-type phones. So we needed to find a new cheap plan for our smartphone.
Our latest research led us to Tello. They have inexpensive prepaid and monthly plans. We chose a monthly plan that gives us 500 MB of data, 100 minutes of phone, and free texts for $6 per month. With taxes added, our final Tello bill is $7.80 per month. Not a bad price, under $100 per year.
After you use your 500 MB of data, Tello apparently lets you use 2G data (slower) for free. We haven’t tested this out yet, since our Tello plan is brand-new but we will report back.
I’ve also read that there may be a manual way to roll-over Tello minutes and data? We plan to test that our and will report back on that also.
Tello’s prepaid plans seemed like a good choice too. Tello’s prepaid rates are here. At the time of writing, they were 1 cent per minute for calls or texts and 2 cents per minute for data, in the USA.
When you sign up for Tello, there is a box where you can type in a code to save $10. The code is P34X9ZBC. Click here to use this code directly at Tello.