The Benefits of Switching to Pre-Paid Rather than Post-Paid Cell Service Switching to pre-paid cell service may be for you, if you are fed up with being held down by a two-year contract or need to save money. Pre-paid cell phone service is very flexible and has the potential to save you large amounts of money. So why do the majority of Americans still insist on signing a contract? If you are one of the people that are beginning to get fed up with paying to much for too little, it may be time for you to rethink why you keep renewing that contract. Below we will look at the differences between pre-paid cell service and post-paid cell service to help you decide what is better for you. We will start with a general description of prepaid and postpaid plans, and then look into some of the providers for both of them, and finally I will lay out how to choose which is right for you and look at some facts. To help customers avoid overage charges and enable them to live on a budget easier, some wireless providers have a prepaid plan. These plans allow phone consumers to choose from a wide variety of devices, but instead of having to pay activation fees and maintain a monthly plan, the phone simply stops working when its assigned amount of minutes run out. As long as you keep an eye on your usage, prepaid wireless plans can be an excellent way to budget money, avoid large phone bills and if you don’t have the financial security to consistently pay a monthly bill, it’s a safe route. On the other hand postpaid payment plans offer more stability and allow consumers to build their credit score by carrying credit with a corporation. There are typically larger selections of devices available to consumers who opt for postpaid wireless plans. Buyers select from a monthly service plan, which costs a fixed amount. If, however, the user ends up using it more than the contract stipulates, the device will continue to operate and the user will receive an inflated bill for that month. Now let’s look into the providers, starting with prepaid. A number of prepaid cell phone providers are also major postpaid wireless providers. Among the more popular prepaid providers in the United States are Cricket, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, T-Mobile, AT&T's Go Phone, as well as prepaid offers available from Verizon Wireless and Tracfone. Some of these prepaid providers offer phones that can be instantly activated with a unique phone number in a matter of minutes, making it ideal for temporary use, but what are the popular postpaid cell service providers? Among the more well known postpaid wireless providers in the United States are AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and U.S. Cellular. Many of the prepaid wireless networks lease their bandwidth and equipment from these larger postpaid providers. For example, prepaid provider Boost Mobile operates by paying Sprint to use portions of its wireless infrastructure. Postpaid providers can typically offer better customer service than prepaid providers, and are generally more flexible if you have to pay a bill a few days late or need to make payment arrangements. We all know how perfectly indispensible mobile phones have become to life as we know it. Yet, even as mobile phones become more and more accessible, the problem still remains: what will be the most cost effective and convenient mobile phone plan that will meet all your needs within an affordable range is a problem that many of us face today. There is, unfortunately, no simple way out of this. To choose a mobile phone plan that will work the best for you is often quite a time consuming and tiring task. One cannot blindly rely on what companies advertise. While choosing a mobile phone plan, it is essential to compare plans keeping one's personal requirements in mind and then choose an option which would work the best. So whether you're out to search for the best prepaid plan or the best postpaid plan, it is recommended to do a bit of research before making a concrete decision. Postpaid plans are designed for people with disposable income. These plans are designed for people who don’t watch their bills closely and who don’t mind the added charges when they run over. As such, postpaid plans do not offer mechanisms to control costs and random expenses. So, doing the wrong thing on the phone could add an accidental high cost charge to your bill, because there are no tools to monitor usage, postpaid plans are not designed for the cost conscious consumer. If you want to keep a handle on your wireless service costs, then you should opt for a prepaid plan. With prepaid service, the carriers all give methods to watch your minute usage, give alerts on how many minutes were used after a call completes and ways of determining current minutes left and when they expire. All of these tracking features let you determine when you need to pay more money to add minutes. On postpaid plans, the carriers decide when you pay and how much you pay. With a postpaid plan, it’s very easy to go over your allotted minutes because you have no way to know that you just used up the last of your 450 plan minutes and it’s just the 15th of the month. That either means you need to check your minute usage often (you have to call customer service to get this information), or you need an app to track this data on your phone. If you happen to buy a phone that supports apps, you might be able to do this. Otherwise, you’re out of luck and will have to do it manually. You may be able to call customer service and get this information, but they only support limited phone hours and may not be able to give you this data in real-time.
If you’re a budget conscious consumer, a prepaid plan lets you track your usage exactly. You also only pay for exactly what you use. With postpaid plans, if you don’t use yours service for 30 days, you still pay the $40 (or whatever the plan costs). If you are using prepaid and don’t use the phone for 30 days, you pay nothing (unless you are on an unlimited prepaid plan). The single thing you must be aware of is the expiration date. So long as you buy more minutes before your previous minutes expire, your old minutes remain and become part of your new minutes.
According to Consumer Reports Magazine “A caller who needs 3,000 minutes of voice service per month and no text or Web service would pay $600 per year for Boost’s and Virgin’s unlimited plans vs. $1,200 for similar plans from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. (Boost includes unlimited text and Web; Virgin charges extra.)
Callers needing just 100 minutes of voice service per month would be better off with a prepaid pay-as-you-go plan: The user pays 10 cents a minute just for minutes used. Boost’s Pay As You Go costs $119 per year—$240 less than the next-best contract plans from the big-four carriers.
But prepaid isn’t for everyone. Traditional contract plans proved cheapest for many families. Our model family using 2,800 minutes per month on four phones, with low text and Web use, would save the most—$73 to $1,393 per year—with Verizon’s Nationwide Basic Family Share Plan 1400.”.
As you can see from those numbers prepaid can work well under many conditions, but at the end of the day the choice is yours. Now that you know a general description of what both prepaid and postpaid service is, and some of the larger providers for both, and ways to determine what plan is right for you along with some facts. Hopefully you can make an educated decision that will fit your lifestyle and needs best.