how to not get ripped off (as much) on your cell phone bill

If you read nothing else:

• Get on a group/family plan with as many people as feasible
• If you can’t, consider prepaid
• Switch to a newer plan with your current carrier if it’ll save you money
• Do autopay and paperless billing
• Take advantage of the free phone trade-in promotions
• Never buy the insurance
• Never go to “authorized retailers”

Intro

I worked in a cell phone store for about four years total: three years at AT&T (and became a union steward with CWA, which represents workers in corporate-owned stores almost everywhere in the country), and close to a year at Verizon, plus eleven months off that job after they fired me for trying to organize a union, before they reinstated my job. From what I’ve seen, AT&T and Verizon are pretty similar in their plans; they tend to copy one another in pricing, features, promotions, and plan structure. I don’t know much about T-Mobile, beyond that their prices are a little lower (but on family plans, which I’ll talk about, the prices are pretty close).

Hopefully it comes across that just because I’m describing these plans and how they work, I’m not saying that I think these companies are good and I love how I have to give them money. Fuck all three major carriers, I hope we build a society that recognizes phones and internet as necessary parts of modern human existence. But, for now, here’s my advice on how to not get ripped off (as much) on your phone bill.

All of this is specific to residents of the USA.

Get on a group/family plan with as many people as feasible

If you’re like most young people, one of three things are true: you’re either still mooching off your parents’ cell phone plan (lucky dog), you’re on a plan by yourself, or you’re on a plan with a significant other. The first one of these is basically the ideal (even if you’re paying your parents back), because the more people are on one cell phone plan, the better, in terms of cost savings. To take Verizon as an example, one line on their “Unlimited Plus” (the middle of their three unlimited plans) is $80 a month plus taxes and fees. The exact same service, once you have five or more people on the plan, is $42 a month per line instead. That means five people choosing to be one one plan together instead of five individual plans are saving a collective $2,280 a year.

You should do this. The logistics can be, initially, a bit of a hassle, but it really is worth it.

There’s always promotions for either a free phone or a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) credit when switching from another carrier, so it’s usually better to have people move onto an account from a different carrier than they have. Four example, if one person has Verizon and four people have AT&T, you’ll usually get a better deal for the four people to move over join the one person on Verizon than vice-versa.

There is a credit check when making an account, so you usually won’t run into issues with requiring a deposit unless you’re making a brand new account. This can be an issue if you’re signing up for postpaid and you have no credit/bad credit; you won’t miss out on any promotional deals, but they might ask you to pay up front a good amount of money instead of financing the phone.

So, how do you actually make the switch? For simplicity, I’ll call the account everyone is joining the “target account.”

If someone is switching from another carrier onto the target account, the person switching will need their account number (found on a copy of the bill; the carrier’s app web site should have an option for “bill PDF”) and the account PIN or passcode of their current account. The person with the target account goes through the steps of “adding a line,” either on the phone, in the store, or through the internet. Personally, I find it easiest at a store, so that a worker who knows what they’re doing is in charge. (See the part below about not doing this at an “authorized retailer.”)

Unfortunately, if it’s switching someone who’s already on the same carrier onto the target account, you have to do that over the phone, unless you get the 1/100 chance you find a worker in the store who both knows how to do it and wants to go out of their way to help you. It’s not all that hard, though. Either do a three-way call with 611, or gather around the person with the target account on speakerphone as they call 611. Ask for switching a line from another plan onto yours. Carriers might call this “Transfer of Billing Responsibility” or something similar. I did this the other day with my partner’s line; it took maybe 20 minutes on the phone.

If you’re lucky enough to be in charge of a small business or registered nonprofit, make a business account instead of a personal one instead. Some of the logistics of dealing with business accounts are annoying for boring reasons I won’t get into here, but the prices are better, and you usually won’t get activation fees (or sometimes upgrade fees). Put all your family and friends on your business plan; no one cares, and every lawyer and private practice doctor in America has their whole family on their “business” plan.

Switch to a newer plan with your current carrier if it’ll save you money

I can’t tell you how many times I pulled up someone’s account, saw that they were on an old plan that was charging them $50 a month more for the same (or worse) service than a new one would, wasn’t eligible for any promotions for new phones, and they insisted to me that I not change anything. “I’m on a grandfathered plan,” they’d say.

A bit of context: many years ago, when cell phone data was relatively new, carriers gave customers unlimited data. As people started spending more and more time on their phones, this became (to the companies) unsustainable, or at least not profitable; they stopped offering unlimited data (except in certain specific scenarios, like you got DirecTV, or it was fake unlimited data that would throttle the speeds very quickly). The people who were already on those plans weren’t forced to change; they were grandfathered in.

That was a while ago. Unlimited data plans started popping back into the mainstream within the last ten years; now, it’s nearly impossible to get a postpaid plan that’s not unlimited data. Still, a lot of people think that being on their old plans are better, out of a (mistaken) belief that their plan is better, or a (reasonable) suspicion that the salesperson is trying to pull a fast one on them.

One mistaken belief people have is that having a grandfathered plan means the price can’t increase. Completely untrue. I’m on a Verizon plan that’s only a couple years old (from when I worked there in 2021), and they’ve already added $4 per line in “administrative fees” that would disappear if I switched to a new plan.

For the most part, probably 90+% of the time, switching to the newer plan is going to be better, especially if it’s necessary to get a promotion like $1000 off a phone. There are exceptions- I’m on that 2021 Verizon plan for a reason- but they’re far, far fewer than people think. If I have to switch my plan to get the next iPhone for free in September, I’ll take the deal instantly.

If you really, really can’t do a family or business plan, consider prepaid

It’s cheaper and you won’t get your phone free or subsidized, but for the service itself, it’s always cheaper to do prepaid. The service isn’t technically quite the same (the data is deprioritized compared to postpaid plans), but unless you’re watching a lot of high-res videos when you’re out of Wi-Fi you probably won’t notice.

Generally, two or fewer people who only need service and not phones will be better off with prepaid. Three or more, postpaid is going to be about the same or cheaper.

Be sure to buy your phone elsewhere than the carrier, though, the ones in the store are marked up for prepaid customers.

Do autopay and paperless billing

This one’s pretty straightforward. Almost every new plan gives a huge discount, usually $10 a line per month, to do automatic payment and paperless billing. Usually, you have to do autopay on a debit card or bank account, not a credit card, for the full discount. You should always do this.

Yes, part of the reason cell phone companies do this is so that you don’t pay as close attention to your bill. You should anyway; when you get texted a reminder that a debit transaction will go through, use that time to check your bill to make sure nothing weird is going on.

Who actually wants more paper things in the mail? If your parents are insisting on paying their cell phone company an extra $5 or $10 a month for a paper copy, show them how to pull up the PDF, then print it for them.

Take advantage of the free phone trade-in promotions

I will, again, give some historical context: more than ten years ago, phone plans worked very differently than they do now. You had a contract that truly was a contract: you signed an agreement to stay with the carrier for X amount of time (usually on one specific plan), and paid a huge fee if you broke it off before that. In exchange, you got a free or heavily subsidized phone.

Carriers replaced this with a plan that was more flexible (and didn’t have them taking massive losses on device costs): be on whatever plan you want, with whatever phone you want, but you have to pay for the phone yourself. If you need help paying for it, you’d get interest-free financing, but no true discount other than whatever your old phone traded in for. When I worked for AT&T from 2015-2019, this is how it was.

More recently, carriers have gone back to aggressive promotions to get customers to switch (and then not switch back). For example, if I was to switch right now to AT&T from Verizon, I could trade my iphone 13 Pro essentially straight across for a new iPhone 16 Pro ($1000 off). The catch is, I’d get those credits over 36 months, offsetting the monthly cost of the new iPhone that I’m technically financing. If I were to switch again, I’d be on the hook to AT&T for whatever the cost of the phone that I haven’t paid yet, so if I switched after 18 months, I’d have only gotten $500 in credits.

So, all those catches, fine print, is it worth it to get that “free” phone? Absolutely. The best way to do it is to wait until all 36 months are paid off, so you own the phone outright, and trade it in for the newest one (as long as the carrier is offering a good promotion at the time, which they usually are when new phones come out, such as in September for iPhones). If you wait too long, you can end up losing money; in my case, my iPhone 13 Pro is the oldest phone worth $1000 as a trade-in, so if I waited longer, it could fall into a lower tier of trade-in value.

Basically, you need to have service with someone (or you wouldn’t be reading this); take their $1000 bribe not to switch off for a few years.

Never buy the insurance

This one is straightforward: the insurance is a complete scam. All three carriers push their insurance really hard, for good reason: the margins on it are unbelievable. Both AT&T and Verizon go through Asurion, TMobile uses a different one, but they’re all the same: you pay a (high) monthly fee for the privilege of being able to replace your phone if it’s lost/broken/stolen. But, when you do that, you have to pay a deductible (usually around $230), and almost always, you don’t even get a new phone, you get a badly-refurbished version of the one you had. And you can’t even go into the store to get it immediately, you have to fill out a form and they mail it to you. So many times I’ve had people paying the $16 a month for the insurance, lose their phone, and they just bought a new one anyway because they didn’t want to deal with the insurance process. Money straight down the drain.

Never, ever go into an “authorized retailer” to get a phone or help with anything

Authorized retailers (aka “indirect” stores) are the absolute worst. The employees are paid minimum wage and a ton of commission, and the companies are incredibly shady, prioritizing unrealistic sales numbers over training their workers, service, or ethics. If you work at one of these and don’t quit within a month, congratulations, you’re a manager. That’s how high the turnover is.

Avoid them at all costs (unless you’re going in to try to unionize them). They try to hide the “authorized retailer” label, so double-check online whether it’s a corporate-owned store or authorized retailer. Corporate stores have their problems too, including shady employees and fraud-encouraging managers, but it’s nothing like at authorized retailers.

Jargon glossary

Activation fee: charge on the bill when you add a new line. Usually $35.

Authorized retailer/indirect: instead of the store being owned by the carrier, it’s run as a franchise by another company, like a fast food restaurant.

Business plan: instead of running credit of an individual and being in their name, it’s in the business’s name and under their credit instead. Nonprofit orgs can have these, too.

BYOD: Bring Your Own Device. Usually refers to some sort of promotion.

“Free phone”: usually, you finance it over 36 months, and get bill credits equal to what you paid. Not literally free in the sense that you can go sell it on eBay immediately, but free in the long run as long as you don’t switch your carrier.

Locked/unlocked: whether a phone can be used on any carrier, or just the one who sold it. Legally, phones have to be unlocked after owning them for 60 days, but carriers (especially AT&T) go out of their way to make the process annoying. Any phone bought from the manufacturer rather than the carrier should be “factory unlocked,” meaning you never have to worry about it.

Postpaid: they send you a bill every month, you can finance phones, etc. Your standard “family plan.”

Prepaid: you pay up front every month, and either bring your own phone or buy it outright from the carrier.

Upgrade fee: charge in the store or on the next bill when you upgrade a phone. Usually $35.