Compare Prepaid Wireless Plans - From PAYG to Unlimited!Offers Have Evolved - A Lot! It's become so difficult to compare prepaid wireless plans. Around 2006 carriers starting offering monthly plans to meet the needs of increasingly more sophisticated customers. Basically, customers starting saying: "Just because I'm prepaid, doesn't mean that I want to get ripped off paying really high per minute rates - please give me better value!" So along came prepaid (still no contract) monthly plans that were commonly known as hybrid plans. They're "hybrid" because they look and feel much like a postpaid plan by offering a bucket of minutes, text messages, voicemail, etc. for a monthly fee, however, on a prepaid basis. For a deeper dive into this plan type and others, please visit Prepaid Wireless Plans. These monthly, or hybrid plans were great because they offered much better value than did PAYG plans, and felt a lot like monthly postpaid wireless plans but without the contract. They didn't, however, get close to competing with the value offered by postpaid contract plans, but still a great step forward. But there was a problem... Arrival of Daily Plans The problem with the monthly/hybrid plans was that carriers found that customers couldn't consistently pay on time. What this meant was that a large number of customers would have interrupted service (a bad customer experience!), and carriers lost revenue, because they were expecting a specific number of continuous monthly payments, which is the basis for how they priced the cost of the plan. In other words, it became somewhat of a lose-lose for customers and carriers. While prepaid carriers continued to offer hybrid plans, they introduced the concept of a daily plan. This allowed customers to pay usually from $1 to $3 on a daily basis for a fixed set of services. This approach provided better value than the PAYG plans, but not quite as good as monthly plans. So, if you couldn't afford a regular monthly payment, you could still get good value by payment a fixed daily fee. Note that customers could typically switch between all plan types fairly easily, although some carriers did charge fees to make changes. Then Came Monthly Unlimited Plans! As the options expanded, and competition began to heat up in 2007-2008, new prepaid carriers entered the market (ex. MetroPCS, Cricket, etc.) that really disrupted the market. They basically came in with guns blazing essentially saying that they could provide the best value, and even compete with postpaid plans. And so now we see a flurry of monthly unlimited plans being offered by new prepaid wireless carriers, as well as the big players. i.e. Game on! The Bottom Line - It's Confusing! So with this evolution customers win, because we get better prices and more services. So much so that a new type of customer is being attracted to prepaid - that being postpaid customers! The value of prepaid, and the no contract flexibility, is now so powerful that many prepaid plans can be easily compared to the value of postpaid. However, the bad news is that prepaid offers are so abundant that it really is confusing to compare prepaid wireless plans. I don't care who you are, the options out there now are simply overwhelming. Having worked in the prepaid wireless industry for many years, it still took me dozens of hours to compile the Prepaid Plan Comparison Charts, and a lot of time to maintain them as new plans are launched and existing ones change. Most of us wouldn't want to spend that much time to compare prepaid wireless plans; it's just too time consuming and frustrating. That's why it makes me very happy when visitors to the site contact me to let me know that they found the site useful; thank you to those folks!
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