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Enlarge / If you've got a cheap phone and want a cheap plan to go with it, these are some good places to start looking.
Andrew Cunningham

Most Americans buying cell phones are going to do it through one of the four major carriers, and most of them are going to opt in to a two-year contract when they buy a phone because it feels like a good deal. You'll give me a $600 or $700 phone for $200? What a savings!

What fewer people take the time to add up is that the cost of that two-year contract can range up into the thousands of dollars over the course of two years, easily dwarfing the amount you "saved" by buying a subsidized phone. Remember, if it looks like a carrier is giving you a great deal, it's probably a great deal for the carrier and not for you.

Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) can give you another way out, buying access to the big four networks wholesale and then re-selling it to you. It's possible to get the best of both worlds—no expensive long-term contracts or cancellation fees, paired with the speed and coverage you're used to from larger carriers. We'll be looking at pricing first and foremost, but we'll also pay special attention to MVNOs that allow you to bring your own devices, like the $179 Moto G and $129 Moto E we're so enamored of. Those devices are great for the price, and buying one of them to pair with service from an MVNO could save you hundreds of dollars a year.

Straight Talk

Network: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile

Enlarge / Straight Talk's unlimited plans are pretty reasonable, especially for international travelers.

Straight Talk gives you a couple of different benefits, aside from the prices of its plans. It will let you bring your own phone, something lots of other MVNOs won't or can't allow (though not all phones are compatible). It also gives you a wide range of carriers to choose from—AT&T seems to be the default for unlocked phones, which generally speaking is going to get you better coverage in more places than the oft-used Sprint or T-Mobile networks.

Straight Talk is a solid choice because it offers reasonably priced unlimited-with-an-asterisk domestic plans, and for not all that much more you can add international calling and data for when you travel. The basic, $30 plan gives you 1,500 minutes and unlimited texts, but its paltry 100MB of data means we wouldn't bother with it—instead, step up to the "Unlimited" plan for $45 a month, which gives you 3GB of high-speed data a month and throttled data for the remainder of the 30-day pay period.

Getting the version of the unlimited plan that works internationally is $60 a month, just an extra $15. Some information to put that into context: AT&T would charge me an extra $60 if I added 300MB of international data to my current plan. I could also pay $10 to get 50 international texts, or $60 to get 80 minutes of talk time in Europe. There are some strings attached here—you'll need to either dial an "international gateway" number or download a Straight Talk app to make this work, and the list of supported countries is fairly long but not complete. If you frequently hop between countries, though, this could save you a whole bunch of money compared to the major carriers.

If you want to stay in the US, you can shave a few more dollars off the price of the unlimited plan by buying in three-month, six-month, and 12-month packages for $130, $255, and $495, respectively, though this reduces your flexibility compared to the 30-day plans.

You can get Straight Talk SIMs that work with both AT&T and T-Mobile's networks, and CDMA access codes for Sprint phones are available too. If Straight Talk specifically doesn't do anything for you, it is but one of many many subsidiaries of TracFone Wireless. Chances are you can find one of its other subsidiaries that will give you a good deal.

Republic Wireless

Network: Sprint

Republic is probably the most interesting outlier in this conversation—it offers some cheap plans, but they're severely limited. Here's the deal.

The very cheapest plan costs only $5 a month, but relies on Wi-Fi for everything including talking and texting. This plan is best suited for people who spend essentially their entire day surrounded by Wi-Fi networks—maybe you're only at work, at home, or at a cafe 90 percent of the time, and you've always got reliable Wi-Fi. If that's the case, you've got a functioning smartphone for the cost of a sandwich (plus the cost of a smartphone).

Stepping up to the $10-per-month plan will let you use Sprint's cell network for calls and texts, but you'll still have to rely on Wi-Fi for data. For $25 a month you can get unlimited-with-an-asterisk 3G data speeds, and $40 a month will upgrade you to 4G data speeds. Those "unlimited" plans will begin throttling your speeds once you exceed 5GB of data usage in a month.

The nice thing about all these Republic plans is that you can switch between them up to twice a month. If you spend most of your time within reach of a Wi-Fi network but you're going on a business trip next week, you can hop up to the 3G or 4G plan for the amount of time you need to and then step back down to your $5 or $10 plan when you're done. It's a pretty good system that goes a long way toward making the Wi-Fi-reliant plans more livable.

The most restrictive thing about Republic is that you can't bring your own phone—you're restricted to their $299 Moto X or $149 Moto G because the phones have to be configured a specific way to work with their network. We like both of those phones a lot (and those prices are decent, compared to the locked-down price), but it's a very limited spectrum of choices. You may also wait longer for Android updates than you would for the same phones on bigger carriers. While the Android 4.4 update went out to most Moto X owners starting late last year, people on Republic just started getting it last month.

Republic isn't going to appeal to everybody, but for the people who can use it, it's a great deal. Just keep all of its limitations in mind before making the plunge.

Virgin Mobile

Network: Sprint

I use my smartphone as a phone only sporadically. I never come close to using my monthly allotment of voice time, and I've got a laughably huge heap of rollover minutes. Any time you pay for service you don't use, that's free money going straight into your carrier's pockets.

Virgin Mobile's "Beyond Talk" plans are a better balance for people who text and browse more often than they talk. The entry-level $35 plan gives you a smallish pool of 300 minutes to use, but unlimited texting and unlimited-with-an-asterisk 3G and 4G data speeds. You can still get decent rates if you talk more often—stepping up to the $45-per-month plan gets you 1,200 minutes, while $55 a month gets you unlimited everything. For all plans, you'll get 2.5GB of data at the maximum speed and throttled-to-2G speeds for the rest of the billing cycle. Streaming video will be limited to 3G speeds, which might impact quality.

Virgin's biggest downside is that you can't bring your own phone, and of the phones it does offer, the only ones in the price brackets of the Moto E and G are less-than-fantastic. As usual, you're mostly looking at Android phones that are either old or low-rent, and they're running rapidly aging versions of Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean. The deals are slightly better if you're looking at buying a new iPhone, since those cost about the same amount unlocked no matter where you look.


Network: Sprint

Ting is neat because of its à la carte pricing structure—if you text a bunch but don't talk or use much data, you'll be billed that way. Conversely, if your smartphone is mostly used as a phone, you'll be charged for the minutes you use but your low texting and data usage will still keep your bill low. You don't have to pay a flat rate per-month or configure a plan based on what you'll think you'll use, which is a pleasant change from most other providers, and configurable alerts will let you know when you're getting near any pre-determined usage thresholds. Tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot functionality is another nice perk that you can't take for granted from MVNOs.

Being limited to Sprint's network would be the worst thing about giving Ting a try, though the phone selection is actually surprisingly robust and it supports BYOD options like the Moto phones, the Nexus 5, and even some Sprint-compatible iPhones. Be careful about buying some phones from the Ting site, though. While the listed $265 price for an iPhone 5 sounds like an excellent deal, what you're actually buying is a used iPhone in "Good" or "Acceptable" condition from Glyde. This may not be a big deal to you—just be aware that the used phones in Ting's listed are mixed in among the new ones.

Anything else?

The providers that are directly owned by other larger companies (including but not limited to Cricket, GoSmart Mobile, iWireless, MetroPCS, and others) tend to offer deals that aren't quite as good as some of the others we've listed here. Either they offer relatively small data allotments for a similar amount of money, or they throttle speeds aggressively. That's not to say they're all bad, just that companies that are already owned by the big four cell carriers often won't do as much to undercut their parent companies.

BYO Wireless is a Verizon MVNO that came up in our research, and while both Verizon's network and its inexpensive and flexible plans might be appealing to people with low data requirements, it's going to limit your phone selection severely. It seems geared more toward customers with older phones they'd like to continue using, not people trying to get new phones up and running. Word on the street is that Verizon prepaid phones like the Moto G often won't activate on Verizon MVNOs, either.

These are just a few of the choices available to you if you want to get away from carriers and contracts. Wikipedia's list of MVNOs in the US is a good starting place if you've got specific carrier- or BYOD-related requirements—let your fellow readers know if you find good deals, or if you've got personal experience with any particular provide that you'd like to share.

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