Cheap cell phone plan for three months in US

October 2, 2009 5:55 PM

Looking for a cheap pay-as-you-go or pre-paid plan, to use until the end of December. I have a Motrola Razr (v3r, or something like it, as I recall), which I used to use with T-Mobile, although I'm not opposed to buying a cheap phone for the interim (although it'd have to very cheap). What are my options?

I might go through the entire week without making a call, or if I'm out, maybe three calls max. I'm not interested in texting.

posted by Busoni to technology (7 comments total)

TracFone. Can get them as cheap as ten bucks, and a couple of inexpensive airtime cards.
posted by tilde at 6:00 PM on October 2, 2009

Depends on how you define "cheap." Since your hardware is already configured for T-Mobile, you might look into T-Mobile Prepaid plans. Looks like you can either 1) "Pay by the day" for ~30 bucks a month plus various per-minute fees, or 2) pay by the minute for about 12-30 cents/min depending on how many you buy.

Dunno if that's as cheap as you were looking for, but it's probably the easiest thing by far.
posted by rkent at 6:03 PM on October 2, 2009

MrR and DaughterR and I all have $15-20 Virgin Mobile pay as you go phones. We buy them at Target. $5/month gives us $.10/min calls. The minutes do expire eventually (if there's no activity on the account), but for $30-40 total you can have a cell phone that works through the end of December. I think you can also buy prepaid cards at Target, but as we've been buying phones to add to existing accounts (as 4-5 yo phones die or need upgrading) that's not something I've really been paying attention to.
posted by jlkr at 6:10 PM on October 2, 2009

You might want to consider who you'll be calling and what plan(s) they have. If a bunch of your calls will be made to people on, say, AT&T (although I think most of the prepaid plans do this now), they have a $1 a day plan that includes unlimited 'free' mobile-to-mobile calls to other AT&T wireless customers and then other calls are billed at $.10 in addition to the $1/day activiation fee.
posted by nnk at 6:21 PM on October 2, 2009

My T-mobile plan's 10 cents a minute, but the prices get far more expensive as buy in smaller quantities. At the cheap end, you could be paying 33 cents a minute! The phone itself is a 20 dollar subsidized and locked Nokia. It looks like all tmobile plans expire in 90 days unless you buy big, then it jumps to a year.
posted by pwnguin at 7:20 PM on October 2, 2009

Doe T-Mobile's RAZR let's you swap in a new SIM? You can buy t-mobile prepaid SIMs for $5 on eBay.
posted by faster than a speeding bulette at 7:42 PM on October 2, 2009

T-mobile has a no-contract option called flex pay. Its like a regular cellphone plan with no obligations and months are to be prepaid. Works great for me.
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 9:04 PM on October 2, 2009