If Your Cell Phone Plan is More than $20/Month, Read This Now!

All you need is an unlocked phone

Al Williams
7 min readJun 4, 2023
Photo by wilfried kanoh on Unsplash

I knew someone once who had an older iPhone. It was “free” she told me. Well, it came with an $80/month cell phone plan she’d had going for way past the contract date. So she’d paid somewhere around $5,000 for that iPhone. I had them unlock the phone and put her on a much less expensive plan. How much less? About $20/months. Sure, $20 vs $80 doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up. What could you do with an extra $720 a year?

There are two carriers I’ve used to pull this off. Both of them are resellers of the “big networks” so you get great coverage and speeds. You do need an unlocked phone and — full disclosure — you’ll save the most money if you buy a year’s service up front. But then again, why not? These are major companies and it isn’t like you are going to quit having a cell phone.

The Two Carriers

The two carriers I’ve used are RedPocket and Mint. RedPocket uses several different carriers (you can pick when you sign up) and I always used the AT&T network. They do have eSim support and WiFi calling, although I could never get both to work at the same time so I stuck with a physical Sim card. Their customer support is nice, but if you have a tough issue like that, good luck.

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Al Williams

Engineer. Author. Team Leader. Lots of other things. I blog about hardware hacking for Hackaday (www.hackaday.com), but talk about other topics here.