prepaid cell phone plans

[topaz]

For some time, keyne and I have wanted to find her an inexpensive cell phone plan so that she could carry around a cell for emergencies. A prepaid by-the-minute plan seemed like the best way -- she'd only pay for the minutes she uses and wouldn't pay a lot of overhead for minutes she doesn't need. So I bought a $30 Verizon FreeUP card for her and activated it on our phone last week.

It wasn't until I got the receipt that I learned this plan gives her "unlimited nighttime and weekend minutes, and unlimited calls to other Verizon Wireless customers" and costs $0.99 a day just to stay on it. So even if she doesn't make any calls she's still spending $30/mo just for the privilege to do so.

This is not what we were looking for. Do all the prepaid plans work this way? Can anyone suggest a plan that does sound like what we were looking for? Or some other clever way to a cheap cell phone plan (preferably on Verizon)?

Comments

tracfone

[moontoad.livejournal.com]

I got my parents tracfone. They have a deal where you can carry over your existing minutes for I think 10 bucks a month. And you don't have to sign up for any kind of plan. My parents use it. Initially they thought they had to keep on adding minutes every 3 months, but I think they put on 100 minutes and then they found out they can just carry those minutes over. They've been carrying those minutes over for about 8 months? now. This might be ideal, since you have the offer of a free tracfone, and knowing that they will only charge you 10 bucks a month after you've put minutes on it to get it started might be worth it. And my parents don't have any sort of plan that they signed up for. I don't think they can make long distance calls, but you probably won't be doing that if you're just using it for an emergency. They have no problem using the area codes that are different but local (there are a bunch of area codes here that used to be all one, and they got divvied up as the population grew).