After years of taunting its competitors for playing pricing games, T-Mobile is now playing one of its own: a rate hike of $2 or $5 a month on a range of older plans.The carrier is quietly informing customers about the rate hikes via individual text messages.“For the first time in nearly a decade, we’re making a change to the price of some of our monthly service plans,” one sent to a PCMag staffer Wednesday reads in part. “Starting on 06/05/24, your rate plan(s) will increase by $5 per line per month.”
(Credit: PCMag)
The text links to a page on T-Mobile’s site that offers no more specifics on which plans are getting this rate hike but blames the move on “rising costs and inflation” and says that after this increase, T-Mobile customers will be “saving an average of approximately 20% vs AT&T and Verizon for comparable services and streaming.”Other customers have received texts informing them of a $2 rate increase.A T-Mobile spokesperson confirmed the rate hikes but declined to name the affected plans, leaving text recipients to compare notes and connect the dots.A thread on Reddit’s T-Mobile forum and a post on The Mobile Report say these rate hikes cover the Simple Choice plan, introduced in 2013 the T-Mobile One plan that debuted in 2016, as well as the Magenta plan from 2019 and 2021’s Magenta Max.Some of T-Mobile’s business plans are also receiving these rate hikes, as I found out in a text informing me of a $5 increase on my $70 Business Unlimited Advanced plan, one of a set of small-business offerings T-Mobile introduced in May 2021.Some customers are also reporting $2 hikes for their smartwatch add-on plans. T-Mobile confirmed that T-Mobile’s “Price Lock” guarantee still applies on plans that offere it, which the carrier’s FAQ says covers Magenta and newer plans. That policy allows subscribers to leave the carrier and have T-Mobile pay their last monthly bill.But when T-Mobile updated its One plan in early 2017 to include all taxes and fees in its advertised rate, it pledged that “T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile ONE plan.” That statement now appears to be inoperative.At the same time, T-Mobile appears to be making Magenta and Magenta Max less operative for new customers. While its site listed them as available for an online signup a month ago, it no longer lists them alongside the newer Go5G series of plans and instead says they’re only available for new subscribers over the phone or in a chat session. And the company’s “Compare our plans” page no longer lists Magenta or Magenta Max in its drop-down menu.T-Mobile confirmed it stopped selling Magenta and Magenta Max plans on its site earlier this month but did not say why.
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For online-only shoppers, this raises the cost of a T-Mobile plan with unlimited on-phone data and a usable mobile hotspot function from $70 a month on one line (Magenta’s rate for 5GB of hotspot) to $75, the cheapest Go5G rate available (covering 15GB of hotspot). T-Mobile advertises unlimited hotspots on the cheaper Essentials plan at “3G speeds,” but its fine print documents a painfully slow limit of 600Kbps on that plan. All of these rates assume automatic payments, and T-Mobile now requires making those payments from a bank account or a debit card, not the credit cards it formerly accepted (and which posed less of a risk to subscribers’ finances in the event of a carrier data breach).At Verizon, the cheapest single-line unlimited plan with full-speed mobile hotspot runs $80 a month, although that covers 30GB of mobile hotspot data. At AT&T, the entry-level $65.99 Unlimited Starter SL plan includes 5GB of hotspot data.Prepaid services—including T-Mobile’s own Metro by T-Mobile and Mint Mobile—can substantially beat those costs for plans with hotspot included but don’t offer perks like free low-speed international roaming that T-Mobile offers in most of the world. T-Mobile subscribers have been worrying about this possibility for several months. Back in October, the carrier seemed on the verge of moving customers on older plans to newer ones, with an increase in price. Now T-Mobile seems to have pivoted to a different way to alter the deal, and customers can only pray they don’t alter it any further.
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