Pre-Paid iPhone Gets Official at Cricket: $55 Per Month Unlimited Pay-Go Plan
Cricket Wireless will become the first carrier in the USA to officially bring the iPhone to the pre-paid plan market. Anyone can already unofficially use an iPhone on a pay-go plan through AT&T, but the Cricket plan is likely a better deal.
Customers will have the choice of the following two iPhone options without a contract, available in either black or white:
- iPhone 4S 16GB – $499
- iPhone 4 8GB – $399
Interestingly, the contract-free prices offered through Cricket are slightly cheaper than the no-contract 4S pricing from Apple, suggesting the devices will be locked to Crickets network to fund the minor subsidization.
The pre-paid plan itself is just $55 a month for unlimited SMS, phone calls, and data, though there’s an artificial transfer cap of 2.3GB per month after which data becomes throttled. That rate is nearly half the cost of an average monthly iPhone plan on the competing cellular networks of Verizon and AT&T, and Cricket estimates the average customer will save about $1000 over the course of two years.
For those interested, the device will be made available on June 22 with pre-orders beginning online on June 15. Be sure to check the Cricket coverage map to see if your area has service.
As of today, when I called Cricket for confirmation, they will only support an iPhone for pay as you go if you buy it from them, so my paid-for unlocked iPhone cannot (or more like they decided will not) work on Cricket. For what it’s worth, Virgin Mobile said the same thing. T-Mobile here I come.
France, FreeMobile, same offer with 3 GB transfer cap before throttling = 20 euros (16 euros for Free broadband customers) and no contract.
More competition is good. Lets hope tmobile comes next.
The Cricket coverage map site took about 5 minutes load, then didn’t accept my Zip code. There was no error message that this was a problem. It just redrew the page and asked for my zip again. This doesn’t boad well for the company if they can’t hire programmers or admins that can plan for load or even code a site right. I’ve never seen them in my area, so I’m guessing they’re not in SF.
I hope this pushes other providers to stop thinking of us as revenue streams, but I doubt it.
I noticed this recently as well, seems they are overloaded at the moment.
Do you have cookies enabled? I had no problems.
Matt,
Your comment “Anyone can already unofficially use an iPhone on a pay-go plan through AT&T” is not entirely correct.
As of April 2012 AT&T blocks data access in the PAYG smart-phones unless the user subscribes to a monthly plan, being $30 ($25 voice + $5 data) the least expensive one.
Fortunately I don’t live in USA.
When I buy a pre-pay iPhone I can top-up by 10 euro per year! Who needs a “plan” when you have wifi everywhere!
Would be great if they had 4G in my area. Hopefully this will create some downward price pressure on the industry.