Quick Facts
- Pay As You Go and Monthly Plans
- No Contracts, No Credit Checks
- Best Prepay Service by Customer Satisfaction
Why You’ll Love Them: If you’re a commitment-phobe, you found your home. They offer pay as you go and monthly plans that you can change and cancel at any time, which never come with a credit check. Choose the pay as you go if you’re looking for something total wild and off the cuff; monthly if you’re looking for consistency without contracts. The minute bundles (on prepay) are pretty good; the more you buy the less you pay, ranging from 10 cents per minute to 5 cents per minute. You can add messaging, five bucks for 200 messages up to twenty bucks for all you can text in a month.
Why You Won’t: They’ve got crossover with Sprint for free roaming, but they don’t have great service. Their coverage map is sparse at best. Their international calling rates start at $.15, which isn’t competitive. There is no international roaming beyond Canada, Mexico, and some islands. For email, it’s 10 cents to send or receive a message. All that adds up very quickly, and these rates apply to both monthly and prepay plans. In addition to which, though they pride themselves on advertising as a very hip and young company, they’ve got very lame and limited phones. Don’t expect a touch screen here anytime soon. Web browsing is cheap but limited–$1 for 24hrs of access, but only 500KB of data. $5 buys you a monthly pass for 5MB worth of data, which, honestly, isn’t much. If you’re a Facebook addict, look elsewhere for a plan.
This review is pretty accurate. But it doesn’t mention one bad thing about the email: Virgin Mobile charges you for email that you don’t even read, and even for spam! But there internet access plans have changed, by which I mean they have added more internet options in the past few months.
They also have the annoying habit of text-messaging users in the middle of the night who have chosen to automatically pay their monthly minimum charge to inform them of this fact. So if you don’t turn off your phone on the 1st of the month you’ll be awakened by a loud alert sound.
I’ve complained repeatedly and the response is “Oh, we’re sorry” but nothing changes.