Everything is getting more expensive these days. From your groceries to your online subscriptions and, of course, your cell phone plan. Everyone wants to take more money from your wallet, and price hikes are impossible to avoid these days unless you’re willing to make significant compromises.
T-Mobile has kept you protected from most price hikes thanks to something called Price Lock. The promise was essentially that the company will never raise rates for existing customers unless they made changes to their plan.
With the new version of Price Lock, however, it appears that T-Mobile is not as committed to keeping prices actually “locked” as it used to be for new users. Worst of all, it’s set to kick in very, very soon.
Starting January 18th, T-Mobile is debuting a new version of Price Lock, which was technically first introduced in 2022, for most new activations and service changes. The new version of Price Lock only promises that, as long as your account is in good standing, T-Mobile will commit to paying your final month’s bill if it happens to make a price increase that’s bad enough to make you leave. If you notify the company within 60 days after a price increase, it will take care of your final month’s recurring service charges.
Previously, the way this worked was that, if T-Mobile were to raise the price of a plan, it wouldn’t be increased for you for as long as you stuck to that plan.
As with many things T-Mobile has done lately, the changes are quite difficult to understand. Essentially, T-Mobile is going from “We promise not to raise your prices, but if we do, we’ll pay your final bill” to “We might raise your prices, but if we do, we’ll pay your final bill”. It’s a small change, but it’s glaringly obvious what the reason for it is.
A key point to make as well is that before “Price Lock”, T-Mobile customers were given what was called “The Un-Contract Guarantee“. This was considered the gold standard version of “Price Lock”, even though it did not share the same name. This original guarantee was essentially the same as Price Lock 1.0, and promised not to ever raise prices on existing plans and accounts. You can read more on what the differences between the original guarantee was and Price Lock here on our coverage from 2022.
If you stick with your current configuration, these changes to Price Lock won’t affect you — T-Mobile will honor its previous guarantees. Importantly, there is likely no need to change your plan before the 18th to lock in Price Lock. Unless your plan is older than around 2015, you are already good to go.
For those who sign up to new lines on or after January 18th, those lines will apparently be covered by this new Price Lock. For those who change their current eligible plan to another eligible plan, the new version of Price Lock will take over for the whole account. Likewise, if you migrate to a plan that’s not covered by Price Lock at all, you’ll lose the old guarantee and you won’t get the new one either.
If you were thinking of opening an account or adding lines, you might want to make those changes on the 17th (today at time of publishing) before the change takes effect — if you want to keep the current version of this guarantee, that is.
