We all like saving money. Prices for everyday items and expenses are through the roof, and saving every penny you can matters.
Many customers on T-Mobile, especially older grandfathered plans from the golden era of Uncarrier, have fixed monthly costs thanks to the T-Mobile promise of never raising rates. Known originally as “Uncontract Promise” and later “Price Lock”, the benefit promised that T-Mobile would never raise your rates unless you actively made changes to your plan yourself.
Unfortunately, businesses like money, and as a result T-Mobile has already once before gone back on the Price Lock back in May of last year. The result was an up to $5 per line increase in customer bills, and was so infuriating it led to class action lawsuits.
It looks like they’re not done yet, either, because in a recent all-hands call internally at T-Mobile, CEO Mike Sievert suggested price increases for legacy customers will likely happen again soon.
By the way, we’re basing everything below on a single quote, along with past behavior from T-Mobile, so take everything you read with a grain of salt. We could always be wrong!
More Price Increases For Legacy Plans Are Coming
On Tuesday, T-Mobile held an all-hands call that every employee was able to view. During the call, the T-Mobile CEO shared the following statement.
“You’re going to be hearing about us, for example, getting back to some of the adjustments of legacy pricing that we began last year.”
Mike Sievert, CEO T-Mobile
The “adjustments” last year are, of course, the ones that happened in late May of 2024, where customers as far back as Simple Choice and as recent as Magenta were hit with per-line price increases ranging from $2 to $5.
Interestingly, not all customers on affected plans faced a price increase. It wasn’t fully clear (and still isn’t) what conditions were specifically required to avoid the increases, but varying versions of Uncontract Promise and Price Lock were suspected.
What Is “Uncontract” and “Price Lock”?
So, what does “Uncontract” and “Price Lock” mean, exactly? Well that’s complicated.
The original Uncontract Promise was a commitment that T-Mobile would never raise rates on Simple Choice customers, and would also not raise rates on unlimited plans for 2 years. The Uncontract later applied to ONE customers as well, and excluded the 2 year limit.
“The Un-contract is our promise to individuals, families and businesses of all sizes, that − while your price may go down − it won’t go up.”
John Legere in 2015
In 2022 the company rebranded Uncontract into “Price Lock”. It carried essentially the same promise as Uncontract. Then last year they changed Price Lock again, this time no longer promising not to raise rates, but that if they did, they’d cover your last month’s bill if you left.
What Happens Next?
So who could be affected by the rumored price increases? There are a few possibilities.
First, new price increases could hit the same customers it did last year. We’re not sure how the impacted customers were chosen last time, but if there’s some legal magic involved in deciding exactly who could have their plan prices increased without the company being in trouble, then the customers that were hit last time are likely in the crosshairs again.
Scenario two is that customers who weren’t impacted in the last round of increases would be this time. This would make sense if T-Mobile had no rhyme or reason to the impacted accounts last time, and simply divided them in half so to speak. That would allow them to save the ones that weren’t impacted last time so they could increase their plans this time around.
Finally, none of this could follow any logic at all, and T-Mobile could just blanket impact everyone not on a modern Go5G plan.
Honestly, no one knows.
When Will The Increases Hit?
So far the only real hint of price increases on legacy plans is the comment from CEO Mike Sievert. Our typical sources haven’t seen anything planned internally about a future increase either.
If we had to guess, though, we’d expect the increases to hit within the next 3 months. When there’s smoke at T-Mobile, the fire usually shows itself relatively quickly soon after.
Of course, we’ll keep our ear to the ground and let you know as soon as we catch wind of the increases coming. There are plenty of alternatives nowadays for cellular service that rivals postpaid quality, even T-Mobile’s own prepaid brand is an option, as well as companies offering entirely free service, so T-Mobile might find it a hard sell if they start bumping people’s plan costs.
Will you be leaving T-Mobile if you’re hit with a price increase?
