T-Mobile has sent a chill through the long-time customer base today by sending out messaging informing customers that they’ll be forced onto a new plan in a few weeks.
This immediately brings back memories of the attempted forced migration from back in 2023, which T-Mobile later cancelled due to backlash.
Luckily, there appears to be no reason to panic this time around. Lots of questions remain, but for the most part, things might end up ok. Here’s what we know.
Impacted Plans
According to users on Reddit and confirmed via employee contacts, the Magenta Plus and MAX plan, and all it’s variants, are being migrated to equivalent Go5G Plus plans. In addition, the ONE Plus plan and the Sprint Max plans are also being migrated to Go5G Plus.
For all of these plans, customers are being migrated to the equivalent Go5G plan. That means Magenta Plus/MAX goes to Go5G Plus and segmented plans like 55+, First Responder, etc. are moved to the identical version on Go5G Plus.
As for the ONE plan, only the paid Plus plan is impacted, not the base ONE plan with Plus promo. The key question for ONE customers is the kickback discount. Kickback isn’t available on Go5G, so it’s currently unclear if the ONE Plus customers with kickback are being migrated.
A very interesting point some have made is that it seems only customers who have received the price increase over the last few years are impacted. For the select customers that got the “good” price lock, which means they never received a price increase, it seems those plans won’t be moved.
Pricing
T-Mobile is claiming that anyone being migrated to the newer plans will not see a price increase.
The only thing we’re unclear of, for now, is the aforementioned ONE plans with kickback. We’ve reached out to T-Mobile for clarification on that and more.
As for everyone else, T-Mobile says the pricing will stay exactly the same. Your discounts, streaming perks, and more are all maintained, but you get the benefits of the newer plan. Essentially, this change simply amounts to a name change to simplify things.
Not too shabby, if true.
Benefits
Customers who are being moved to Go5G Plus are getting a few benefits over their previous Magenta (and ONE) plans.
The first benefit is better trade-in values. When buying a new phone on installment with T-Mobile, the value you receive from your trade-in device can vary with your plan. The Go5G plans get slightly better values on trade-ins compared to the legacy Magenta plans.
Then there’s the hotspot data. The Magenta Plus plan included just 20GB of high-speed hotspot data, with the high-end Magenta MAX plan including 40GB. The new Go5G Plus equivalent gives you 50GB of high-speed hotspot data, so it’s a decent improvement.
Finally, there’s the high-speed data available in Canada and Mexico. The Go5G Plus plan includes 15GB of high-speed data in those countries, which is a 10GB increase over the Magenta Plus/MAX plan.
For more information and an FAQ, you can visit T-Mobile’s dedicated page about the migration.
What comes next?
Overall, this isn’t too big of a deal. After the price increases recently, the price of the Magenta Plus/MAX and Go5G Plus plans are identical, so there’s not much reason to stick with the Magenta plans anyway.
There is, however, T-Mobile’s past promises that they’re breaking here. T-Mobile famously once said that “only you can change your plan”. While the new plans being used here are effectively the same price, it’s still technically violating that promise, and that’s likely to irritate some customers. Notably, there is apparently no way to opt out of this migration, unlike the last time.
The next question, then, is what’s next for T-Mobile? Will they make this change for other customers too, like customers on the base ONE and Magenta plans, or even Simple Choice plans? Only time will tell.
The migration to Go5G Plus for these customers is set to take place on August 13th.
This story is breaking and still fluid. We’ve reached out to T-Mobile for clarification on some things and will update this post if we learn more.
