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Everything is expensive these days, and cell phone bills are no exception. Luckily for us, there’s been a smidge of competition between the big three carriers lately, and as a result, T-Mobile is beginning to offer a few incentives for customers to stick around.
According to internal sources, starting today, February 5th, T-Mobile will begin offering two new plan types for existing customers. The catch? The main one is only for certain “segmented” accounts, which means there’s no telling if you’re eligible without asking. Oh, and the plans themselves require some (or many) sacrifices.
Along with the Better Value plan launched last month, T-Mobile is launching two new plans for existing customers. There are various prerequisites to these new plans, and it’s currently unclear if customers will be proactively offered these plans or not.
Experience More with Appreciation Savings
First, there’s a new version of the Experience More plan that’s called “Experience More w/Appreciation Savings”. This is identical to the regular Experience More plan, but with reduced phone trade-in credit, and a reduced cost for the first two lines on the plan.
A single line is $75, and two lines is $120, with lines 3-8 being an additional $30/mo and lines 9-12 an additional $40/mo. Those additional lines match the regular Experience More plan exactly, so the discount comes in on those first two lines.
Trade-in credits are what changes here, with the credit values lining up with the segmented versions of the base plan (55+, First Responder, etc). Unlike Better Value, though, this plan is eligible for free line offers. Presumably, this means that if an existing customer moves to this plan and has existing free lines, those will migrate as well.
This new plan variant, in our opinion, seems to only makes sense for customers that make little use of trade-in deals. For a typical 4-line plan, you’re saving $20/mo on service. Let’s say you want to do the iPhone trade-in promo that’s currently available at T-Mobile. On Experience More you can get up to $830 off, but with this new Experience More w/Appreciation Savings plan, you only get $630 off. That’s an extra $8.33 per month.
One or two phone trade-in deals like this makes sense, but any more than that and you end up paying more than if you had chosen the non-discounted plan.
Oh, and this is a targeted rate plan, so only customers marked as eligible using an unknown criteria will be eligible. It also requires at least a 2+ year tenure with T-Mobile.
Update: This plan is now available and customers that are segmented will see the plan available under “change plan” in the T-Life app, as seen below.
Note you may need to tap “see more” in the plans list to see it.
Loyalty Plan
The second new plan is simply called the Loyalty plan, and comes with quite a number of sacrifices. This plan actually isn’t that new, as it’s been around for a while as a retention offer. Regardless, it’s included in the chart, so here are the details.
One line will cost you $65/mo, and two lines $120/mo. The savings comes from additional lines, with lines 3-8 adding only $12 each per month to the bill. That makes a 4-line plan come out to $144, which is pretty good.
The catch here is everything else on the plan. Consider this a new version of the Essentials plan but for existing customers.
There’s no unlimited high-speed data (only 50GB), there’s no high-speed hotspot data (only unlimited 3G speed), and there’s no high-speed Canada/Mexico data. You also lose out on your free subscriptions like Netflix, Apple TV, etc.
As for trade-in values for device promos, it is simply labled as “up to $830 off targeted promos”. This presumably means you’ll still have access to full-value trade-ins, but only on offers T-Mobile allows you to take advantage of.
Oh, and that 5-year price guarantee? Doesn’t exist for the Loyalty plan. Existing device promos at the time of migration are allowed to stay, though, so that’s nice.
So who is this plan for? Basically anyone that really wants to cut back on their costs on their large family plan, but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of porting to a competitor. This plan feels like a last ditch offer that T-Mobile will provide to large accounts that are thinking about leaving for another carrier. Unlike Experience More w/Appreciation Savings, though, pretty much anyone can snag this plan if you manage to reach the retention department.
Is it enough?
The competition is heating up, and T-Mobile is taking notice. Are these new plans going to stop the flow of customers leaving? It’s hard to say.
Personally, these two new plans don’t seem like that great of an incentive for most customers. Add to that the fact that seemingly only targeted accounts will be eligible to even sign up for one of them (the Experience More w/Savings plan), and the whole thing seems a little bit misguided in our opinion.
Customers want savings, though, and this is T-Mobile’s way of compromising on price while also maintaining a profit margin by removing other benefits (either in the form of trade-in values or entire plan benefits).
Let us know, would you switch to either the new Experience More w/Appreciation Savings or Loyalty plans? Are the trade-offs worth it?
