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More information about TracFone pricing

Wed, 03/17/2010 - 23:07 — Scott

Following is some detailed information about TracFone pricing. For a "this-is-how-to-use-the-information" page see Simple cell phones at a low cost.

How do TracFone plans work?

TracFone offers prepaid cell phones, which means you pay in advance for the minutes you use by buying "units" (same as minutes). You also buy "days" to extend the time that the phone remains active.

When you add minutes/days you choose among the following:

  1. Minutes/Days packages (for example, "60m90d" in the chart is the 60 Minutes & 90 Days package),
  2. Minutes Bundles Deals,
  3. Promo Codes that give you "bonus" minutes, and
  4. Supersizing options to add 365 more days or 30 or 60 more minutes (for example, "+360d" in the "60m90d+365d" plan indicates checking the "supersize" option to add 365 days)

How do I find the lowest cost plans?

It was pretty complicated until I analyzed the pricing model. What's really important is the cost per month, which can be calculated based on the average number of minutes that you will use each month.

It ends up that there are more than 100 combinations of these items. But for a given average number of minutes there is a least cost combination of minutes/days/promo/supersizing. The first chart to the right shows the quick and easy version of this information.

The second chart is more complete (but harder to read). This shows the cost outside the range where the plan is cheapest. While this chart shows the cheaper plans it is still just a small subset of all the possible combinations.

Assumptions

I've made a number of assumptions in creating these charts. Changes to these assumptions wouldn't significantly affect which plans are cheapest.

  1. Your phone came with (or you bought) the Double Minutes for Life feature.
  2. Taxes of 9% are included in the costs.
  3. TracFone Promo Codes change pretty often. The charts assume you can find Promo Codes that have 20 bonus minutes for 60 minute plans, 30 bonus minutes for 120 minute plans, 50 bonus minutes for 200 minute plans, and 250 bonus minutes for 400 and larger plans.