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I used to loudly support Google Fi when I switched to them from Verizon. My coverage wasn’t as good, but my bill was a small fraction of what it had been, and I’m usually on wifi so the pay for what you use model was great for me. I also really enjoyed taking it with me to Mexico on vacation. Sweet deal since my average data use was like 1GB/month.

Then like a year ago, I did some digging and found that I could have a very similar experience with Mint, except unlimited data for about the same price. Plus the price was locked in because you pay for it up front. It took maybe an hour to swap our phones over, and we kept our phone numbers. There was a little bit of hassle getting voicemail to work properly, but that got figured out.

My favorite thing about these types of services are that you can buy a pretty cheap, unlocked phone, use eSIM, and you’re not locked into your service provider. I am a fan of the Pixel a series of phones since they’ve got plenty good capability at half the price of flagship phones, but with good support. Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why I personally should go to the trouble since I don’t see enough of a benefit for my use case. But that’s neither here nor there. I just like unlocked phones, and my 8a and my wife’s 6a were cheap and they were easy to transition to another provider; look into unlocked phones the next time you’re shopping for one so you can have that kind of freedom.

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MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
US Mobile is a good option too, even cheaper than Mint IIRC and you can switch yourself between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile networks.

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- TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  US Mobile is the best deal I’ve been able to find with their yearly unlimited plans. I pay once around Black Friday for what I paid for 2 months of service on Verizon
  
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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah, we used Google Fi for a bit, but then I did the math and found a better offer. I use very little data so I use Tello ($8/month), and my SO uses a lot more so they have Mint (15GB plan). All in all, it’s cheaper than Fi.

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- Redfugee@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I also don’t use much data and found Keepgo to work well. It has data plans that don’t expire, you just buy the data and use it until it’s gone. 10GB ($42) usually lasts me the whole year.
  
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Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Others love the option to dump Android for Graphene OS but I really haven’t seen a compelling argument for why

I mean if you don’t care for privacy or security then you won’t.

I personally should go to the trouble

The only trouble is plugging in your phone and clicking a few buttons on the website.

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- MrVilliam@lemm.ee ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  privacy and security
  
  I’m not really sure how much my OS affects that though. If I remove that avenue, cool, but I’m still signed in on my browser and YouTube and various other apps, so to really protect my privacy and security, wouldn’t I need a whole slew of other changes to actually be effective? Credit bureaus, which I never even asked to have involved, can’t even keep a lid on my shit. How secure and private can I really expect to feel just from changing my phone OS, and is that warm fuzzy really good enough to justify moving from something that is working exactly as I want and expect to something that is, in a word, uncertain?
  
  Not trying to attack you or anybody with these questions, just kinda frustrated that any time I’ve tried to look into it, all I find is a vague statement about privacy without any real elaboration, or worse, a bunch of speculation that the guy running it is unstable or something. Idk, it just feels a little like the wave of people screaming the praises of crypto.
  
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- Deconceptualist@lemm.ee ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s a little more than that. I had to manually install speech-to-text and fiddle with language downloads and mic permissions to get that to work. And I had to disable exploit protection on my banking app so it would launch. And… well that’s about it. The rest was basically identical to setting up stock Android.
  
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