I'm perplexed. I can see hating them for other reasons, but expensive would not be the word I associate with Google Fi. I pay $22 including taxes/fees per month, but it's probably not a good carrier for people who watch a lot of video on their phones.

* they're also probably one of the only honest carriers in terms of taxes/fees. My previous carrier had a much higher tax % which I thought was normal, but now I realize it was just a markup disguised as a tax, so they could continue to offer their "$40/month for everything" price point while actually charging $50/month.

How are you managing such low data use? I easily burned through 1gb in my first week (partly due to my podcast app downloading 400mb -> me changing the settings -> it downloading 200mb the next day -> me finding the right setting to block it from using mobile data).

I've been keeping mobile data turned off unless I explicitly need to use it. I turned it on last night to google something quickly, and it managed to use 60mb.

Can't wait to go back to mintsim after I satisfy the 4 month requirement from their cyber Monday deal.

I'm equally astonished how people can use so much data :)

Like one of the other posters said, I don't stream on phone, and use the wifi at home and at work. I'd love to see the breakdown of data usage (reported by the phones) for heavy users. I wonder if it's like 4GB netflix, 200MB chrome, 100MB Tinder, 20MB Uber, 5MB email.

>How are you managing such low data use?

I have a 5GB plan and rarely use half of it in a month, even though I spend plenty of time using various mobile apps.

It's probably pretty simple: I don't do any streaming: music, podcasts, internet radio, etc.

If you really "need" to stream YouTube videos away from a WiFi hotspot, then you should just pay $150/month and stop complaining.

I used ~20mb last month. heremaps with offline - faster, less battery. carbonOS rom on my pixel w/ no trace of google anything. read news type sites only on the toilet or in bathtub, so that's on wifi. when I'm out and on the subway or whatever, I'm playing a korean learning game on my phone. don't have any social network stuff. That 20mb was mostly email headers, set to only fully download on wifi and I only opened a couple of those emails.

googling something does not take 60mb. as soon as you turned on data, a whole bunch of google's android crap and other apps started phoning home and sending the data they've been collecting on your phone at the expense of your battery life.

I'm not the parent commenter, but I usually use around 500 MB a month. Mostly, this means sticking to Hacker News+quick web searches (which should not take 60 MB!). Mail, weather, and some other built-in apps have background refresh enabled; everything else has cellular data disabled.

agreed, it is so much cheaper than verizon for multiple phones on a plan. we don't use a lot of data, but its very predictable and cheap pricing if we are traveling and are using it. I've not had to deal with support often, so my experience has been positive.

My single gripe about Project/Google Fi is that sometimes I'm forced to use a 3rd party app (FiSwitch) for when it doesn't automatically switch to the best carrier for that area, but even with that the cheaper price is enough for me to stay. I still hope they improve the carrier detection issue though.

If you use large amounts of mobile data, their plans very quickly become obnoxious (throttled after 15GB) and expensive ($80 plus taxes/fees).

Compare that with T-Mobile, who offers $70 a month (including taxes/fees) with throttling at 50GB and 20GB of hotspot data for $15/mo more, or even AT&T or Verizon, and it's more expensive for less service.

I'm not sure how other people use so much data (besides video). I use whatever I want, and rarely go above 500MB ($5). I made sure to do the offline Google Maps (which I want anyways), and avoid streaming video on phone.

I use offline Google maps (I have ~10 areas since I travel frequently) but still use 600 MB/month of data from that app alone, I'm assuming traffic data.

I'm not sure this is the use case for the majority of Fi users, if they are using a lot of data its going to be cheaper from one of the source carriers than Fi, there is no way Fi could be cheaper than T-Mobile or Sprint who are the Google Fi carriers for heavy data use like this.

Most of the time my phone is on wifi and only using data during travel why pay for anything Im not expecting to use. If I'm off wifi enough where I'm doing a lot of data I'm not using Fi.

> there is no way Fi could be cheaper than T-Mobile or Sprint who are the Google Fi carriers

Look at it as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination. A carrier can charge a lot to their locked-in customers, and sell spare capacity at lower markups to people who have competing alternatives, as long as all not everyone abandons them and moves to Fi.

Part of the appeal of Google Fi for me is the unlimited free international roaming. Do you know if there's any competition in that area?

For US customers, TMO is the next closest (and is the carrier partner Fi uses for international roaming anyway). The catch is that TMO's ONE service plan throttles 'free' international usage to 2G speeds. Fi on the other hand does not.

That "catch" is such a big difference in practice that it makes TMO a totally different (worse) thing.

And no other carrier offers up to 9 additional data only SIMs on the same plan without additional charges.

This is by far the thing I miss most about Fi, and I'm shocked that no other carrier so far has replicated the feature.

It’s because people will figure out that they don’t need voice services st all...

That's not a problem if you follow the Fi billing model: a base payment for voice and SMS/MMS service is always required to keep the account active. Data is billed separately.

The thing is that I’m sure there are plenty of families on Fi who don’t have phone numbers for anyone but the primary account holder and rely on voip.

Because they charge by the byte, rather that the sim card. I find it hard to believe that is a generally useful feature unless you happen to have a network of IoT devices with 100MB of data usage a month.

Whatever you do, don't give one of those sim cards to my kids, which somehow manage to burn multiple GB a month each with the occasional music/youtube video in the car/whatever when they are away from the home/school/etc wifi.

Same here. I am actually an AT&T customer and the $10/day for international roaming is nice as a backup but for the most part I just use my wife's Fi data SIM and pay a lot less.

I traveled to India in 2017 and 2018. I had problems getting HSPA+ most of the time. Had no problems with local carriers.

In Mumbai right now. Full LTE. I did a speed test today for fun and got 25mbps down and 5 up.

Last night on the way to some mall we took a route though some sort of jungle dairy farm. Both of the locals had no signal when about half way through traffic stopped ( except for the masses of motor bikes, they just keep comming ). I was the only one able to pull it Google maps and check how far up thr road the traffic was.

Maybe Mumbai is set up better for Fi? What parts were you in ?

Also. The main post here should be about Google payments, not Fi.

I agree. Personally, I wouldn't use Mint (I just looked them up and they use the T-Mobile network--no thanks! I like having reliable service outside of the middle of metro areas.), but I use "Total Wireless" which is a Verizon MVNO, and it costs me $34/month for 5GB and unlimited text and talk, and uses the Verizon network. But $15/mo. for 3GB if you don't mind T-Mo's spotty signal quality is a really good deal.

Are there any downsides to Mint? I thought I was getting a pretty good deal with t-mobile, but damn, $15 a month is pretty tempting.

Be aware that $15/mo is promotional pricing. It's more like $23 or so a month after the first 3 months. I use Mint and like it.

I used Mint on and off. The service itself is solid, and the international rates were among the best around. I only left because my neighborhood has poor TMo coverage.

I'll second that Mint is solid. They're a no-nonsense TMO-based MVNO. If you just need text, talk, and minimal to moderate data, and are okay with TMO's hit or miss coverage and iffy building penetration (which seems to have only improved moderately in spite of their band 12 LTE rollout), Mint is fine.

Only two things I noticed when comparing on their website. 1) lock in contracts, and 2) they piggyback off the T-Mobile network while Google Fi dynamically uses the best of 3 networks. Otherwise seems like a pretty frugal option.

>they piggyback off the T-Mobile network while Google Fi dynamically uses the best of 3 networks

This happens only in theory, not practice with Fi. As a Fi launch customer that stuck with Fi through late 2017, Sprint (and later US Cellular) service was always terrible and frequently unusable, no matter what metro area I used it in. My experience improved dramatically when I just kept my Nexus device around as a spare, and moved my primary SIM to an iPhone, where it was permanently locked to using TMO.

Anecdata: Mint has been working quite well for me for about a year, including during a few trips to Europe. I believe pricing gets even a tiny bit better if you buy service for a whole year at once.

Isn't it 2GB? And on their website I'm charged $45 for some reason.

Also the plan says 3-month plan (regular price $23), so your price seems to be promotional.

Mint requires you to buy at least 3 months at a time.