Re:An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information...
by Macha on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @02:19PM
(#32401738)
Wow, the prepaid plans in your country suck.
How they work here is:
1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account
2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data).
3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer
4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data
Re:An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information...
by terinjokes on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @08:07PM
(#32406330)
We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire.
Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.
Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)