> There’s no such thing as a free phone.

If your choices are:

A) Pay $45/mo. for service.

B) Pay $45/mo. for service and get a new phone.

Then there is a free phone. You don't get a discount because you refuse the phone, so it is effectively free.

There are obviously contract lengths, but then you end up buying out the rest of the cost of the phone, so you still got some percentage of that phone subsidized by the carrier.

Which carriers are these? I just went to the AT&T site, they wanted $30 a month for an iPhone + a separate $85 a month for cellular service. If instead I pick "wireless->bring your own" and go through the steps it was $75 a month so

A) Pay $75 a month for service B) Pay $115 a month for service and get a new phone

Their bottom offer was $5 a month for an iphone 12 (plus the $85 month for service)

Curious which carriers offer free iPhones where there's no difference in price.

T-Mobile has a deal if you trade in existing phone but the phone has to be high-end and recent otherwise they won't give you the trade in value needed to cover the new phone.

You get the free phone when you create a new line, so it's easy enough for parents to just choose an iPhone as their kid's first phone (which is what they all seem to be doing).

> Then there is a free phone. You don't pay a lower price if you refuse the phone, so it's effectively free.

No. The cost of the phone is baked into the plan and you get punished with a higher price if you don’t buy your phone from the carrier. It’s a way of getting people to think of it as free so they’re effectively buying a new phone every 2-3 years.

It’s a variation of tied selling, but instead of requiring you buy a phone from them they just price it so it’s obviously a bad deal not to.