My favorite source for current MVNO options: https://prepaidcompare.net/

My household of 4 adults independently chooses Visible (cheapest tier, $25/mon which offers unlimited data (and and unlimited hotspot, though capped at 5Mbps)). Due to the slow hotspot speeds I might migrate DW & I to US Mobile which offers high priority high speed hotspot (up to 30GB/month at about the same price when shared across 2 lines) which could be valuable when we're traveling.

A little birdie once told me that mangling the TTL on outbound packets to 65 (either on the connected machine(s), or on a separate intermediate router) may be able to get around that particular hotspot throttle.

Legacy T-Mobile plan (SimpleChoice with 10 lines and lots of grandfathered benefits) for about $270/mo.

The lack of any fluctuation in billing make it easy for me to offer lines to extended family.

Visible, which is a Verizon entity. Its primary advantages are that it is cheap, unlimited, and the pricing is free from fine print and gotchas -- the price is simply the price.

I'm on a (hypothetically) perpetual promo that costs me $35 per month for their better tier, which for me mostly differs from lesser/cheaper tier in that the first 50GB of data I use in a month has a higher priority than the cheaper ($25) tier.

Performance is fine for my usual needs, and native Verizon coverage is excellent in my neck of the woods.

(Why so cheap? No stores. No bricks, no mortar. No support outside of chat. No roaming. No 3G, even in places that might still only have 3G coverage. LTE and 5G only.)

I'm the cheapest of the cheap.

I use project genesis because they were giving away 21 months of service for free if you did some basic tasks for a couple weeks. I'm on month 6 or so of completely free, unlimited data/talk/text.

I hope they last long enough for me to see it through.

Edit:

What I would use without PG, which is what my wife is on, is US Mobile. 10GB/mo for $15.

basic tasks? like simple industrial sabotage missions?

Haha nothing that exciting. Like send 5 texts, make 5 calls, visit any 5 websites. Supposedly a 'network test.'

I just did it all in about 5 mins from bed each morning by calling/texting myself.

not sure I count as the HN crowd but I've been happy with Verizon and its owned MVNOs for a while (particularly Visible). The service is generally rock solid and the voice quality is imo better than the other 2 carriers. Also, Verizon seems uninterested in customer imprisonment atm - any device bought from them automatically unlocks 60 days after purchase. CS can be spotty esp. since they also seemed to have gone down the path of outsourcing - previously it used to be US-based afaict and very competent ime.

Very happy with US Mobile.

$30/mo unlimited everything, and I average 50gb/mo with tethering. Uses both the Verizon and T-Mobile networks, best of both worlds. And very happy to not be paying $100/mo anymore.

Details? (I'm about to go look, but mobile providers are about as transparent as residential ISPs)

I also use US Mobile and have been generally quite happy. I need a much cheaper plan than the parent post though. I think I'm at about $18/mo which gets me the unlimited minutes/texts and 6gb of data per month. I'm typically on wifi so tend to use about 1gb a month of data, the extra data is mostly for the rare occurrence that my internet is out and I need to tether for work.

Support tends to be wishy-washy but each issue I've had has been resolved, so I can't complain really. I think I've had two issues in the 3 years I've been with them. Maybe 3 conversations with support total? The third was getting assistance flipping to eSIM as it had just rolled out at the time so there wasn't a super clear solution (to me) at the time.

Oh, I'm on the Verizon network, and have never seen deprioritization. I am in a small town though, so I'd be shocked if I was going to encounter it, probably larger cities it becomes a thing.

I’ve been on T-Mobile since the Sprint merger and been mostly happy with them.

My biggest complaint is that they don’t seem to take security as seriously as they should. They’ve developed a reputation for frequent security breaches. I’m not sure that any of the major networks are great at that. Somehow a scammer was able to order 2 brand new iPhones and charge them to my account when I was still under Sprint. Customer service dropped the charges immediately when they saw the shipping address was far away from anywhere we’d ever lived, but it was still frustrating.

I switched to USMobile recently when they dropped their prices. Don't need much data, $18/mo pool covers both me and my wife easily.

I miss Tello, thought. The Sprint network used to be the strongest and most reliable in our area, but after they got bought and shut down we had to switch away.

I've been using Ting mobile since 2015. My bill was ~$45 for two lines for years, and recently dropped to $30, seemingly because we're not being charged for data anymore.

I use Mint because I'm cheap.

Experience is definitely subpar coming from T-mo - at times slow/laggy. But it works well enough.

Tello has been great for me so far, I'm on the 5GB plan for under $20/mo.

I use Google Fi + Visible in one phone and switch between the two as needed.

Fi: free international roaming in most countries, good tether speeds in urban areas in the US, 4 additional data SIMs at no cost for robots and other hardware projects that just use data from your main plan

Visible: better rural US coverage and fills in a lot of Fi's coverage gaps

How do you do this? Is there a button somewhere in android to switch networks?

Some phones have multiple SIM slots.

I've never used eSIMs but seeing as they're just bytes, I would imagine you could switch them much like wifi networks.

One eSIM for Google Fi + one physical SIM for Visible.

You can switch which network is used for mobile data in the settings. (As much as I wish it had an option to failover to the other rapidly ...)

Mint :(

Mint

Mint :|