Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20
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Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale!
- No contract, no fees.
- 1GB data, Unlimited talk & text Phone Plan will only be $5 per month in the first 3 months.
- After the 3 month promo period, the plan will cost $10/month.
- Offer valid for new customers who choose to join Tello or existing customers who add a new line between August 6 - 20, 2020.
- Coast-to-coast wireless coverage.
- We do prepaid. So, no contract, no activation or early termination fees!
- Stay as long as you like.
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My wife and brother use Tello. Can’t say enough good things about it. Probably the cheapest cell service you can get. As soon as I use up my banked balance with AT&T Prepaid I too will be joining the ranks of Tello. Long live Tello.
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Can anyone speak to whether Tello is $10/month or $10-which-is-actually-$18-after-taxes-and-fees?
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@orthros said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
Can anyone speak to whether Tello is $10/month or $10-which-is-actually-$18-after-taxes-and-fees?
Tello lets you create your own plan depending on how many minutes you want and how much data you want (texts are always unlimited unless you choose a plan with no minutes and just data)… The cheapest regularly priced plan is $6 for 100 minutes of talk, free texts, and 500 mb of data. My wife currently pays $6 for 100 minutes, free texts, and 500 mb of data. You can add minutes and add data and personalize your plan to whatever you want. They sell data in these amounts: no data, 500 mb, 1 gb, 2 gb, 4 gb, 6 gb, 8 gb, or unlimited. Unlimited minutes, text, and data would run you $39.99 a month. If you prefer you don’t need to have any plan and you can pay per phone call, text, etc. A phone call within the U.S. is a penny a minute as is a text. Data is reasonably price a la carte, too. My brother doesn’t use a lot of minutes or data so he pays a la carte for it without a plan and probably only pays $1 to $2 a month for his phone service.
The calling plan that is on sale in this post is unlimited talk and text and 1 gb of data. The regular price for that plan is $10, but with the current promo you would get it for only $5 for the first three months of service. Then it would go back up to $10 a month. There are no contracts with Tello., You can change plans anytime. The taxes and fees with Tello are very minimal. On my wife’s $6 plan she only pays 36 cents a month is taxes and fees.
You can also open a secondary pay-as-you-go account and make deposits into that and if you run out of minutes or data on your calling plan instead of disabling your phone until the end of the month, it would dip into the pay-as-you-go funds and subtract from there. Remember a call is a penny a minute as is a text, so very small change.
Here is a link to Tello in which you can look at their plans and pricing: https://tello.com/buy/custom_plans
I am looking forward to the day when I can leave AT&T Prepaid and go to Tello, but the only problem is I have an account that has $92 banked on it, so I got to use it up or lose it. AT&T Prepaid charges me 10 cents a minute for calls and 20 cents for a text and that is cheap. New customers pay 25 cents a minute for domestic calling.
If any of you decide to join Tello, please use my referral code when you sign up and you will get $10 in Tello money and I will too. You can use that free $10 you will get to pay towards a monthly calling plan. My referral code is: P3B50PK5
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Also their data is not a hard stop but throttled down.
It is fast enough even throttled down to use for Google Voice calling.
I have the cheapest plan with 100 minutes/unlimited text and 500 mb data for $6 plus tax = $6.70
I mostly use text and Google Voice so I rarely even approach the 100 call limit.
I am definitely a lite user and a cheapskate to boot.
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@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
Also their data is not a hard stop but throttled down.
It is fast enough even throttled down to use for Google Voice calling.
I have the cheapest plan with 100 minutes/unlimited text and 500 mb data for $6 plus tax = $6.70
I mostly use text and Google Voice so I rarely even approach the 100 call limit.
I am definitely a lite user and a cheapskate to boot.You may want not to have a calling plan at all and just fill your PAY AS YOU GO sub-account if you don’t call that much. It is only a penny a minute for domestic calls and a penny for domestic texts. That is what I plan to do is scrap the plan anf just pay pennies here and there when I use it.
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@mrvietnam said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
Also their data is not a hard stop but throttled down.
It is fast enough even throttled down to use for Google Voice calling.
I have the cheapest plan with 100 minutes/unlimited text and 500 mb data for $6 plus tax = $6.70
I mostly use text and Google Voice so I rarely even approach the 100 call limit.
I am definitely a lite user and a cheapskate to boot.You may want not to have a calling plan at all and just fill your PAY AS YOU GO sub-account if you don’t call that much. It is only a penny a minute for domestic calls and a penny for domestic texts. That is what I plan to do is scrap the plan anf just pay pennies here and there when I use it.
I think the minimum add to Paygo is $20 and by the book, they require you to make an addition every so often but I can’t recall what that time frame is right now.
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@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@mrvietnam said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
Also their data is not a hard stop but throttled down.
It is fast enough even throttled down to use for Google Voice calling.
I have the cheapest plan with 100 minutes/unlimited text and 500 mb data for $6 plus tax = $6.70
I mostly use text and Google Voice so I rarely even approach the 100 call limit.
I am definitely a lite user and a cheapskate to boot.You may want not to have a calling plan at all and just fill your PAY AS YOU GO sub-account if you don’t call that much. It is only a penny a minute for domestic calls and a penny for domestic texts. That is what I plan to do is scrap the plan anf just pay pennies here and there when I use it.
I think the minimum add to Paygo is $20 and by the book, they require you to make an addition every so often but I can’t recall what that time frame is right now.
@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@mrvietnam said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
Also their data is not a hard stop but throttled down.
It is fast enough even throttled down to use for Google Voice calling.
I have the cheapest plan with 100 minutes/unlimited text and 500 mb data for $6 plus tax = $6.70
I mostly use text and Google Voice so I rarely even approach the 100 call limit.
I am definitely a lite user and a cheapskate to boot.You may want not to have a calling plan at all and just fill your PAY AS YOU GO sub-account if you don’t call that much. It is only a penny a minute for domestic calls and a penny for domestic texts. That is what I plan to do is scrap the plan anf just pay pennies here and there when I use it.
I think the minimum add to Paygo is $20 and by the book, they require you to make an addition every so often but I can’t recall what that time frame is right now.
I called customer service and they said you need to have an order every three months or they may close your account, so I think your approach is the best, that is to order the cheapest monthly plan. I think I will sign up for the special that is the topic of this thread for $5 a month and then after that transfer to a plan similar to yours.
The rep said it used to be if you just placed a call that would be enough to keep your account current with Pay as You Go, but now it has changed ever since late last year and now you actually have to place an order every three months.
I read on another website that a lot of longtime customers of Tello are now getting emails threatening to cancel their service if they don’t place an order:
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r/Tello
•Posted byu/MrRadar
6 days ago
On legacy PayGo-only plan, now required to buy monthly service? Is this happening to anyone else?i just got an e-mail from Tello telling me that my number will be expiring soon and I need to buy a service plan to keep it:
We noticed that more than 90 days have passed since your last order. As stated in our Service Agreement your Tello number +X (XXX) XXX XXXX together with your Pay As You Go balance (if any), will automatically expire on 08/13/2020.
To keep this number and avoid service termination you can go ahead and subscribe to a Tello plan in the following days. Regardless of any account activity (call, SMS, data usage), your number will expire if no order is registered by 08/13/2020.
Please note that once deactivated, a Tello number can no longer be retrieved.
Has anyone else gotten an e-mail like this? I don’t necessarily blame them (I haven’t bought anything from them since I originally signed up in 2016) I’m mainly just curious.
Just got the same email. Very annoyed, especially since I’ve had an account with them for years and this is the first I’ve heard of this policy change. How very generous of them to inform me only a week in advance!
I also don’t appreciate their threatening to both take my leftover money and deactivate my cell phone number, which I’ve had for over a decade. Will definitely be switching to another service.
I’m looking for an alternative but it seems companies don’t offer pay as you go service anymore, at least not like they used to. Every company now requires a monthly fee at a minimum, and I’m just looking for something that only charges me if I use it. Bunch of crap.
3 days agoThat correct. The cellphone companies HATE low usage customers. Now they are all in cahoots together to destroy these kinds of plans. Basically they want at least $10 per month out of all of us at a bare minimum.
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Kind of makes me wonder if I should stick with AT&T Prepaid. I can get AT&T Customer Service extend my credit validity time by 6 to 12 months by just calling in to customer service and asking. Last time I called in they extended my airtime by an entire year. They charge 10 cents a minute, but I don’t call much. The only downside with the per minute plans with AT&T Prepaid they don’t let you use Pay as You Go data. In order to have data with AT&T Prepaid I have to buy an expensive monthly plan. They also don’t allow me to use Google Voice with AT&T Prepaid.
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@mrvietnam
so you might consider keeping your paygo balance in play and only taking the dirt cheapest plan every other month?
I did something like this last year when Mint offered a really cheap teaser plan. I had some of the original free paygo money left from when I switched to Tello after Ring Plus went down.
I can jump around providers by using a Google Voice number that can be directed with a click to various devices.
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Excellent idea, juicer. I can put $20 in the PayGo balance and then once every 3 months I can buy their cheapest plan, which is $6, and that way I could still use my PayGo balance for two out of the three months and still be a current customer under their new terms. Thanks for the idea. It’s nice Tello gives you a one week warning via email before closing down an account.
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I found this article very interesting and informative about Tello: https://www.threethriftyguys.com/2020/05/tello-review-no-fee-cell-phone-provider/
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@mrvietnam
++ to what the article said.
I don’t think you can renew every 3 months according to their terms. There is a catch that makes it you need to add money every ? days. I think it is more like every 2 months?? Call customer service. They are really amazing.
I just sent you a PM.
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@juicer said in Tello Wireless Awesome Back To School Sale! thru 8/20:
@mrvietnam
++ to what the article said.
I don’t think you can renew every 3 months according to their terms. There is a catch that makes it you need to add money every ? days. I think it is more like every 2 months?? Call customer service. They are really amazing.
I just sent you a PM.I did call them yesterday and they said you need to have an order (meaning, one) every 3 months, so it looks like my plan will work.
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@mrvietnam
It’s not a “month” thing. By coincidence, I got the following notice on one of my very old accounts created after R+ went down where I had paygo $ but never really used the number:
We noticed that more than 90 days have passed since your last order.
As stated in our Service Agreement your Tello number +1 (xxxxxxx) together with your Pay As You Go balance (if any), will automatically expire on xxxx .
To keep this number and avoid service termination you can go ahead and subscribe to a Tello plan in the following days. Regardless of any account activity (call, SMS, data usage), your number will expire if no order is registered by xxxx .
Please note that once deactivated, a Tello number can no longer be retrieved.
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It may not be a month thing as you say, but the last time I checked there were 3 months in 90 days.
It is nice that they give you a week after they warn you before deactivation. I just hope I see the e-mail and it doesn’t go into a junk mail folder.
I am just waiting for my Sprint SIM card to show up that I bought new for $4.25 on eBay. The Sprint stores I called and Tello wanted $10 for the SIM, so getting it on eBay was the best alternative. I think it should arrive by Monday.
