My Weird "Free" Legacy Phone Plan
Some pondering on how it's affected me, and how it may have happened
Around ten years ago, I had a conversation with someone about my phone plan.
I said something like “Oh, why don’t you use the phone data plan I have, it’s such a good deal.”
Their response was, “Well, yeah it is, but there is no guarantee that they won’t pull it, so I’d prefer to have something that is more guaranteed.”
I don’t remember exactly who it was, but I do wonder whether they stuck with the more conventional plan in the end.
Even now, I sometimes drift toward the “guaranteed” option, even when it is slightly worse. And my early experience with this has helped shift me away from this mindset.
I used to wonder whether calling it “free” was just self-deception.
But the trick is simple, and relies on two things.
First, when you top up a pay-as-you-go SIM, the credit can sometimes be spent not just on calls, texts, or extra data, but on other services through billing agreements.
Second, Three Ireland once ran a very specific promotion:
“Top up by €20, get free unlimited data for a month, and keep the credit.”
...and you got to keep the credit. Incredible.
So you simply need to have something to spend the credit on, which for me has never been a problem.
For myself, I have historically spent it on YouTube Premium Family plan, Crunchyroll, and occasionally if I have credits left over, some mobile games.
In theory however, you could also set up your own app or subscribe to yourself on Patreon or something too, and pay yourself minus some fee.
My phone plan is from Three Ireland, which is one of the “premium” telecom providers in Ireland.
In day-to-day use, budget providers often feel identical. In edge cases, they do not. I noticed this most while roaming.
My guess is the international agreements made by providers differ. The cheaper plans I’ve tried often seemed to offer the bare minimum, while my old Three plan worked more reliably.
This is not universally true, premium providers can be stingy too. But in my experience my “free” phone plan has worked consistently well. And the differences seem to have gotten smaller over time.
How did such a promo come to be?
I’m not too sure.
At that point, they were pushing hard to grow their network at all costs. They had promos like “Three-to-Three phone calls are free”, and I guess by having such a plan, which included data but excluded phone and text, they expected people to use the credits for calls, or let the credits run out quickly when one forgets to top up their plan on time. I have spent some credits on both of these.
They also, interestingly enough, did let you buy a small amount of data using the credits at the end of the month (eg: 5 euro for 500MB), which meant you could keep using some limited amount of data for like 5 months off a single data top-up.
But of course, “free” still came with costs.
For data in EU or UK, I have quite good usage limits, unlimited data in Ireland, 19GB of data in EU or UK.
For anything outside this, costs are quite dear. Phone calls and SMS cost quite a bit. Data over the usage limit gets charged at like €1.99/MB and more when roaming (and in the US, it’s been like €6/MB, ludicrous).
They change the costs and limits a couple of times a year. Sometimes telling me my EU data limit has increased again. Sometimes telling me the costs have gone down or up. I stopped following a long time ago, I never intended to reach into these limits anyway. These can be worked around.
The most annoying change was when they altered the usage period from once per month, to once every 28 days. This might seem fine, but it means when I set a limit on my phone for “data used this month”, the usage period drifts quickly enough to become meaningless. I have ended up using more than my limit before, but the costs are mostly bounded by how much credit you have topped up on your phone.
The overall plan stays spiritually the same.
I also worry that there is no such thing as free lunch.
And overall, people often try to present a good offer such as this far more often than is true. All this search does have time-cost in search and jumping through hoops. The phone plan worked for me, but I fear I originally learned some of the wrong lessons from the experience.
I spent far too much time thinking about loyalty programs and coupons and credit-card rewards, despite these not really being available in Ireland. There are some crypto ones I guess. But overall, I feel that these are basically never worth thinking about, and that time is wasted compared to other ways you could spend your time.
Even with phone plans, when you travel to most countries, it is incredibly easy to look at some eSIM comparison sites such as https://esimdb.com/, spend a few dollars, then get all the data you could want for pretty cheap.
So I guess I learned that yes, the dollar cost may be sometimes free, but your time is also valuable. It may have been worth it for me in this case as a kiddo, but for most, you should probably not spend your marginal time squeezing things that cost 20 euro a month.
Money-saving tricks are sometimes real, but the search and mental overhead are often not worth it.
Of course, all good things come to an end.
They have long since stopped offering the promo for new customers. I wonder if one day they will pull the plug for existing ones too. My most recent “contract change” message says that they lowered the credit expiry period from 180 days to 100 days. But they have been “tightening the belt” for years and years.
“The continuation of the promo is not guaranteed.”
But I don’t really worry about it anymore.
The journey has been interesting, and I’ve saved thousands of euro along the way.
you look so devious in that illustration lmao