Cost, Capabilities, and Convenience Brought Me Back to Google Fi (Premium)

After a year and a half on T-Mobile, I unexpectedly switched back to Google Fi after researching lower-cost mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). And now I’m surprised I didn’t do this sooner, as Google Fi has long had a wireless plan that’s uniquely well-suited to me spending more time in Mexico now that we have an apartment there.

Before getting to that, allow me to proceed through the article I thought I was going to write, which was about wireless carriers, math, and convenience. This is a shorthand way of saying that choosing a wireless carrier is much like any other decision in that it usually involves a matrix of choices to weigh, instead of just a single factor like cost. That is, it’s not enough to just save money, the service needs to meet your needs as well.

And if you’re a classic over-thinker like I am, these types of decisions can be problematic. Comparing prices is simple. But determining which features and capabilities are the most important to you, and then weighing those factors against the respective costs of various choices is not. And in my case, that leads to a roadblock where I just give up for some time and then revisit the decision later. Rinse, wash, repeat.

But we’re heading back to Mexico City in early February, and so I kept revisiting this topic as I thought through how to best optimize online connectivity, both there and at home, in a way that balanced costs, convenience, and functionality. Yes, we live in a world of endless possibilities now when compared to our earliest international trips decades ago, but the sheer amount of choice we have now also adds to the complexity and indecision in its own way.

Anyway, the timing of this trip is interesting. It coincides with the second anniversary of the moment my wife and I saw and quickly decided to buy our apartment there. During that January 2022 trip, I was in the final months of my second year of using Mint Mobile, and since then, I’ve switched carriers three times, and have experimented with various Mexico data plans, third-party eSIMs, and other solutions, trying to make sense of the domestic and international divide. Each had its advantages, but each also had its challenges. If there was an obvious answer, I would have chosen it.

But you have to start somewhere. And for most people shopping for wireless carriers, the biggest concern, assuming service availability and reliability are acceptable where they live, is the monthly cost. But in mulling this over, not just recently but over the past few years, and experiencing what it’s like when things don’t work, I’ve come to understand that other factors are just as important as the cost. For example, I want the phone plan I use to work seamlessly and automatically, whether I’m home or abroad. I don’t want to think or worry about data caps. I want to move my phone plan(s), and easily, from phone to phone, ideally via eSIM. And I know from some bad experiences at Mint Mobile, in particular, that phone and text spam protection is important: I don’t need to be distracted by nonsense.

My current carrier—excuse me, my previous carrier—was T-Mobile. I paid this company $50 per month for its pay-as-you-go Magenta 55+ plan, which provides 100 GB of high-speed mobile data, 5 GB of high-speed mobile hotspot data, 5 GB of high-speed international data, unlimited international texting, and low-cost international calling. It would normally be $55 per month, but there’s a $5 auto-pay discount. That’s a bit more than I wanted to pay, but the portability was important to me: As with smaller MVNOs like Google Fi and Mint Mobile, I could walk away from the service whenever I wanted.

T-Mobile was OK overall. I never needed the amount of data that plan offered in the U.S., but I very much wanted to have more international data, and often ran into that 5 GB cap. Ideally, data would just be data, and I could use all of it in the U.S. and/or Mexico, with no distinction between the two.

I could and did augment T-Mobile with a local SIM in Mexico or a pay-as-you-go data eSIM to overcome this issue. We still have a Telcel pay-as-you-go SIM that we can now replace with a “real” Mexico phone plan since my wife and I have temporary residency status now, but we’ve been surprised that we’ve not needed to do this. (Meaning, we’ve not run into a bank, business, or service that has issues with a U.S. phone number.) On our previous trip to Mexico City this past October, I purchased 10 GB of data in eSIM form from Nomad to address the T-Mobile data limits, and that seemed to work out well enough.

But I would like to not manage two eSIMs/SIM cards. And T-Mobile’s eSIM experience was beyond disappointing: I need to move my eSIM from phone to phone several times each year, and T-Mobile ruined what should have been a seamless self-service experience by requiring me to call their support line and wait for them to do this for me. Other carriers handle this correctly. All of them, I bet.

In researching my options, and given my previous experiences and decades of international travel, I figured that my next step would be to move back to one of the services I’d used before. Google Fi, perhaps, though I felt like it would be too expensive. Or perhaps Mint Mobile, which would be very inexpensive but would require me to figure out a separate international data plan. Price, features, convenience. I don’t know.

But again, you have to start somewhere. And so I decided to start with some math: How much would Google Fi or Mint Mobile cost compared to what I was paying T-Mobile each month?

To get a rough idea of that, I looked up my activity history on T-Mobile. And I was surprised to discover, not in a good way, that I had used a lot more data than expected, including 9.64 GB and 6.4 GB in the most recent two months, respectively. What the … ? I’m not sure why, honestly, but I was guessing that my usage was in the 2 GB range each month.

Digging deeper, I discovered that those two months were strange outliers, and that I had used between 1 GB and 4.5 GB of data most months in the previous year. That calmed me down—I still don’t know exactly how or why my usage was so high in those two months, but my usage in the current cycle is a more normal 1.63 GB with about a week to go—and so I broke out the calculator. My total data usage in 2023 was 47.9 GB, so almost exactly 48 GB, or 4 GB per month on average. (Ignoring those two outlier months, it was just 3.2 GB per month.) And $50 per month for one year is $600. So that was the baseline.

Had I been using Google Fi last year with the same usage, my bill would have been over $720 because that service costs $20 per month for text and calling plus $10 per month for data. (At an average of 4 GB of data per month, Google Fi would cost $60 per month, and $60 x 12 is $720.)

What about Mint Mobile? That’s a bit harder to guesstimate because of that service’s variable pricing (you can pay in 3-, 6-, and 12-month blocks, lowering the monthly price at each tier) and the need to purchase international data separately. But as I did above with Google Fi, I simply used the 15 GB plan I had used before for the math, which would have neatly covered those onerous 9.64 and 6.4 GB months without extra charges. If I paid for a year upfront, the annual cost would have been $240, while it could have cost up to $300 otherwise.

That’s a huge savings, but additional separate international data brings up the cost. Mint Mobile offers something called UpRoam for subscribers who need this service, but at $0.06 per MB in Mexico (and Canada, $0.20 elsewhere), or $61 per GB (!), it’s a non-starter. And so I would need to turn to a third party and a separate eSIM/SIM. There are local options in Mexico I need to research on the next trip, but if I had used a Nomad eSIM for my three trips to Mexico City last year, I would have spent $30 per 10 GB with a 30-day time limit. Given the length of those trips, that most likely would have resulted in five separate eSIM purchases, so about $150. And that means that the total cost of Mint Mobile (plus international) last year would have landed at about $450. And that math is easy: $450 is less than $600 (T-Mobile) or $720 (Google Fi).

It’s also not the full story, as I needed to use a Nomad eSIM with T-Mobile at least once this past year as well, which raised the price for the wireless data I did need in 2023. There were also other factors to consider. For example, switching to Mint Mobile could also mean that I would be inundated with spam text messages and phone calls again, one of the issues that triggered my move from that service to Google Fi in March 2022. And moving to Mint (or Google Fi) would also mean that I could swap my eSIM seamlessly, something I can’t do on T-Mobile. This is a nicety, but it’s something I do want.

But in my tunnel vision, I had forgotten something important. And it was this factor that put Google Fi over the top.

And it’s that what I think of as “Google Fi” isn’t the only option at Google Fi, it’s just the option I had used previously. But Google Fi has three different plans, and the one I had been using, called Flexible, is no longer the best choice for me, thanks to that Mexico City apartment we purchased. That is, I no longer need seamless international data, calling, and text messaging all over the globe. I just need seamless data, calling, and text messaging in Mexico. And one of the newer Google Fi plans, called Simply Unlimited, meets that need nicely. Indeed, it seems curiously designed just for me.

Google Fi’s Simply Unlimited plan costs $50 per month, just like my current T-Mobile plan. I had hoped to lower that price, but it also has some interesting advantages, key among them that its high-speed data allotment (35 GB per month, far more than I’d ever need) works identically in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. With T-Mobile, I had just 5 GB of data I could use in Mexico during a billing cycle, but Fi would give me 7 times that amount for the same price.

That means that while Google Fi Simply Unlimited costs the same as T-Mobile, $600 per year, I would never need to worry about or pay for additional data. I’d also not need to manage multiple eSIMs.

But there’s more.

Google Fi Simply Unlimited also offers one year of free YouTube Premium, a service that costs $13.99 for each month. So that’s a saving of over $165 for the first year, assuming I stick with Fi for at least a year (a requirement of this offer). So at the end of that first year, the cost of Google Fi Simply Unlimited would have been about $435. And that doesn’t just undercut T-Mobile nicely (albeit for the first year), it also undercuts Mint Mobile, while cutting down on the complexity (and potential spam issues) nicely.

Google Fi Simply Unlimited also offers 5 GB of hotspot data per month, the same as T-Mobile. It has terrific anti-spam protections and seamless eSIM switching too. And in the off chance that I head off to Paris for a few weeks sometime this year, Fi lets you switch plans on the fly. I could switch to my old plan, Essentials, and have seamless international data there too, then switch back the next month. That’s a unique type of portability.

I can’t anticipate what this year will look like. But in 2023 we traveled to Mexico City three times, and my guess is that we will make at least four trips this year. Those trips were 3 to 4 weeks each, but our next trip is for 5 weeks, and we’d like to spend more time there on each trip if possible. Google Fi Simply Unlimited just makes sense. And so I went from uncertainty and indecision to decision unexpectedly last night. And I switched back to Google Fi.

That process went incredibly smoothly. In a matter of minutes, I had signed up for the service, and after I grabbed the transfer PIN I needed from T-Mobile from its mobile app and pasted it into the Google Fi app, it transferred my phone number, deactivated T-Mobile, and activated itself on my phone. If anything, it was almost too easy, and a sharp contrast with my T-Mobile eSIM switching experiences of the past year and a half or so.

And here we are. I will still look into what’s possible now at the major carriers in Mexico, and my wife and I still vaguely feel like we need a permanent Mexico phone number. But that’s all good: At the worst, I am simply paying as much as I was already paying for cellular, but I now have unfettered data in Mexico. And at the worst, I might save enough with a Mexico plan that maybe I do want to switch over to Mint Mobile or another lower-cost carrier. No problem: Google Fi will make that switch easy too if I need to.