A Year of Mint Mobile (Premium)

A few weeks back, my Google Pixel 4a 5G buzzed on the desk, so I looked down to see a notification for a text message from Mint Mobile. “It’s the last month of your Mint 12 Month 15 GB plan,” the text message explained. “How time flies.”

It really does.

One year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across the world like some Biblical plague, and, here in the United States, we were just coming to realize that the initial two-week predictions about the duration of our work-from-home requirements were going to be just a bit off.

This was interesting timing for me from a wireless carrier perspective. I had been using Google Fi since the year the service first launched as Project Fi, and I switched to it full-time in September 2017. Google Fi was particularly compelling for a number of reasons, and I especially liked its international data capabilities, since I usually spend at least a month each year overseas.

But Google Fi does have one downside: With a base cost each month of over $30, it’s not the cheapest of the carriers. And facing some number of months---now, it’s going to be over a year---of not really traveling, especially internationally, I figured it was time for a change. Maybe I could find another mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) with better prices but the same quality (at least for domestic usage).

(And by the way, I realize that I’ll travel internationally again at some point. My plan for that is to go back to doing what I was doing before I used Fi full-time and just use that service when I’m traveling outside the U.S.)

I found that MVNO in Mint Mobile, and I made the switch in March 2020, paying $300 for one year of a 12 GB/month plan (that has since been upgraded to 15 GB). That means that I paid $25 per month, about half what I had been paying per month at Google Fi. (Yes, the base price at Fi is just $30 per month plus taxes, but that’s for just 1 GB of data, and you pay another $10 for each additional 1 GB each month. You can find my math here.)

I could have saved even more money: With just a few exceptions---the big one happening last August, when a lightning strike took down our Internet access for several days, causing me to use way more Mint Mobile data than usual---I only used a few gigabytes of data each month. So I could very easily have gone with an 8 GB plan (now 10 GB) for $20 per month ($240 per year) or even a 3 GB plan (now 4 GB) for $15 per month ($180 per year).

That said, I’d been planning to stick with the $300 per year plan, which as noted now gives customers 15 GB per month: I’m really hoping that I’ll need that data because I’ll be traveling again by the second half of 2020 at the latest. And even if it goes unused, I’m still saving a lot of money vs. using Google Fi.

As to the quality of the service, it’s hard to say because I didn’t really travel all that much in the past year. I spent much of the past 12 months never traveling much...