My most recent renewal took under 10min. 3 minutes of actual rep time after receiving my request. Luis didn't ask a bunch of questions, just said to give him 3 minutes and that is pretty much exactly how long it took him to confirm it was renewed.
Annoying, more so because E coasters have no service until at least 11am after it expires.
Luis, Sonia, Marivic, Sharon, Gary...I've chatted with them all over the past nearly 2 months. This was first reported on Reddit on 11/17/2024. I don't think they have any plans to fix it.
Well, 'they' are CS reps, so it's not up to them to fix. And I don't think FP execs care about fixing an issue for their free customers. I guess they can forgo usage tracking of the free folks for a few hours each month. I wonder who they sell the data to... LOL
Actually, FreedomPop won a long time ago.
Even at the avg minimum wage of about $16 an hour, how much time have we spent with this renewal drama over the last year plus---(and seriously, for a product that most of us are just toying around with)
And my time is worth much more than $16 an hour.
Chat agent "Gary" got it done in the usual ~ 3 min.
Only hiccup was that I had no service on the phone, resolved by reboot, never experienced that before.
It's now taking up to 30 minutes to complete the renewal. From Luis:
Thank you for patiently waiting and apologies for the long wait. Our support team was able to renew the plan however the system still applying it. Please check the account after 30 minutes or an hour to check if it's already applied.
This has been a major pain. Yet, I still torture myself to do it, for many phones.
Worst of all, each FP representative wants me to upgrade the Android version on my older phones (Android 9) when I tell them what version it is.
I explain to them that the same issue (requiring FP to manually renew) arises on my Android 12 device, they still ask me to upgrade the Android 9 devices.
Android version doesn't matter. I have the same issue on my Pixels which both have Android 15. The issue has to be with their app version, the lates of which is 1.7.0.. I really don't think they are trying to fix anything. They've had since November 17, 2024.
Just tell them what they want to hear, that you have app version 1.7.
My routine for line renew request is to check playstore as I'm beginning chat to see what the latest version is, then cut/paste my chat script.
Always worked for me.
Thanks. Whenever I tell them the app version, they tell me that my Android version is too old. Then, I explain to them that the app version description supports my Android version, to which they reply that it doesn't matter, and that I need to upgrade my Android version.
In the end, this text-jousting ends with my line being renewed, and the self-torture is extended to the next renewal date.
Very glad that our FP phone is just a spare for use if something else fails.
.
If/when it becomes even more troublesome it'll be easy enough to just ditch.
By way of comparison my Textnow account with the 4.99/year number protection is FAR more useful - even just via WIFI.
