Major Change at FreedomPop

They updated their terms, today, and Freedom Friends are only worth 5 MB each, now, instead of 50 MB.

Maximum per month is now 50 MB, not 500 MB.

That's a huge change.

https://support.freedompop.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2186/kw/friends

Yikes... Squeezing us to become paying customers... For 250MB free data on a SIM, looks like Freedompop is becoming a non-viable service.

If they aren't already doing this, they need to push for the prepaid GB year plans. Having only the free 200MB plus 50MB, like PEW said, isn't viable at all.

Thanks for the heads-up Chelle

A huge change for FreedomPop UK customers, too--
About 10 days ago, they announced all UK free plans would be cancelled.

NOTE: this is UK Freedompop, not US.

Although I did not go with freedompop.

The more options that are for free services the more competition there is the better it is for all of us. This is not good news

Paying for FP Annual plan with CN Gold still sounds viable for "freeish" service. Hopefully, there will be a solution to paying for Unreal service using CN Gold.

You can pay for FreedomPop service using CN gold?

I have a FP line that rolled over on the 6th, and still shows 500mb from friends. I'll be watching a line that rolls over on the 12th to see what happens......
(at least so far, it appears that the change may occur at rollover, and that already credited bonuses will remain.)

250 mb will be too low for me to count on it for much-- I like to leave a fair amount of leeway to allow for accounting differences, so maybe I could push it to 175mb. (Or install the app to monitor more closely....)

This will make the FP Sprint devices more attractive-- more than twice the available data. I haven't found the throttling to be a problem for anything I'm likely to do with 500mb.

Same, I just had a few accounts w/ cycles that reset in the last few days and all still received the 500MB. But I have another few set to reset their cycle in the coming days, so will see if this does indeed drop to just 50MB...

In re-reading the policy, it looks like Freedom Friends are still worth 50MB each for up to 500MB max a month. It's Friends data sharing that is limited to 5MB/friend for a max of 50MB/month (unless you already hit the 500MB friend limit).

Most of us have at least 10 friends (or 10 accounts) so we should still be at the 500MB max.

Plenty of typos or information that doesn't match in the TOS update (and I hope you're right, woo_24), but this from a FreedomPop rep on slickdeals

[below conversation copied from Slickdeals thread linked below.]
Quote (question) from xxx (username redacted as a courtesy)
"The info at that link contradicts what's posted above.
It's posted above that 500MB/mo can be earned by adding 10+ Freedom Friends.
The link you provided indicates that only 50MB/mo can be earned.
Which is it?"
[answer from Freedompop rep]
"We sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding. The link we have provided is correct. You can now earn up to a maximum of 50 MBs per month with Freedom Friends. "

https://slickdeals.net/f/11785127-freedompop-gsm-plans-no-credit-card-req-d-3-or-12-mo-1gb-17-99-44-99?page=2#commentsBox

via Amazon purchase of the annual plan.

So this affects both Sprint & ATT ("LTE SIM") sides or just the ATT side?

Well both my ATT LTE sims now show only 200mb a month. Freedom friends are still there so not even getting the 5mb extra per friend.

My global sim shows 700mb total and my sprint line shows 1000mb still. So still getting the full 50mb each for those. Not sure what is happening. Typical freedompop BS.

Edit - appears I can add new friends to get the extra 5mb each. What a joke.

FP should see drastic drop in # of "subscribers"

Dang

That may be the goal. Unload non paying customers and push any user that will pay to the new cheap, not free, Unreal mobile service.

Or the quite reasonably priced annual FP plans, if one is ok with VoIP or mostly looking for data.
Obviously, FP has always faced the need to transition a significant number of customers to paying customers sooner or later. Until recently, I thought most of their "paying" options didn't make sense even if the free plans weren't available.
FP is increasing the pressure to move to paid plans. as they've downgraded the max data allotment of the LTE SIMs by almost 80% over recent months, the Sprint devices by a lower 66%, but also throttled data. (Without data sharing/shuffling, only 65% and 55% reductions.)
I imagine it will be a balancing act for FP, to keep subscriber numbers sufficiently high, while decreasing free data sufficiently.

mmfacemm writes:
"Well both my ATT LTE sims now show only 200mb a month. Freedom friends are still there so not even getting the 5mb extra per friend."

Did these just roll over within the last couple of days? So far, my Sprint, Global, and LTE SIMs all look unchanged, but none has rolled over in the last few days.

It's possible that the missing 5mb per friend will return after the next rollover.

They were asleep and I reactivated them - probably triggering the change. Maybe they will get the 50mb missing when the bill period ends but at this point I will probably cancel. 250mb is peanuts.