Well I am not giving them any numbers in my SSN
Cost savings? Not renewing the plan maybe saves them money. Plus it's a hassle factor to weed out glove box phone users.
BTW, who's to say that the online chat was not a BOT?
How can they ask for your SSN? When I got a card that was not asked and they did not ask when I renewed my plan. Heck when I renewed via chat 2 weeks ago, I think they just asked for the surge number and asked if I had Moolah installed.
Thanks. My renewal is in a few days so will see. Perhaps it depends on which agent you get.
From the sound of that they have no system in place to check you have moolah installed on the phone. I suspect the need to call/chat is all they can do to make sure users are installing the app and keeping it running just by asking users to self certify each month. The agent would then manually add the credit if satisfied.
Maybe they will eventually implement a system to automatically check and renew but right now it seems like everything about surge is a work in progress.
Okay so I renewed my plan today.
I contacted surge on Saturday by chat and was asked by Marlon for my name and address only. I was told I was too early and had to do it on Monday which was the day my plan expires.
Okay so fast forward to Monday and I reach Fredy on the chat who asks for my name, address and last 4 digits of my social this time. I already had entered in my phone and said I was on the free plan and had moolah installed. I give my name and address and tell him they don't have my social nor do they need it and so they can't have it lol. He proceeds to check the account and renew the plan for another month.
The online account just shows the 1000 mins/ 4000texts / 1000mb added to the old balance. Not sure if last month rolls over or if it will drop off tomorrow. But there is no indication that I have another month other than what Fredy told me.
So far so good. For $10 it was worth the experiment and anything from here is a bonus.
mmfacemm writes: "The online account just shows the 1000 mins/ 4000texts / 1000mb added to the old balance. Not sure if last month rolls over or if it will drop off tomorrow. But there is no indication that I have another month other than what Fredy told me."
I'm pretty sure that previous reports match your experience with the new allotments adding to the old, and reported that the leftovers from last month will disappear when the plan date rolls over.
I don't remember reports about how/when the plan expiration date displayed changes.
It's a pain that the window for renewal is so short-- a busy workday might exceed 16 hours for me, and sooner or later that would be a problem.
Wait, you folks have something that shows your plan expiration date? My portal doesn't have that. And I was already wondering whether I'd have trouble getting the credit taken care of, say, next month, when assuming it's supposed to be the same day of the month, my plan rolls over on a Sunday.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I got a call back from them saying the F at the end of my ICC ID in the Moolah app meant I'd been sent a SIM for a plan they don't support anymore and needed a new one...
Of course, fifteen minutes after they said they'd send me the new SIM I got a follow-up email saying I don't need a new SIM after all but they need my IMEI. Which I'm trying to follow up on, but it's awkward...I never expected to need to send email TO them (I was expecting some kind of ticketing system to reply to) so the email address I was using is one I can't actually send from. But that's a separate issue.
No expiration date on the online portal. I was just told it by the agent i chatted with.
That seems a design oversight, doesn't it? 
I wonder if it's fixed to the day of the month, or on a 30 day cycle?
Yes they are very much a work in progress. They say they are working on new features for the online portal including an expiry date. But how long it will take is unknown.
Seems to be a 30 day cycle from when they key in the renewal. So if you have it renewed at 5pm it will expire at 5pm in 30 days.
I've had no issues with the cell service itself and it offers generous allotments for free. The steps required are not that bad considering what you get. Just have to take a note of the renewal date and be careful. As well as put up with the homescreen launcher. If you are used to older phones the launcher won't feel that out of place.
I am used to older phones that were cheap even when new, so perhaps the launcher will feel like an improvement. (Yay, a free upgrade!)
Yes you are right the old allotments dropped off today.
I've been getting really bad speeds all of a sudden tonight. My other tmobile mvno line works fine. I'm seeing 0.2 MBps down and upload speeds versus the usual 30/10. Really strange. I have 380mb left so it should still work.
This happened to me last month on my first month on Surge. I was getting 256kbs. After 2 chats and 3 calls, I finally got to a person who escalated the issue and later let me know that, YES, they do throttle after the first 500MB. This was after at least two others had said that there was no throttling. I said that was not mentioned anywhere in their T&C or on their site. Just another sign that Surge is in need of a more professional system if they are to survive.
thanks. yes just confirmed with support. there is no mention of that anywhere. Oh well.
Used 650mb day 1 so that screws me for the rest of the month.
It should definitely be stated. But, I could probably muddle through with 256k-- I've managed to do so on Tello's 64k. (Using Puffin browser, and being patient.....)
Oh, what awaits me on that Tello line... one of our lines switched to the 1GB option with the lower speed afterwards. Wats worst is that troubleshooting some data issues, we burned through about 300 mb just testing and re doing. Funny thing is that what caused the issues was the FreedomPop profile being installed on the iPhone using that line. I thought I had removed it but it was there and the backup kept restoring it. Now it's funny but then it was pulling hairs since first it would work with LTE and then it would just get stuck on 3G (once the profile was restored from the backup).
Oxymoron of SURGE. haha
Well, I spoke too soon about my 3rd month renewal going smoothly.
The day after my renewal via a chat session, I noticed my available texts, mins, and data went to 0 within my account.
I called Surge tech support, which was easy to do at this point, since all abound calls from my phone went directly to Surge.
The wisdom of Surge tech support was dismal to say the least. I was told I had used up all of my texts, mins, and data. They even told me about all of my calls of 1, 2, and 5 minutes for the month. After wasting my time, I said how does all those calls of roughly 300 minutes amount to 1000 minutes? Tech support was puzzled but insisted I used up all my balances.
Then it was 50 questions time again. Did I have the Moolah app, what's my full name and address, etc.
After all this, he reset my account. I had it on the screen and behold the new values were all wrong, 250 minutes, 250 messages, and 250 mb.
Then I had to explain what I really should have. After fumbling around for a few more minutes, he found the right plan and reset everything to the correct amounts.
I was away for a few days, returned. Tried to login to my account and could not.
I turned on my phone and it was set for emergency use only.
Then I had to contact tech support via chat to make my account active and give me the correct amounts again.
Of course 50 questions again.
While, my phone works again and I have the correct balances, clearly Surge isn't going to be a long term solution for me.
Contacting them once a month via phone or chat doesn't mean the new balances will be added to the account.
The Moolah app is unproven as to how much of my data is being collected and sold.
Now if they're throttling the data after the first 500 mb, that's something that wasn't disclosed to me.
The shame thing is I was planning on paying Surge $10 month for this plan, uninstalling the Moolah app and erasing the phone.
$10 is a good price for T-mobile 1000 talk, 1000 mb, 4000 messages. The phone service had been working fine for me.
But given the conditions, I don't want to take a chance their paid setup is no better than the free one.
Technically if you want to pay for the plan, ie, via credit card, I believe you can actually do that yourself without contacting them. When I played around with the account website when my plan was ready to renew, I noticed you could click "Add" and it gives you the option to pick a plan to increment your allotments. The only thing I don't like is no mention of expiration/when the month ends, so I don't know if it re-ups your month or just adds to the allotment for your current month.