Would be nice if one of these companies could get their act together.
I think we can safely conclude that Surge is only at the Alpha stage. Certainly not at final release, and not even in beta. When the final phase is done, everything in theory should be better like not having to call in for renewal. Question is whether or not Surge will make it to that point. That is , will they still exist as a mvno? And if they do get that far where everything is stable and feature complete, will the plans be completely different than what it is today.
Yes a lot of these free mvnos seem to wing it and make radical changes as they go. Usually reacting to issues rather than being proactive. It doesn't usually work out.
It is a fundamental requirement for the moolah app to be installed so they should already have developed a checking process and those that pass should automatically get sent the credits each month to renew the plan. If they don't get the basics sorted out they won't last long. It should be a lot easier than this.
Yeah, that's about where I am. I will probably very rarely hit their throttle, and even if I do, I might not even notice I have. But it bothers me that it isn't mentioned.
Adding a data point about what it looks like when renewing the plan.
I opened a chat with them online and provided my name and Surge phone # when I requested the online chat.
This is what they asked for on the chat.
As a side note, I haven't seen any ads on the Moolah app for a long time (several weeks). Right around the time I was up for renewal it somehow did 70 ads when I wasn't looking two days ago, but no more since then.
Another potentially useful piece of info...last night in chat, while following up on another issue, I asked about the service period and was told that it is 30 days, not 1 month, so (1) my plan renews a day earlier than I expected and (B) I can't just leave the data plan settings for my data usage warning set to a specific day of the month.
Assuming Fred was right, anyhow.
He's probably right--somewhere, in one of the Surgephone threads, mmfacemm got that same answer. (Of course, maybe that was from Fred, too!)
(Edit: It appears mmfacemm might have come to that conclusion empiracaly:
https://www.nthcircle.com/forum/other-mvnos/2761-surgephone-new-user-setup-experience-and-tips?start=60#40362
But it was Fredy who helped with his renewal:
https://www.nthcircle.com/forum/other-mvnos/2761-surgephone-new-user-setup-experience-and-tips?start=60#40348 )
Just this week, they told me it was 30 days. I asked for the exact date renawal date listed on the account and sure enough, it was 30 days. While he said calling in was required, they hope to eventually have an online method for renewal. Of course that assumes the company is in business long enough to implement that feature.
My activation was done by calling them because I wanted to port in a little-used Freedompop number that would have been abandoned otherwise. In the end, I had a new number for 2 days until the port was complete. Surge called me on the ported number when the process was done.
The Moolah app itself and the Moolah app website both indicate that the eventual plan is:
[ul]
[li]The Moolah app adds either enough ad volume or enough other ways to earn M! (presumably in manners similar to earning credits on FreeUp, CellNuvo, GrabPoints, etcetera) that it is feasible to earn over M!100000 per month. Technically, if the place in the app where you can buy Moolah refills for dollars already works, this is sort of already possible, except it's buying them, not earning them; based on my experience, there's no way to do so yet without paying money. I may not be earning as much as possible from ads, but I think I'm doing better than 6-7%.[/li]
[li]With a partnered service provider (read: SurgePhone Wireless) and a paired SIM, you can be automatically charged M!100000 each month by your service provider. Currently, that is the equivalent of $10. There's a place in the app that tells you the current M! "exchange rate," so it looks like they've built in the potential for that to change.[/li]
[li]There's also the part of the app that purports to be able to pay your prepaid phone service bill with other carriers, apparently manually. I'm interpreting this to mean they plan to have a feature similar to how it has, at least at some point, been possible to pay a phone bill with CellNuvo. Neither my Surge number nor my T-Mobile Prepaid number comes up as possible to pay at that screen currently.[/li]
[/ul]
Those apparently-planned features would theoretically provide two ways (one automatic as a Surge customer, one manual but user-serviceable for...any provider they can get to cooperate the way CellNuvo did) to avoid the customer-service-aided renewal.
Currently, renewing someone for having the app installed costs them that $10 they don't get, plus the CSR's time. From what Drysun posted, it looks like the entire process can be accomplished in just a few minutes.
Some users might pay the $10 to avoid that inconvenience. From Moolah's perspective, that's probably a win.
Other users might give up on the service completely if renewal doesn't get easier. From Moolah's perspective, that might be a win right now for some users. I mean, I have a hard time imagining that the app is already generating enough revenue per user from ad impressions that a Standard plan user contacting support for the credit every month is actually making them as much as it costs them to provide the service.
Any automatic or user-serviceable replacement for the current process of a CSR going through "Who are you, do you have the app installed, okay here's your $10 credit" would be inherently temporary unless their business plan changes drastically from what's implied.
Therefore, implementing such a thing would have to save them more money in retaining customers (between having them as Moolah users and possibly using higher tier plans than Standard) and CSR time than it cost them in development time and in payments from any users who remember or bother to use that feature where they might have declined or forgotten to contact support and instead paid $10. And the development time for the feature is a mostly static cost (it shouldn't be complex enough to need much maintenance) that also might take time away from developing the Moolah app, so not only would the remaining costs have to be offset by the benefits, but the difference would have to be enough to recoup that development cost by the time the features in the Moolah app are finished or it's a net loss.
tl;dr: I will be (pleasantly) surprised if they provide an easier way to get your monthly $10 credit for having the app installed before they get the paired sims working - and actually require you to earn M!100000 for the credit.
Then again, I'll also be pleasantly surprised if their business model is sustainable.
I'm going to run an experiment. My plan renews around the 20th. For the next 10 days or so, I'm going to pull my SIM and put it into an iPhone SE, which obviously cannot run Moolah. I'm going to then put the SIM back into my "official" Surge Android phone (an old Motorola Droid Mini) before calling in to renew. We'll see if they notice.
Interesting. Look forward to seeing if they tie the SIM to the IMEI like Metro does. P.s. if I managed to forget or read about this being done already, my apologies. Still, would be interesting to see if they notice reporting from the moolah app.
In the Moolah app when you pair your sim, the data it loads is IMEI, ICC ID, and phone number. So that at least suggests the ability for them to know it. However, while it will be interesting to see how bingyee's experiment goes:
[ol]
[li]Reported experiences so far suggest that they are not usually even bothering to make sure you're telling the truth when you claim you have the app installed, let alone that you have it installed on that phone, nor that you didn't just install it two minutes ago so you could truthfully tell them you had[/li]
[li]The fact that the app implies a future ability to pay other prepaid phone bills with M! credits suggests that even in the future, the paired sim / autopay ability specific to Surge (and other participating providers, if there ever are any) may be mostly for convenience, and as long as you're making and spending the M!100000, they won't actually care whether you did so on the device the sim is in. We can hope, anyhow.[/li]
[/ol]
I ran the Moolah app for about a month before ordering Surge in order to see if I could stand the launcher. For the most part, the app was tolerable because there was never any ads. Mostly, I just saw a list of my apps with no icons. At most, I reached about 500 on their app. I cannot imagine ever reaching 100,000 in a month.
Prior to ordering, I asked whether a minimum number of moolah points was required each month. The response I got was a NO.
Well, I hope for the sake of early adopters that stands indefinitely. The information available on the Surge site is very limited, and the information on the Moolah site already seemed to purport that the arrangement is based on earning 100k/mo when I signed up even though that appears to be impossible, so I'm assuming that eventually I'm going to have to do that, at which point (especially if I can catch a flash sale or something) Red Pocket may become preferable depending on how the app progresses. We'll see.
I just did my first renewal. Experience was almost the same as drysun's, except Juan asked my if I had the app installed first and then for my name and phone number, not name and address. Took only a few minutes, including waiting for Juan to connect and...what I think was about a minute between when I could see the updated totals and when Juan told me it was done.
One thing I don't remember seeing mentioned up-thread: I got a text from them yesterday evening reminding me my plan was about to expire, but not specifying when. My current 30 day period should be ending on the 14th. So...three business days in advance is okay, maybe?
scriptninja, did the agent allow you to do a renewal prior to the renewal date? I know that several folks previously have been told to call back on the renewal date.
The text notification is welcome improvement.
Unless somehow I managed to create my account on August 15 but have my first service period end on September 12, yes, I seem to have been allowed to renew before the Last Possible Day.
I think they text 3 days in advance period. I was texted at the beginning of August when my first month was nearing the end. It was a Friday and I figured, well, I'll contact them Monday since I didn't know if anyone would be there on the weekend. Come Monday, my phone doesn't work. I chatted with them online and they renewed the plan, asked about app, etc, but didn't say anything about me missing the renewal date.
The second renewal, I think I did it the next day after I got the text. The totals added to the current amounts and I guess whenever the month ended, it dropped the previous months values (ie, at one point it said I had like 1800MB, then later dropped to like 997MB).
Bonus just for kicks, I did take the sim out and plop it into my T-Mobile testdrive hotspot they were giving out and it worked, no changes needed. Sadly, bands out where I live aren't that great so it can't show me the benefits of B71 (since it's not out here). Only B2/4/12 out here. After I finished goofing off with it for a couple days, I put it back into my phone with the moolah app.
Yes looks like they will do it in advance now. I did mine 2 days early and they processed it this time. Do note the expiry date is 30 days from the day you renew.
For those who used a new dedicated address when signing up, are you getting any spam emails from Surge or Moolah? I used an old address and am trying to figure out if me getting more junk mails nowadays is related or not.