This is anecdotal (of course), might actually be my memory failing, and is not something I'd recommend relying on anyway, especially since I think there might be something weird about my account status (I have no addons available, apparently could only add credit by buying a refill card because no other means of payment seem to be usable, and have what I think is a second non-existent device halfway through the activation process)...but I'm almost positive that I have missed the "renewal" window at least one month and my free plan just kept going without my intervention. In other words, I am now one of the first category of iffy cases mentioned above.
I'll check again around the new year and see what happens.
I am also fairly certain I have neglected to manually renew free plan and it's still active (500 talk/text + 100mb). That said, unless FU launches a new rewards program I don't see how it makes any sense for them to not discontinue even the grandfathered free plans.
Agreed. To speculate, FU's plan from the get-go was to have many people sign up for the free plan and once they saw how easy it was to earn $7/$15 a month via the rewards program with which to fully or partially pay for a pain plan, many would upgrade to a paid plan. But I doubt FU correctly predicted the huge number of people who would get a free plan and earn rewards but never upgrade to a paid plan. I also suspect that FU didn't really understand its contract with billaway.com and thus its inability to have control over the rewards program, which ended, as we know, not well as one party pulled the plug on the program. Given FU's reasonable prices for their global plans, it might survive, but there is no good reason now to offer or keep Free plans active and as has been mentioned the F in FU needs to be removed.
Other than the hope that those of us on the free plan realize that the paid plans are still worth recommending to friends. (And I think they are, for those with high talk/text needs, and international calling.)
As an example, I use the FreedomPop free plan. I've recommended the preloaded SIMs to a range of friends, while I wouldn't recommend the free plan to most.
I don't know if this is KentE's reason, but I know I've come across some folks who consider the preloaded sims a decent deal but stay away from the free plans because the preloads can be activated and used without adding a payment method to your account, making it harder for you to get charged for things you didn't mean to enable (or the one-cent-a-month fee they've had at times that essentially seemed to be what they charged for the service of making sure they could still charge you if you incurred charges).
I suspect Free Up suspended new free plans due to the surge of users jumping ship with Tello's Pay as You Go plan rule changes.
Free Up has been really good about allowing current users to stay with their free plan, regardless of the current free plan offering.
The rewards program showed again how FreeUp stayed true to their word and all users were credited with their rewards.
I believe Free Up benefited by the rewards program, just as users benefited with rewards. They're probably trying to secure a new rewards program so both users and Free Up can benefit from the free plan. For this reason, it makes sense why Free Up continues with the free plans even though there's no obvious benefit for them at this moment. If they can come up with a new rewards program, they'll already have a solid user base who've received many months of free service and likely willing to try the new rewards program.
Another thing to keep in mind, if they're working with companies to develop a new rewards program, being able to show a real user base of free users is worth something. They can show perspective companies they're coming to the table with an established user base not starting from scratch.
scriptninja, thanks for saving me a lot of typing!
Plus, 1GB (or more) per month on the preloaded SIM is enough data for a lot of folks to do something with. Now that the free plans are down to 200 mb (250mb with 10 friends), it takes someone being very aware to get much use out of it without either running out of data, or hitting overages. $3-$5/mo is more manageable for most folks than that set of issues.
I just swapped my SIM into an AT&T Go Flip 2 (Alcatel flip phone w/ LTE) and it's working fine. I got it from eBay for $15 shipped (used). A big step up from my P.O.S. Pieces flip phone (3G). It appears to be using a cut-down version of Android called KaiOs so it feels somewhat Android-like. KaiOS even has an app store but it's disabled in this phone .
And no, you don't need a payment method.
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