Actual Free Phone Plans (non-wifi):
FreedomPop
FreedomPop is what inspired this post. BikeGuy and GoMike deserve a hat-tip for sharing this with me. And I wrote this entire thing to post last week, and then decided to see if FreedomPop has an affiliate program. They do, and now I’m posting with the hopes of making tens of dollars… or at least ten. Point is; affiliate links are after the fact, just so you know I actually love FreedomPop that much.
Link: FreedomPop Phone. FreedomPop is a free sprint phone plan. I kid you not.
Per month, you get:
- 200 minutes
- 500 texts
- 500 mb of data
For free. If you want to go over that, or if you happen to go over that, you pay for extra data. You can get a plan for more data, or pay per minute/text/MB of data that you go over.
Buying the phone: The one cost is the phone. BikeGuy was kind enough to give us one that he bought that he couldn’t use because where he lived just didn’t get sprint. So you may be able to find someone else on ebay who’s selling it for cheap. Or just buy the smart phone from FreedomPop for $79. It’s an HTC Droid.
Wifi (while traveling). The phone internationally will still make calls and texts on wifi with the same number. I tested this out and called my mom from Panama today and it was just like using the phone any other time.
This month I’ve browsed the web, talked on the phone and sent texts and haven’t come close to our limit.
Free/Cheap Phone Plans
Wifi based
Our current phone strategy is a rather untraditional phone set up, but it works pretty well for what we need. We are all wifi. We don’t really have a phone plane. We have options for wifi.
Most everywhere has wifi. Hotels, airports, restaurants, most stores, the walking mall in Cville, the busses and parks in Hong Kong, etc… You’re close to wifi at any given point in time.
More and more places have wifi and signals on phones and routers are getting better.
Skype
My friend swears google voice is a free, and therefore better option, but we’re locked into skype and fairly happy with it.
We pay a few dollars a month for a phone number and for a few hundred minutes of calling US numbers. The best part is that we can make calls from anywhere in the world. A traditional phone plan allows you to only make calls in the US. Seeing as we’ve spent maybe 2 months in the last year in the US… that would be kind of a waste.
Pros:
- Skype is good at getting online and a few times at airports that only sell wifi, skype can sometimes charge your account to get online.
- Signals are good and communication is good even on shotty wifi… most of the time.
- Voice mail
- Being able to login and call from multiple devices. I can call from my phone or laptop.
Cons:
- No Text SMS at all on your phone number.
- It’s not cloud based. Minor detail but contacts and history will be on your phone/computer and not in the cloud.
Text Apps
Text Apps are buggy and the free ones are ad supported, but they meet the needs. And while traveling, as long as we have wifi, Carrie is texting her family constantly.
Programs we’ve tried are “Textme,” “Text plus” and “TextNow.” Text plus sends more ad-texts than the other ones, but otherwise they’re all equally mediocre. Often people will recommend text apps they’ve heard of but the main idea is to find an app that messages a phone, not just a messaging app that messages other people with that app because people often confuse the two.
We can never get people to label our numbers though so people are constantly trying to call our text number. Luckily “Textme” (or probably most of them) notify you when someone has tried to call you, even if you aren’t able to pick up and answer (for free).
Google Voice
My friend Adam swears that I should cut out skype and switch to Google Voice because it’s free. I haven’t switched for two reasons. 1) I paid for a year of skype calls (super cheap). And 2) I can’t set it up. It asked for my real phone number to call through… and I don’t really have one of those.
If you figured out Google Voice as an alternative to a normal phone, comment and I’ll update this. Lol.
I do know that google allows calls and texts and it’s free. Free is great.
Getting Used Smart Phones
I promise you there are at least 30 people in your life who have smart phones sitting in a closet at home. Most people don’t want to get rid of these because… Well, it would be a complete waste to pay $200 for a phone and stop using it even though it’s nearly completely fine. Therefore, it should sit unused.
Ebay, amazon, pawn shops, thiftstores (?), or friends who realize the irony of keeping something they won’t use so it’s not a waste… There are plenty of phones that are perfectly fine, or perhaps the ways in which they’re broken won’t affect a wifi-only user.
Cheap/Free Internet Plan
FreedomPop
Link: FreedomPop mobile hotspot for 5 devices
Again, FreedomPop is awesome and they have free internet devices. One is a hot spot and the other is a USB drive.
It gives 500MB of data a month free. Again, you can pay for a plan or just pay per mb when you go over.
They sell them for $20 and sometimes give them away for free. I got ours from FreedomPop free because they were giving away old models (I think). Better someone use them and get roped into their plan than to let it sit… I guess?
Think about though…
Pay the one time $29.99 to buy the hotspot. Then pay $0 a month from here on out. Okay. Compare that to Boingo. Boingo is $9.99 a month or for like once use, and they have stingy fees, and their service sucks depending where you are in an airport. Since we’ll have the Southwest Companion Pass, this makes way more sense. Besides the fact I can use it outside of the airport, it’s better than a Boingo plan for domestic airports.
Update: On our road trip to the Grand Canyon (with Carrie’s family) I spent the entire time in the back of the van online, mostly answering emails, some browsing the web and forums (Saverocity forums) and the first day of all-day use I used less than 100mb. But I made sure I wasn’t logged into things I wasn’t using, like dropbox. And I turned off Facebook’s automatic streaming of videos.
FreedomPop ending? FreedomPop has announced that they will stop their WiMax (?) services by the end of 2015. No one knows exactly how this will affect/change things. When? New hardware or new firmware update? If it’s a hardware update, will your product be replaced? No idea.
Conclusion
Really, for the last 3 years we’ve gotten by with Skype, and then in the last two years we’ve had an old iPhone with Skype for a phone number and text apps. This keeps us connected as much as we need to be.
Does Carrie talk to her family regularly? Yes. Do we have access on long car rides? Now, thanks to FreedomPop, Yes. Before? No, but we don’t own a car. Are we as connected as someone with a full data plan via Verizon? No. But way more than anyone was a decade ago.
Internationally we’re better off. I’m not about to pay for an international phone plan. Although I know a lot of people buy sim cards when they land. We move around too much and just don’t need it. We can make calls more than 50% of the day. I have no reason to be more connected than that.
Anyways, this is what works for us. It’s not a broken system that needs fixed, but we have had a few updates.
Any other tips for phone plans internationally and cheapo plans in general? I know this is a crew with a plan.
I really don’t trust Google voice outside of the states. I used it in Canada on wifi and came home to a $600 cell phone bill. I switched to Skype when I was in Europe and have no complaints.
I guess it’s worth the $2 or whatever.
I dont know why you got home with a $600 bill unless you were routing all of your google voice calls to first dial your real mobile number. Normally, through the use of the official VoIP application made by Google called “Hangouts” or even by the use of the old version of GrooveIP that connects to Google Voice (the new version uses Ring.To instead) I see no reason why anyone should be charged for calling a US number from abroad. For example, I have FreedomPop, which is basically a data only plan on my Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone operating using the Sprint towers, I dont have a real sprint number or any other number attached to my phone and I use the HANGOUTS app with the HANGOUTS dialer app to make and receive phone calls with no problems, obviously my calls are not getting routed to any number as I dont have a mobile number attached to this phone I have and dont have a credit card attached to my google wallet account. Even though I haven’t traveled from my home city of New York further than Virginia Beach, I will be traveling to Bermudas and Puertorico this year on June and I am almost pretty sure I wont have issues dialing from, lets say bermuda to call my Aunt in New York City over the hotel’s WiFi connection and if the attempt were to fail, well I have the newest version of GrooveIP installed already with a Ring.To phone number there as my other freeware backup and I can probably get a terciary backup just in case if I shall want.
In my personal opinion, our $600 bill was most likely due to 3G roaming charges as you know, Google Voice (Hangouts / or Old version of GrooveIP) uses your data to pass your voice calls, so it NEEDS your data, UNLESS you disable both, your 3G and 4G radio and only leave on WiFi and only connect to a WiFi hotspot to make a call.
I wouldn’t worry about losing Wimax, as that wass Sprint’s original 4G infrastructure, before LTE. Only an older 4G phone would use that.
That’s good to hear. I really didn’t know what it meant, but found their forums weren’t helpful as the representative kept answering with, “we’ll disclose more later”. Which… is pretty vague.
T-Mobile. T-Mobile. T-Mobile. Unlimited data and texts abroad. Easy as that.
$50 – $80 a month is way too much for me right now. But it’s totally a great option. I’m just on the free budget right now…
how about magicjack its 20.00 a year and can make unlimited calls in other countrys to usa – I use it in Thailand to call home for free -but did pay the 19.95 for a year
Looked it up. http://www.magicjack.com/index.html
Watched the video but I’m confused. Do you plug in the usb to an old style home-phone? Then make calls?
And looks like there is an app. A lot like skype in that you can call home? If so, it may be cheaper for the unlimited plan.
I live in Doha, Qatar and have used both Skype and MagicJack apps on my iPhone. When I used the MagicJack app on the iPhone it was free (not sure if it still is). It worked great for a while, but started having connection issues after about a month, so I gave it up and went back to Skype. $36/year for all you can call back to the US is a steal of a deal for me. If MagicJack was more consistent, it’d be great.
Just looked @Magic Jack, a guy I met in the local cafe strongly recommended it. I came back to your site since I remember someone talking about it. It looks like the app is still free, though you have to have both members with the app or Jack. Otherwise it’s $35/yr cheapest I think. I guess it depends on where you are located.
I am looking for a way to call back to US, but business #’s (trying to set up a small medical billing service to fund my travels), so I need something that’s not app-dependent.
+1 for T-Mo.
Had a great experience with them in S America.
One day. :-p
I am confused. Is freedom pop an option for overseas? ( I am not sure why you are discussing it.) If you are looking for free or near free, then ringplus phone service should go in as an option for phone service, I guess. If you are discussing data options for US only, I would consider T-Mobile’s $30 month at 4G with 100 minutes of talk. You can only sign up for this plan online when you first pick a plan. AKA the Walmart plan.
Well… it’s a post about our personal phone plan while traveling on my personal travel blog. Seemed worthy of discussion at the time.
Indeed, as I said, you can use the freedompop overseas on wifi. I updated it saying I called my mom from Panama too.
Never heard of ringplus… Is that like a paid version of the freedompop?
And for US only options freedompop has 4g with 200 minutes of talk for $0 a month instead of $30.
Drew could you receive calls via your freedompop phone while abroad. Someone in the us call your us phone while your connected to wifi in italyjoe
My Wife and I have used Google Voice for the past 3 years while living in Germany. We signed up when we both had phone numbers from our cell phones back in the US. Even after we cancelled those cell phone plans, Google Voice still works great … on our computers. We can call and text anyone in the US for free as long as we have a laptop with internet connectivity. International rates with Google Voice are great as well.
Also, if you have a tablet or smartphone and want to use google voice over wifi for free, you can sign up for http://www.talkatone.com/index.html which will give you a free phone number to link up with Google Voice. That will give you free inbound / outbound calls and texts to any US number whenever you are connected to wifi, anywhere in the world 🙂
That’s what I was missing, a number… I guess. I was hoping they would give me a number.
Thanks Andy.
Hey Andy,
I just got a google voice # and I am going to forward my regular verizon cell phone to it while I’m overseas. I’m sure to get text messages, too, to my verizon cell phone number – can those be forwarded/intercepted by google voice, too?
Thanks!
I love the bizarre English in your posts as much as I love the content. “Shotty” – not shitty, not shoddy, but “shotty” 🙂
That’s hilarious. Most of the time I write off these comments as it’s not like I hire an editor and other blogs do, so most people don’t realize that it’s a huge difference. But every once in a while, someone points out a bizarre Drewism. Not a typo or misspelling really… but something just wrong, but came out of my mind as a fact. lol
What I don’t get is why you don’t use a basic spell checker?
How do you get “busses”? Or “mediocer” Don’t you bother to spend 2 seconds to proof read? Or do you simply not give a damn?
Can’t afford a spell check other than the one in google chrome for wordpress. There will be typos, I’m over it.
dont they charge you when you dont use it for a month? this is why i didnt use it because i leave the country a few months at a time.
Who? FreedomPop? I hope not. I’m not aware of this. But I can still use on wifi.
yes. freedompop, please make sure no charge if you DONT use it… at least, it was that way when i looked last time.
There are plenty of used Sprint iPhones for sale on eBay. The iPhone 4’s go for roughly $70. I don’t know if they use WiMax or LTE.
Hi Drew,
Love the blog. I am especially interested in this topic but don’t quite understand. We have Sprint as our carrier. As travel agents, we travel a lot but would like to travel more. What’s stopping us is the issue of being able to run our business while we are away. We need to be able to receive forwarded calls from our business line. Does freedompop give you a phone number? I followed your link to try and get some info but it was sketchy with info about international use.
Hi Drew can you send the link to where Freedom Pop gives the free smartphone device? The link on the ad has a $79 one and I was trying to find the free one.
Ok well can I just use my regular non-smart phone to connect to Freedom Pop and just have them send me a SIM?
Also I can tether too?
Also don’t forget for the US calling there is the Obama phone with I think like 300 free minutes per month.