5GB

2024-06 update: years of subscription, mint roaming is awesome! It has been a couple years since I started my trial. I did acknowledge that T-Mobile is/has acquiring/acquired Mint, I do wish there is no further change to the existing plan, but increasing the data allowance would be awesome. I did travel to Canada and Germany this year, and I was able to roam in both countries by purchasing the mint roaming pass. This is rare for prepaid services I have to say. 2022-07 update: hotspot also works under 5G Had to make some travels in the past month, I used the hotspot feature, and did a speed test. The hotspot speed tested on my laptop is the same as the one on the phone, which is 5G speed not capped at 4G/LTE or any lower speed. Gotta recommend this. Also I renewed again. Coverage still depends on T-Mobile. 2021-12 update: eSIM is available! If you need help to convert to eSIM, navigate to the online portal and request it for free. Takes about 5 minutes. 2020-10 update: T-Mobile turned on 5G in my area. I saw 5G on my Samsung Note 20, did a speed test, in the ball park of 200Mbps. Hence, when not congested, performance is indeed rather nice. Latency is in mid 50 ms. 2020 - 03 Update: I renewed for another 12 months. I don't see a reason to leave. Need more info? Scroll down! UPDATE: IOS Wi-Fi calling worked. Please update your system to iOS11+. It has been 3 months, I renewed as annual plan. The past 3 months experiences were pleasant. If you need more details, keep scrolling down! I have been using different prepaid services for my personal phone since my business phone from the company handles most of my calls. Hence, I can risk my own device to try out all the possibilities and save a couple dollars. Hereby, let me break down into pros and cons: ============================================================================== Pros: 1. Big amount of data with hotspot tethering supported! Okay, for under $30 per month excluding the tax and fees, you can't find anything like this. If you purchase this on sale, yes, it will be 5GB (NOW WITH 8GB) per month for you for 3 months. 2. Wi-Fi calling on Android actually works! (With supported phones) With Pixel XL and another T-Mobile Samsung phone, I was able to get Wi-Fi calling working, simply by registering online. Do make sure to check your phone compatibility. iPhone from my wife simply can't do it. Please bear that in mind. ( Worked with new iOS update! ) Make sure you update your E911 address on the website after the activation. 3. Hassle free activation with no credit card needed for sign up! Well, if you are not sure if you will stick around with it, and worry about auto charge, during the sign up period, you can skip for adding credit card. And activation only requires the ACT CODE on the back of the card, takes about 1 minute to activate. 4. Cute and elegant account management interface. My wife likes the sim card and the mascot design, you can't deny it. And the web management interface is WAYYYYYY better than some of those competitors. You can easily get the most you needed from it. But, how often do you need to log in anyway? 5. Number good for banks and short-codes Yes, your banks and short-code service will go through like a breeze. ================================================================================== Now, lets talk about Cons: 1. Data de-prioritization This thing is prepaid as well. So it is subject to throttling. That is generally known as de-prioritization. Since you are paying for the service with a discount. So you are not in the fast lane always. During the busy time in downtown Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco, this card will speed lower. I saw some posts actually complain about the speed, but most of them didn't factor in this issue. The speed is not painfully slow unless you go to the stadium on a game day. I'd suggest on Game Day, just concentrate on the game and family rather than Instagram, makes you a gentleman. (Well, when you have to, since stuff won't load... Like 0.02 mbps for download...) But yes, off-busy time, I had same fast speed across boards as the speed from postpaid tmobile business plan. 2. Customer service Well, the customer service waiting time over the phone is... long. So grab a cup of coffee when you call. 3. Number pool Well, they must withdraw the number from a pool of prepaid, then depending on your luck. If the previous owner had the number signed up for some ghetto things, you will get spam calls and so. You folks might ask National Do Not Call List... Okay, here is a thing, it takes 30 days for the system to completely register your account. ==================================================================================== Overall, what do I think? I'll stick around for 3 months, at least. (I mean, I paid for this already, no refund at this point...) Also, if after 3 month, new customer if and only if gets the same $20 for 3 months, then yes. If it would be your primary phone and you need to do your next millionaire job with your service, then I guess no, go postpaid. If you are a person like me, who only uses data for none crazy things, like just social media, email, web browsing, or 9GAG on the go. You'd be fine. Streaming? Not so much... Good luck and have fun folks! Keep the SIM card, cuz it is cute!

Loved the service. U can get ur phone plan cheap if u pay up ahead of time. Like 45 is 3 months unlimited so basically 15.00 a month but u have to pay it quarterly if u do 6 months or a year saves u money in long run. They even called me n told me I picked a plan that was too high according to my usage n so I downgraded. Um NEVER has a company called me to tell me I'm paying too much! N Ryan Reynolds even left a pre-recorded message wishing me & a million other moms to Have a Happy Mother's day... Can u say momma's boy haha

General Overview- Prior to using Mint mobile, I had been with AT&T for 10 years. I have been using MINT mobile for 6 months now, and I have no complaints. I purchased the 12gb/month at $25 per month. Mint sent me a nice letter with the sim card inside that can break down from a regular sim, microsim, or nanosim. Putting in the sim was as easy as taking a pin or paperclip, popping out the sim tray, and putting it in the phone. Of note, this $75 deal is for a 3 month package, and to maintain that rate, you must pay up front for a whole year. Honestly, it is so nice knowing I do not have to pay another phone bill until November this year. Data plans- At the time of this posting, Mint offers 3gb, 8gb, and 12gb plans with prices of $15, $20, and $25 per month respectively. When you buy in bulk, the more you save. Many people I have talked to about Mint mobile are skeptical because they do not offer an unlimited data option at this time. I do not think people realize how much data they actually use. Mint plans all have unlimited talk and text in the US and after reviewing my monthly usage, I realized that even the 12gb plan I have is too much and when I renew I will be going to the 8gb plan. Think about it, at home you are on wifi and at work you are on wifi. Unlimited data is a scam given by big phone companies to make you pay for more than what you need. Call quality- I do not see a difference in call quality compared to my prior carrier. I have only had one dropped call in 6 months of use. Data speeds appear to be adequate for daily use, obviously in high traffic areas such as concerts, data speeds and accessibility are negatively impacted. Referrals- You are able to refer others to mint mobile using your referral code. For example, my referral code is fbuyme/nBqV. When someone signs up using your link, both you and the person you referred get a $15 credit towards your next renewal bill. There was even a promotion once where if you refer 5 people you would get enough credit for 1-2 years of service depending on the plan you chose. I have referred friends and family to Mint and they also enjoy the service and especially the price! Promotions-Occasionally, there are deals where you can get 6 months free when you sign up or the service for a discounted rate, so if you are thinking of making the switch, wait for a promotion. From time to time, Mint opens an exclusive "underground" website, where users of mint can get exclusive clothing, gear, accessories, etc. Keep your own phone number -Moving my number from my prior carrier was seamless and extremely fast, when I input my number into the app my phone began working in minutes. I believe I had to call my prior phone company first because I was on the plan with another user, but after that its as simple as downloading the mint mobile app and inputting your phone number. Compatibility- I have used Mint only with iphones, and it works seamlessly. Mobile hot spot works. Visual voicemail works. Facetime quality is good. I do not have experience using mint on android devices, but there is a full compatibility checklist on Mint's website. Pretty much is a phone is unlocked, it should work. Mint works off the TMobile towers, so if your phone is Tmobile it should work too. A word of caution for Verizon and sprint phone owners (except for iphone). Verizon, Sprint, and US cellular phones use CDMA (a different signal) that does not require sim cards. An unlocked iPhone is compatible and uses a SIM card tray so there are no issues. I would imagine due to the lack of company exclusive phones like in the past, there should not be an issue as long as the phone is unlocked, but I would check the phone compatibility prior to making the switch. International- when on Wifi, you can make calls and send texts as normal via wifi calling, regardless if you use an iphone or android. International calls start at $0.06 per minute, and you load credit onto your account to maintain service out of the US. TLDR; Too Long, Didn't Read- Mint is a great phone company. If it makes a difference to you, Ryan Reynolds is now technically the owner and also uses Mint mobile.. that's how much trust he has in the company. Check your phone compatibility and input your zip into Mints website to ensure the best results. Use in the Chicagoland area has been great in my experience. I highly recommend Mint to everyone and will not switch to one of the big 4 until I live in a place where Mint doesn't work.

After reading all negative review, I still decided to give it a try. You know what, all of them are correct. So nothing new here. In short, trial sim works, porting number doesn't work, customer support is slow to respond and helpless. Wasted $5 and 5 days of my time. Full story: I really had high hopes for the mint mobile, as they prices sound right and additional services for roaming and international calls are exactly what I need. Trial sim was installed with no problems and number was assigned. Data and mms configuration is semi - automatic on iphone (you'll get sms that you need to accept) and manual on android (you need to enter 3-4 config lines). But everything works ok after a day of testing on both devices. Issues start when I decided to 'make it official'. App instructions are non existent, so mint has successfully charged me for the full promo plan and that was it. Trying to port number on the next screen gives the error, no explanation what to do and credit card was already charged. The only option is to contact mint support. I was aware about helpless support by phone with hang ups and requesting the same info again and again, so I decided to keep it organized and use emails. No big difference, other than that it takes 24h to get a reply on every email exchange, so it was really slow communication. They asked for 'Act Code' and 'OSP' among the other of usual pin and ICCID. Does anybody know what 'Act Code' and 'OSP' stand for? Google doesn't know, as well as t-mobile prompt support. The answer is 'Activation Code' and 'Old Service Provider'. After all info was provided (I was hoping so), I didn't get a reply for more than 24h. So I've decided to request a refund, considering it was Friday, no idea if they work on weekends and we're getting close to the end of 7 days refund window. Still no reply from the original support person. But Saturday morning I got an email from a different person on a separate request I made about a refund. I've replied to it and 24h after got a confirmation that refund was issued and should appear in 24-48 business hours. They really need to invest into automating everything and have correct error messages and clear instructions about what to do next in the app to avoid unnecessary communication with the support. Why charge the card before the port is successful? Would be much better just to place a hold on card and charge after everything is ported successfully.

(UPDATE: I liked this 3 months SIM so much that I purchased a 6 month SIM direct from Mint. I didn't need to use it right away so I just stuck it in a drawer. A month later I got an email from Mint warning me that if I didn't activate the SIM within 45 days from purchase, it would be permanently deactivated! There was nothing on their website mentioning this. I contacted their support and was told that this policy comes from T-Mobile (Mint uses their network) and actually the SIM might still activate after 45 days. But if it didn’t, I could contact Mint support and they would get it working - though it could take 5-7 business days. This definitely is something that they should make clear in their product info. I’m also not sure about blaming it on T-Mobile since I know that US Mobile - which also uses the T-Mo network - has SIM cards that last 2 years before needing to be activated. The rest of this review is about the 3 month card I purchased from Amazon, before I got the 6 month card.) Overall I’m really happy with Mint so far. It was easy to set up, the service works well, and support is good too. Activating the card was seamless, the info provided with the SIM and on their website was really well organized and clear and the process was easy. You can choose to add a credit card for auto-renew when the 3 months are up, but I skipped that. About the minor negative I noticed during activation is that I didn’t get to choose my new number from a list; instead they just assigned me one. Once activation was finished the website clearly told me how to update my phone’s data settings (though I found that on my phone, the first few steps were a bit different though it wasn’t hard to figure out). Mint uses T-Mobile’s network so signal strength and call quality and data speed are all fine on my Moto E4 phone. Voicemail and international texting is included (I tried both). International calling is available too, but only if you first add credit to your account - however even though I never added any credit, I could still make International calls (at least short ones - I haven’t tried more than that). Voice and texts are unlimited and so is data, though after you’ve used 2GB data, it’s supposed to slow down (a lot) until the start of the next monthly cycle. But as with the international calling glitch, I found that even once I had used up my 2GB (which I confirmed by checking my account on their website), my LTE data speed was not noticeably any slower than before. Since I was concerned that allowing me to make International calls without me paying in advance could come back to bite me later, I contacted their support via email. I got a reply within a few hours assuring me that they would investigate and I wouldn’t be charged. Similarly when I noticed that data wasn’t slowing down after 2GB was used up, I sent another email, the equally quick reply told me they would look into that too. Since neither of these are really problems (who doesn’t want free int’l calling or free unlimited high speed data?), it doesn’t bother me that both issues seem to still be happening a week later - but it is a bit concerning that if they give away stuff they’re supposed to be charging for, that might not bode well for their long term business success! P.S. If you get this card for a friend/family member and activate it for them, the good news is that although during activation you need to provide an email and a name and password, later on the only info needed to log in is the phone number and password (and once logged in you can change any of that other info including the password). Also P.S. The number I got must have been recycled. Every few days I get a robocall from the same company asking me to call back about an overdue payment.

November 19, 2018 update - It's been one month today. Still couldn't be happier. I spent a week on vacation. No problem with service. Wireless internet went out for a couple hours while I was at the resort. I used my phone as a hotspot. It's been a really good experience. I thought my plan month was over tomorrow, so I had planned to run out my data tonight (I only used 2.7GB) by using my phone as a hotspot for my Roku (it eats about 2.3GB/hour) to see how fast the non-4G LTE data is. The phone plan includes unlimited data, you just pay for the 4G LTE data, after that you get slower data. How much slower is the question. That will have to wait until next month because I got a text earlier saying my second month had started. Stay tuned for the answer next month. Mint is great. October 22, 2018 - I was an AT&T customer for ~10 years @ $80/month (unlimited talk & text w/ 2GB/month). I could go into all the details of why I didn’t change before now, but I’ll save you the pain of reading that and me typing it. It’s going to be a long story anyway. I got an offer in the mail from Spectrum Mobile for unlimited talk & text with either unlimited data ($45/month) or pay for what you use ($15/GB). So, I looked at the phones they offered and didn’t like any of them. After a little research, I decided to buy a Moto G6 from Amazon. I got the phone, decided I liked it and then called Spectrum Mobile to send me a SIM card. Only to find out that they only support the phones they offer (I guess they’re more into the business of selling phones). OK, bummer. I then searched for cell phone plans in Amazon. Mint came up. I ordered the starter kit. It came two days later. I put in the first SIM and after a little easy-to-follow setup (I had to manually put in my APN information, but the directions were no problem at all), I was off and running. My house is in an AT&T dead zone (even though I live in Orlando FL). I had T-Mobile before and it was a dead zone too, so I thought that was my fate. Not so. As soon as I had the Mint card up and running, I placed a couple test calls from my house and was told I sounded perfect. Later, I noticed that my phone was saying it was using Wi-Fi calling. I'm not sure if this is a standard feature now, or just the G6, or part of Mint, but I know my old phone didn’t have it (one review that I read talked about having issues setting this up, I didn't it just magically appeared - I didn't even know it was an option). OK, I had to rerun the phone test. So, I turned off my Wi-Fi and did the test calls again. Same result, I sounded totally clear. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but before, I could hear people perfectly, but they couldn’t hear me half the time. MAJOR irritation. OK, on with my story. I then drove around and placed several calls from other areas that had been problem areas. Same result. I sounded perfect. I tried from inside a building where I was totally FUBAR before. No problems. So far so good. I tried out the mobile data. Sites loaded quickly and without any trouble. I decided to run a speed test. It got to about 35MB/s before I stopped it. In the time that I was running the test, it used 35MB of the 100MB on the test card, but I had the information I needed. Plenty of speed. So, the next morning, I got on the AT&T site and reset my phone account PIN (this was a little bit of a pain, but only because the AT&T website instructions were incomplete so I had to search for the reset link). You need this to take your phone number over. So, then I stuck in the second SIM card from the starter kit and followed the instructions. After reading all the legalese, I signed up and purchased the 3 months of 5GB/month plan (there were $3.41 tax and additional charges, so my total was $58.41 after the $5 back from the starter kit refund). This was about noon. At the end, it said it would take up to 48 hours to switch my old number over. My old cell SIM became inactive almost immediately. After a few minutes, my new phone rang to my old number when I called from a land line, but it was on Wi-Fi calling. It took a couple more hours for it to ring with my phone Wi-Fi off. It took a while longer for the mobile data to kick in, but by 6pm it was fully up and running. So far, so good. I played around with the app some. It is very intuitive and easy to use, so much better than the AT&T app that is just a continual struggle. It doesn’t look like it will be any problem to extend my service through the app when the time comes. Summary, Mint gets an A+ so far. Easy to setup and everything seems to work perfectly. If you’re looking for a phone, the Moto G6 also seems very nice. The screen’s not quite as wide as my old LG Optimus Pro (70mm vs. 73mm), but it’s taller (especially when you activate the Moto gestures to eliminate the wasted space associated with the Android on-screen navigation buttons). Battery life is excellent (my LG had replaceable batteries, which was cool, but the longer life of the Moto certainly compensates). Assuming the next 3 months go well, I’ll extend to the 1 year plan so I can keep the low monthly cost. I should have done this long ago. I hope this review was helpful (and not too long).

Got sick of paying Sprint (later T-Mobile) crazy monthly fees. But wasn't excited about going through the conversion myself (without a store clerk/tech there to do it). But I have to say, it wasn't bad at all! First, Mint is a T-Mobile sub-carrier, so I was reassured that I was not "going far" in my case. (this doesn't really matter) Second, setting it up is easy. You install the app on your phone and create an account. You stick the chip into your phone. You tell the app your chip number. Hit a few more Next Next Next buttons, and boom, you're done. The whole thing took about 5 minutes. I did 5 of these in one evening. 4 of them were done in 5 minutes. 1 of them took about 15-20 before the system picked that person up. Not sure why, but who cares. It works great for everyone, now. The price is fantastic. Note that it's an introductory price. It went up by about $5/month after the intro period was over. But this is still WAY cheaper. Coverage is great... it's uses T-Mobile's network, so it's as good as their network is in your area. Supposedly, as a sub-carrier, T-Mobile reserves the right to slow you down when things get congested, so their main customers can have priority. If this has ever happened, I've never noticed. I say, go for it. Bandwidth is 4 gb/month, which is fine for more users. I use less than a gig per month because i'm always in wireless places. The wife walks the dog on the trail and listens to podcasts & stuff, so she uses all of her 4 gb/month. You can buy more, but it can get pricey, like $10 per extra gig. If you don't buy it, your data use is slowed WAY down when you run out... technically it still works, but it will feel like the 56k modem days. So decide if the 4 gb is enough for you. There are 5 of us, and only 1 of us even comes close to using it all each month. The app isn't very detailed. It's cute, modern, even a little edgy in style. But it didn't NOT give you detail on your bandwidth. It will tell you your total, and dates when it will replenish, but that's about it. Probably good enough for 90% of the people out there. I would like to know more about what apps or types of data I'm burning through, but I suppose you can get a lot of that off your phone if it's at all modern. I'm loving Mint, and highly recommend it.

If I could sum up the Mint Mobile experience in one concise phrase it would be that - great price, terrible service. Let me start with the good - and there are some good points. - The Mint Mobile Starter Kit is an awesome concept and more providers should offer something like it. I was surprised that a cellular service provider offered a sim pack for $5.00 that would give me a limited, one-time-purchase trial of the service. If you don't like it, you're out $5.00 - if you do like it and continue to purchase service, they credit it off of your first month. This concept alone is unique and is a great way to trial the service. I wholly recommend doing it. - The service plans are inexpensive. Truth be told, Mint has some of the most inexpensive plans I've seen. Sure, to get the most bang-for-your-buck you'll have to commit to a year at a time (after your introductory plan and pricing), but still - $25.00/mo for unlimited talk, text, and 10GB of data? That's nearly unheard of! Yes, you miss out on some features such as roaming or international calling and texting (outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico), but these can be added on if absolutely necessary and, if they're not major requirements to you, can easily be written off due to the cost. Now onto the bad, and there's a lot of it: - Support. Mint's customer/technical support is ABYSMAL. I guess they needed to cut costs somewhere, but I don't think I've ever experienced such a slow, useless support system. The first time I installed Mint I was noticing extremely low upload speeds (0.10mbps - 0.30mbps) compared to my Cricket service (~6mbps - 8mbps) whereas the download speed was roughly the same. I called the Mint support number to inquire about this. The first support representative put me on hold and then promptly hung up on me. The second representative passed it off on "we're doing network maintenance". So I decided I would go to the community forums to see if anyone else had an answer or was experiencing the same issue. When I went to sign in, however, I received an error. Low and behold, the community forums were down. This was on 9/24/2018. It is now 9/28/2018 and the community forums are STILL down! Furthermore, I sent an email on 9/24 to their support and did not receive a response until 9/27 - the response simply asked me to try signing in again and tell them if it worked. It didn't, so I responded to the email and have not yet received a response. It seems their tactic is to wait for three days, hope it fixes itself, and ask you to try again. Mint's support is by far the worst I've ever experienced so hope nothing breaks. - Spotty/slow service and/or deprioritization. As an MVNO, it's understandable that Mint would be deprioritized - especially as a T-Mobile MVNO as T-Mobile is known to heavily deprioritize MVNO users during peak hours. While this depends on your region, from the hours of 10:00am to around mid-night I would classify my LTE speeds as slow. Around 6 - 8mbps download and abysmal uploads of 0.20 - 0.30 (sometimes the test fails on the upload portion). After around 12:00am however my speeds will kick up to 22 - 24mbps down and up to 2 - 3mbps up. When not being deprioritized the speeds are pretty good (aside from upload), but during pretty much all hours of daylight the speeds are nothing special and data service is being deprioritized. For reference, I live in metro Phoenix. - The number assigned to me by Mint was apparently already on a bunch of scam/spam call lists. This isn't inherently Mint's fault, but it would be nice if they would allow me to generate a new number to avoid this - a feature that they, unfortunately, lack. So if you get a bad number when signing up for Mint, you're stuck with it unless you want to try manually requesting a new number (something I have yet to try as their support team is so bad and I really don't want to have to deal with them). - Setting up the service upon receiving a new SIM can be annoying due to some nuances. Sure, it's not extremely hard, but it can definitely be frustrating if you're new to the experience. The activation codes for the SIM cards that I received came with a random letter F at the end of them. Turns out that this wasn't actually a part of the activation code and I couldn't activate the SIM card until I found out that the F shouldn't be there. I was then advised during setup that I would receive an automated text explaining how to set up the APN. That text never came, so I had to manually look it up myself. In some instances, however, you may not even need to use your APN - your phone might automatically set up a T-Mobile one. This depends on your phone, however. As I am familiar with this process, these were minor annoyances and something I could easily work around, but for someone totally new to this experience, I could see it being a point of frustration and causing confusion. All in all, if you don't mind terrible support, broken things remaining broken for an indefinite period of time, and constantly deprioritized/slow data and you're only interested in the price point and unlimited talk/text, Mint definitely is not a bad option - its definitely one of the best price points I've seen. If you're looking for a seamless experience, good data speeds, and consistently working features, however, you may want to consider looking elsewhere.