Comment by tzs

What he said was:

> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.

That makes it sound like this is the minimum that you have to pay to get a smartphone and service to get by in modern life.

$200/mo is definitely high for that. An iPhone 17 Pro Max with maxed out storage (2 TB) is under $85/mo for 24 months.

A Visible+ Pro prepaid plan is $45/mo ($37.5/mo if you pay for 12 months at once) if you don't use one of their frequent promo codes to get a discount.

That includes unlimited premium data on Verizon's 5 G UWB, 5 G, and 4 G LTE networks, support for a cellular smartwatch, 4K UHD video, and unlimited mobile hotspot. By "premium" data they mean no deprioritization. Visible users get the same priority as user's of Verizon's own postpaid plans.

The hotspot is only 15 Mbps, so you probably wouldn't want to rely on it if you have frequent or long internet outages, but I've found for the occasional short outage it was fine for email, HN/Reddit/etc, and YouTube videos.

This will be massively more than enough to cover the smartphone hardware and service needs for everything probably 99% of the US population needs to get by, at $130/mo.

Note that includes getting a new top of the line iPhone every 2 years. With a more modest phone and keeping it for 5 years we are looking at more like $60/mo.