Grandfathered Cell Phone Plans: Are They Still Worth Keeping in 2024?

Verizon won’t force you anytime soon to ‘upgrade’ to a new phone plan, but it certainly hopes you’ll do it voluntarily by nudging grandfathered pricing up – and up, and up. Verizon has raised grandfathered pricing before, but this is a relatively rare move. Not anymore. In 2023 alone, Verizon bumped legacy pricing twice: first, in June, adding a $2/month ‘Plan Rate Adjustment’ to older plans – then, in August, adding between $3 and $5, again depending on plan.

It’s not surprising that legacy Verizon subscribers chafed about the price increases, and Verizon made matters worse by making clear that it still wasn’t done with the price increases. On 1 March 2024, customers on certain older Verizon unlimited mobile plans saw the price jump by $4 per line. For now, that has been the end of it but, as I write this, it remains just that — for now.

Are Verizon legacy plans still worth it over the current tier?

But some version of a grandfathered plan now, in 2024, will it still be worth hanging on to? It might.

Today, if you’re getting a fresh Verizon plan and want LTE or 5G access that is roughly equivalent to the legacy More bucket, you’d start with one of three MyPlan buckets priced from $65-90 per line. Multi-user discounts are available. Those buckets by themselves come with practically no perks, but you can buy perks – often bundled – for $10 a pop. Among those perks are stupefying numbers of streaming services, such as Disney Plus and Hulu, ESPN+, Netflix/Max, Apple One perk, and more. See our Verizon plans guide.

Accounting for the variety of heritage plans since most Verizon legacy customers are on one of the More plans, let’s compare heritage’s simplest and most expensive MyPlan options to the equivalent heritage legacy options:

While there’s very little else going for the Start Unlimited plan, it’s much more expensive at $79 a line – not a lot of savings when the newer line-up, Unlimited Welcome, is only $65 per line. You also lose the hotspot access that the other lines offer, though you can pay $10 per month to get 100GB of that access anyway, so if you’re on an entry-level plan, you might want to consider switching up after the price hike. The opposite is true for Verizon’s top-end plans.

MyPlan Unlimited Welcome costs $90 per line compared with $111 for Get More Unlimited, but the latter comes with a slew of extras, including the Hulu/Disney Bundle, Google Play Pass, Apple Music, one Travel Pass a month, and 600GB of additional Verizon Cloud data.

The My Plan option has no extras by default but you can add up identical perks to the tune of an additional $50 a month, which hikes the price between $140 and $102 per line. Even with all these increases, the older legacy plan remains much less expensive overall as well as the better deal – at least until it’s time to buy a new phone, at which point the newer plan will likely include a better deal on the device.

Like Verizon, AT&T won’t force you to change your plan but it isn’t too proud to raise prices. ATT dramatically increased legacy plans in August of 2023. Legacy plan increases ranged from a few dollars to close to $30, depending on the legacy plan. There seems to be a lot of vagueness with ATT’s legacy prices, but after a very long search, I can’t find actual numbers for all the legacy plans but most appear to have gone up $5-10 in 2023.

In addition, the hotspot/laptop users on Unlimited Plus and Choice as well as Choice II plans received a $10 monthly increase. The original Unlimited Elite plan also received a $2.50 per month per line increase. Other increases also affected plans, but it’s difficult to identify the actual amount of the rate increases.

ATT continues to up its tax on the traditional old-world standard phone plan so much, family plans will rise $12.00 and single-line subscribers $6.00. After this latest uptick, all grandfathered legacy plans will reflect the increased price – the one that subscribers already paid for an increased tax last year.

Are AT&T legacy plans still worth it over the current tier?

For those with a hotspot or laptop on an older Unlimited Choice plan, these plans remain hard to beat with $10 or more per month price increases – but defending them is likely going to become harder with the next round. You get real unlimited data on the road, a great plan for full-time RVers and people in the country whose primary access to the internet is over 4G. But keep in mind that the original Choice plan was only 3Mbps, making this a hugely better deal only for Choice II customers.

The final question, of course, is what these plans are worth now. The answer is: it depends. It depends on exactly which plan your phone is on, and what it could realistically be replaced with now. Updated, simplified or adjusted, ATT’s legacy plans come in basically three variants: they were three variants in 2018, they were three variants in 2019, and they’re three variants now. Prices in 2023 range from about $66 to $86 per phone, with family plans getting a discount for every line added. In general?

The old Starter plan just sucked – and the new Starter SL is basically just the old Starter plan, minus one or two features and about $3 to $5 more expensive than the pre-2023 Starter. Nothing really special about it, really – not enough to make it worthwhile for most of us to hang on to. The older Starter plan is generally considered to be totally unmemorable, and maintaining that essence won’t be alone worth shelling out more money each month.

For Elite users, the situation differs. Let’s take a closer look:

As the chart shows, even with price hikes Premium is technically less expensive – yet the gap is not at all big.
The two plans are in many ways similar, but possibly the biggest difference is that Premium gives out at least 30 GB hotspot data. Moreover, it omits Max entirely. Come on, how many of us actually use virtually all of hotspots? Thus, we would lose more than we would gain. If you currently use Max and want to keep it, single-line subscribers will pay close to $106 in total if they transfer to Premium. If is it not a priority, it’s probably worth going for a new plan.

After years and years of cultivating its brand as the bad boy who takes money for himself, not the Man, and offers penitent employers the care they failed to give, T-Mobile is now kicking its legacy customers when they’re down. Sometime last year, many T-Mobile users first learned that the United States’ third-largest wireless carrier was planning to automatically upgrade their plans from older tiers – such as Select Choice and T-Mobile One to newer ones including Magenta.

In a period of heightened declarations that corporations should do good things, surely T-Mobile wouldn’t do anything to customers who stuck with the company after a bad breakup. As T-Mobile quickly clarified, anyone so upgraded would be able to opt out and revert back, free of charge. But such opt-outs offer little balm for wounded customers’ morale, and eventually T-Mobile backed down.

Realising that that wasn’t going to fly, T-Mobile eventually raised prices anyway, increasing all of its legacy per-minute-of-talk voice plans by $5 a line, with connected devices increasing by $2 a line.

Are T-Mobile legacy plans still worth it over the current tier?

Once again, how much this costs will vary according to the plan you choose, but for many of the vintage grandfather plans, even finding a plan that’s just $5 more a line could be a better deal.

No US carrier has been particularly admirable lately at its dealings with legacy customers. T-Mobile’s early attempts to change customers’ plans without having to actually speak to them was not exactly a surprising leap up into the hearts and minds – although the fact that the company listened and reversed course gives it more credit than its peers. And Verizon and AT&T aren’t exactly ramming people onto new, more expensive plans – but since these are primarily driven by price hikes, the effect is the same.

By comparison, T-Mobile has handled its legacy plans the best so far, never tacking on the draconian rate hikes its competitors have. The problem with all this is that it’s less about wanting to help people, and more about perception, optics and painted nails.

It’s a tough call if you’re thinking about switching providers because of price increases and are looking for a carrier that won’t arbitrarily raise rates or switch you without your permission. Of course, T-Mobile will probably stay the course after going to such lengths to avoid being sued with a class-action lawsuit. But the same won’t be true for new customers in the future. The same goes for those who might be tempted to switch by AT T and Verizon gradually making their old plans less valuable to consumers. For those seek ing m ore flexibil ity with their carrier, a prepaid opti on is one to consider.

In America, we’re used to buying service directly from a network provider, but this is not necessarily the case. Across much of Europe, smaller and less well-known MVNOs – especially those that offer prepaid services – are more popular. Larger, postpaid carriers tend to be more popular with enterprises and businesses. Not only do MVNOs bring deeper competition to an otherwise controlled national or regional carrier marketplace, but they often run on the same networks as the larger carriers. Only you can know which of those issues matter the most to you. If you’re sick and tired of price increases and want an option that is easier to exit, prepaid services are hard to beat.

While some of these MVNOs might offer a lower-than-optimal experience (one provider recently used the fourth-ranked Verizon network, suffering from congestion and throttling), others offer fantastic service that competes head-to-head with the major carriers. An excellent example is the Verizon-owned Visible with unlimited calls and data for $40 per of unlimited service.

If you can wait to carry multiple lines (such as your whole family instead of just you and a spouse), Google might be the least expensive option. Starting at just $20 per line for 6 lines with data in Canada and Mexico, and 5GB of hotspot access, Google’s Unlimited Basics Firellephone Plan (was US Cellular) offers calling from the US to over 50+ countries and unlimited data in over 200 countries, 100GB of Google One storage and one full year of YouTube Premium for new subscribers. (There is some throttling that might be a problem for some, but my years of service have been glitch-free.) While throttling is a potential speed killer, my years of experience with Google Fi have been trouble-free.