Maybe I shouldn’t be as pissed as I am but, for me, I like using my Apple card for autopay because I get 3% back with T-Mobile charges. What I like to do is use my CCs to max my rewards / cash back and then pay off my card each month.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’m not happy about this. Of course I don’t want to pay an additional $40 a month on my phone bill so yes, I’m switching autopay to a Privacy card, but F—, man.
Okay, I’m done lol
Edit 6/6/1023: So I made a new virtual card but when I add it to my T-Mobile account the site adds it and says it’s not supported for the discount. They’re going to force me to enter a physical debit card or bank account or pay an additional $40/month.
T-Mobile really has been sucking with their service strength in NY. But they’re doing very well at driving me crazy.
I’ve linked my debit card for auto-pay but I manually pay with my credit card before the due date and by doing so I get the auto-pay discount and as well as the credit card cashback.
Oh shit that’s a good idea
Verizon caught on and closed that loophole, so we will have to see whether T-Mobile does as well.
Someone else was also just saying this. That’s awesome. So it’s working for you?
It is!
pretty sneaky sis
Verizon does the same thing. 🫤
All I wanted to do was use a Privacy.com card with them. No discount.
My friend, please, it’s been a good day, let’s not mention Verizon (there’s…history there).
Fuck that.
I set up recurring payments through my bank’s website. I never give a company my banking information if I don’t absolutely have to. I simply don’t trust them not to screw me, or fix their “errors” in a timely fashion. They’ll happily make a “mistake” and overcharge you by hundreds or thousands of dollars with zero verification, but try to get a 22 cent refund and they’ll fight you tooth and nail. After keeping you on the phone for an hour, of course.
No way. BILL ME, and I’ll look over it myself, thanks.
Yeah, but I don’t want to pay the extra $40. I use Privacy so I don’t have to give my debit card info.
I hate it too, but at least it’s fair. The CC companies have squeezed everyone by raising their percentage fees ridiculously high to 3-5% for doing nothing but moving a number from one database row to another, and then bribing us the consumers by giving us 1% of our own money as cashback. The phone companies have calculated how much it costs them in CC fees to support CC payments, and they are giving us the choice to pay them that or switch to a cheaper payment method. Granted, $40 is probably still way more than their actual fees, but if you are choosing to pay that anyway, then your preferred payment method is worth at least that much to you. I am paying $10/month to my service provider for the “privilege” to not use autopay.
What’s Privacy? (without context, that’s an incredibly dystopian question lol)
Lol, that’s funny.
Privacy is a service that you link to your bank account and then you can write virtual cards with custom limits on the fly.
Switch carriers, why support a company thats actively annoying you and has a record of breaking customers privacy with data leaks?
Yeah, I hear ya. To be honest, I’ve had AT&T, T-Mobile, then went to Verizon for a year, then back to T-Mobile in the span of about five years (I had AT&T, since they were Cingular before the switch to T-Mobile the first time). Looks like the three choices we have aren’t the greatest in the world…
I just switched to T-Mobile after getting played by both AT&T and Verizon too many times. At this point, I don’t know what I’ll do if T-Mobile tries to screw me over worse than those two did.
Switch again. Go with whoever has the best value at the time. Don’t get sucked into brand loyalty.
You switch to one of the dozens of MVNOs, like Mint Mobile, US Mobile, Cricket, etc etc.
Yeah, I switched away from T-Mobile after I saw that my nearly $600 a month phone bill was less than $200 with AT&T.
How is that even possible? I pay €27 for unlimited calls and texts, plus 10 GB of data every day. In The Netherlands. You guys are getting scammed I feel.
To be fair, I have 4 accounts (one for each family member). It’s still not as nicely priced as the Netherlands.
That makes sense then, not as bad as I thought. And we live in a tiny country, so the mobile providers need to maintain a lot less infrastructure.
$70 is typical for that, except it’s 30GB of data for the month before they reduce you to around 25kB/s.
Gotta love those theoretical unlimited data caps lol
Does nobody here know about privacy.com?
I don’t think that’s considered a debit card.
Funny thing is that privacy.com is funded by squatting on the CC interchange fees, while CC fees is precisely what T-mobile is trying to avoid by switching to ACH.
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It is unfortunately real
My autopay discount is $5 and I get about half of that back in rewards points from my credit card. I’m keeping the CC on file and chalking it up to having better protections and an extra 25 days interest-free for $2.50/mo.
I had nothing but deteriorating service and escalating fees from them. So glad to have switched away!
It’s crazy, they were doing good. Then, past several months, garbage.
Who’d you switch to?
Ting. They rent/use Verizon and t-mobile towers I believe. The coverage is fine and the prices are way lower.
Sounds good! I’ll check it out.
I switched to Mint Mobile several years ago (god, like 5 years ago now?) and haven’t looked back since
Yes, I tried Mint for a little bit and was very excited but I had poor signal for the short period I tested it. I admittedly did not go everywhere I go for business and travel so it’s not a fair review. Around where are you located, do you find good signal? Is it comparable to mainstream carriers?
T-mobile bought Mint mobile back in March, so welcome back to T-Mobile
Boost or US Mobile are the new Mint. Think Boost actually has a chance of hanging around for a while since they are owned by Dish who is building out their own network of towers (think they just hit coverage of 70% of US). They also use both T-Mobile and AT&T for roaming with their rainbow sims, which is extremely rare. US Mobile is a Verizon MVNO… their “unlimited” package has the same priority as post-paid Verizon customers for the first 30gb each month, but I’m afraid they’re eventually going to get bought out by Verizon ala Mint.
I’m pretty happy with Google Fi. I realize it’s Google, which isn’t great, but at least they deliver exactly what they say they will and the price is always exactly as advertised.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they are taking a loss on it just to gain market share. They can afford it.
This text message is the fake scam link people click on before discovering a bunch of card fraud and having to call their bank to dispute a charge. Do not click that link. Call T-Mobile using their official phone number online and verify it’s not a phishing attack before doing anything.
Edit. People in the comments saying it’s legit. If true, TMobile chose the shadiest way to send these messages out. It’s just good practice to never click on unsolicited links before making sure it’s not phishing.
Scams are fun to analyze, unfortunately, this is legit and not fun at all
It’s legit, is sent from the same shortcode that account updates and such get sent from, and their official app also has notices about it.
Don’t really see anything wrong with the way they did it.
Why would they do this? Debit charges can fail if got enough funds. Cc almost always goes through. The only risk is a charge back.
I would NEVER do this. CC in the US have actual consumer protection laws. Debit does not.
My guess is to get better pricing at their bank for the ACH they’re probably already using and reduce the CC network fees they’re paying. Just a guess though.
I hope they don’t roll this out to Tmobile Prepaid. I don’t really trust Tmobile with my bank account information.
Paying over $100 each month on cell plans is crazy. If all you use is talk, text, and some data, Connect by Tmobile Prepaid has $15 plan with 3.5GB per month
Huh, I only get a $30 discount for autopay
Y’all are getting discounts for autopay?? 😩
It’s per line. Which is even more infuriating. They aren’t charging you 4 times for 4 lines. They are clawing back money for more profit
Maybe it’s because I have a lot of lines? Four phone lines, 3 connected watches, and one connected iPad.
Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.
My only concern is being even more locked into Google. I already feel like I have too many eggs in their basket and they are basically impossible to deal with if something goes wrong. I don’t want to end up locked out of everything with no data and there’s no customer support person I can call up to maybe sort things out with because Google is too cheap to pay for actual customer support staff.
I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.
I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.
This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).
I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.
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I do not link my bank account to vendors like this. Discounts aren’t worth it, in time cost alone, when something goes wrong and you have to recoup your money.
I’ll autopay off a CC and pay that. Or pay monthly manually. Those are the choices, full stop.
It’s easier to handle fraud or theft with a CC who hasn’t gotten their money yet.
T-Mobile doesn’t even let me setup auto pay. I’m a Sprint customer that got converted. Sprint app no longer works, T-Mobile doesn’t recognize me.
I still get the removed but it makes me pay manually, using the short code from the phone app… And since I can’t see it get into the account, can’t pay off or buy my current phone.
Once I get time off near August I hope to deal with that. And after, may just switch to something like mint. Hardly use any data, text, or talk, just needed phone financing and insurance.
Makes me glad that mobiles are mostly prepaid here. Port my number to any operator in 24 hours, recharge and go!
Same. If I wasn’t still getting Hulu for free I’d be out
Holy shit, your AutoPay discount is $40?! Is this, like, not USD or something?
Lol it’s USD. But I have 4 phone lines, 3 watch lines, and 1 iPad line. I think that’s why it’s at $40?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess that explains it, but that’s even more scummy, really. You’re paying all these off of tbe same account, yeah? And they’re still using it as an excuse to dupe the fee?
