Prepaid packages that cover the entire year are few and far between – at one time, Rogers offered two different annual prepaid packages that each cost $100 for the whole year. One plan offered unlimited texting and 100 minutes of talk time and the other one offered unlimited evening and weekend calling as well as 100 daytime minutes. The new “Unlimited Pay As You Go” Plan costs $120 per year but offers both unlimited texting and unlimited evening and weekend calling, although the daytime minutes dropped to 50. There are no choices to make with just one easy plan for one easy price and this makes it easier for customers to make a decision.
Obviously, for $120 per year, there are going to be some details and overage prices to watch out for, but for only averaging $10 per month, what do you expect? Most text-only plans start around $15 per month, and the talk-and-text plans start about $25 and up per month. For your $120 a year – which must be paid upfront – you get your unlimited evening (6 pm – 7 am) and weekend calling (Fri 6 pm – Mon 7 am) local calls and 50 minutes per day calling. All calling is local only, so you need to make sure the number you are calling is local. If you go over the 50 minutes of local calls per day or need to make a long distance call (Canadian or to the US), be prepared to pay $.50 per minute! All text messaging is SMS only – no pictures or video messages allowed. There is a $.35 per message charge for International text messages and other services available at the higher Pay-Per-Use rates. Voicemail, Call Display, and Call Waiting are all included in your $120.
You can also add data to this plan starting at a monthly fee of $10 per month for 100MB, $15 for 250MB, a new $20 per month for 500MB of data, $30 per month for 1GB of data, and $50 per month for 2GB of data – any overages are billed at $0.15 per MB. There is even a $1 per day (24-hour period) for 10MB of data or $5 a week for 60MB of data per day. There are certainly better deals out there, and these options are for someone that anticipates using very little data. This $120 “Pay As You Go” plan is not for everybody, but what about the person that is thinking about jumping from a feature phone to a smartphone, with strictly local texting or talking to the grandkids in the evenings. This plan would be ideal for a child’s first smartphone, where the parent would want to restrict their child’s access to the internet and allow only local texting and calling to monitor them. For those types of situations, it may be ideal.