Virgin adds a pair of $20 prepaid plans

It wasn’t too long ago that Virgin Mobile changed things up and revamped their rates. The focus seemed to be on messaging and data users, though they did retain their basic pay-as-you-go rates. Now they’ve added two plans called payLo. They look a lot like plans with daily access fees, except the $20 covers either one month or 90 days, depending on which plan you choose.

You don’t get actual minutes or messages for the $20, but instead get access to a certain rate. The first plan covers one month and gives you 400 minutes at 5 cents per minute. So in order to maximize the plan you’d be paying $40 for 400 minutes, or 10 cents per minute. But that’s only if you use all 400 minutes.

The other plan covers 90 days, and provides minutes at 20 cents per minute. This seems to work better for people who talk less frequently. This rate seems excessively expensive, as you can find a number of services that provide a far, far better rate without an access fee. I honestly didn’t think I was reading this right when I first saw it, but no, this is the deal.

Users of payLo can get text messages for 15 cents each, pictures messages for 25 cents, and data for $1.50 for a megabyte per day. Again, all of this seems far, far more expensive than comparable services. I’m not sure what audience Virgin is targeting with this one, but I think that most customers can do far better with other plans.

Via Engadget.

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3 Responses

1. mike freeman Says
   

   The Good: 5 cents a minute without having to spend $50 or buy a 1000 of them. The bad: NO rollover, expiration time is only 30 days and overage minutes are 20 cents each.

   Still, at least they are doing something with their paygo as well as their monthly plans.

   
   Posted on July 17th, 2010 at 3:49 am
2. Virgin adds another payLo plan and phone | Prepaid Reviews Says
   

   [...] you're new to the site, you may want to subscribe to the the feed.When Virgin Mobile introduced its payLo plans in July, I wondered what kind of advantage they offered. Customers basically had to pay $20 for the [...]

   
   Posted on October 21st, 2010 at 7:31 am
3. tom Says
   

   It’s still half the price/minute of T-Mobile’s plan.

   
   Posted on February 16th, 2011 at 1:57 pm

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