*EDIT
Noticed this yesterday, probably going on for more than that. Makes me wonder if this is the twilight of the project. From what I heard in internet rumor that was always kind of the expectation from the person running the thing.
I did a look around to see if there are any services that duplicate the functionality but I didn't find anything terribly compelling.
I'm wondering if this might be a side effect of CGNAT. Stuffing a bunch of people into one or two ip addresses means you're sharing the IP with potentially other abusers.
And to think IPv6 has been around 20 years now....
Good theory. I wonder if that is some of it. Though I've got a dedicated IP from my local co-op ISP and I'm pretty sure I haven't done anything offensive. The issues from other users makes me really wonder if this is the death throws of archive.* and how in the world am I going to read all these newspapers I don't want to pay for now.
From my experience certain IP addresses are now less privileged than other IP addresses.
It worked for me up until I changed my ISP. Captchas usually use the IP address to determine how difficult to make the challenge. Abusive ip ranges get worse experiences than others.
That makes sense. My VPN testing affirms it. Houston node doesn't work, Atlanta node does. I guess someone decided my IP range warranted extra attention. Though that still doesn't quite square with what I'm seeing; it's feels like the CAPTCHA is broken.
All I have to base that on is when I click on the checkbox sometimes no images load and it checks and then unchecks. Sometimes I seem to get the "hard set" though I think I missed part of the boat or something. I've been able to run through enough fails that I'd expect to get the hard set but don't. Which makes me think it isn't actually working right...
I'm calling the "hard set" those images they give you that are super extra grainy.
I'm almost curious enough to see what I can divine from inspecting their network requests but I have a hunch they have a vested interest in making that annoying.
Or maybe there are way more CAPTCHAs to click through than I'm thinking. To anyone: What is the highest number of CAPTCHAs you've clicked through and actually got a site, any site, to load at the end? I'm legit curious at this point.
Leaving this here in case anyone runs into this. By putting chrome into incognito mode I am able to access archive.ph. Normal profile gets infinite CAPTCHA.
So I'm thinking messed up cookies or extensions and IP reputation stuff are probably the root of this.
Edit:
cookies or extensions based on testing with chrome normal vs incognito on the same host
IP reputation based on testing with VPN using the same browser
So CGNAT is exactly what it is. I tried using it through a VPN and it worked great. But through T-Mobile Home internet it doesn't work at all.
That IP you're using is being shared with bots and other malware to attack sites. So instead of trying to filter out all the potential attacks through things like fail2ban, etc. what archive.is is doing is to just block entire ip address ranges.
I'd never looked into CGNAT so that is really interesting, and yeah, yuck.
From what I can tell though I'm able to get to a webserver running on my local machine and hosted off my public IP through a paid VPN. That indicates to me I am not behind CGNAT from what I understood of the wikipedia.
Are you using Firefox? I've noticed certain website operators show lots of CAPTCHAs if you have tracking protection turned on, you're not logged in to a Google Account, or you've deleted your cookies.
What are you going to do, NOT accept card payments?
The sky high rates in the US is because fuck you, deal with it. It's pretty explicitly wealth transfer from poor people to credit card companies, with a small kickback to well off credit card users to make it popular and hard to regulate.
You don't have to be well off to not buy more than you can afford. That said, I'd be perfectly fine if CCs disappeared altogether, and limited people to only debit accounts.
Usury was forbidden by all major religions and was banned in most states until the US Supreme Court legalized it and everyone incorporated in deleware.
The plan is $75 in big bold letters on the website and every other bit of marketing material, but I have to pay $85 if I want to use a credit card, or a prepaid debit card, or Apple/Google pay, or mail a check, or go to the store and pay cash. Why is this not a clear case of false advertising?
In fact we printed 20% of all money ever printed because they couldn't go two weeks without normal cash inflow.
Edit: This was just in 2020, and is true, doesn't matter if you don't like it. We'll all be paying higher taxes now forever for it. And the value of the currency will devalue to the point where it is easier to payback, because that's what inflation does.
Which also means whatever you have in your retirement account will devalue and you’ll need even more money per month when you retire. To offset this, your salary and contribution amount needs to increase. Otherwise the net effect is you are getting a pay cut.
The unusual requirements to actually pay 75 are not explicitly defined anywhere that I’ve found and I’ve read almost all the fine print if not all of it. This is plainly false advertising. If I go to a grocery store and everything is labeled one price but I get charged 10% more because I’m paying with a card and the only notice is a little sign hanging near the bathrooms down a disgusting hallway no guest goes down, then the bad faith checkbox notice posting is prima facie evidence of intent to defraud. This could be successfully prosecuted under federal wire fraud statutes, considering the litany of more tenuous precedent thanks to our war on drugs, if anyone with real power in this country had a spine or belief in justice.
> About 85% of American consumers with bank accounts are comfortable making recurring payments using those accounts, said John Anderson. He is head of product at Plaid, a fintech company that links vendors with customers’ bank accounts.
Plaid, who got sued for abusing their access to people’s bank info. Fuck that guy.
I, frankly, do not understand why Plaid doesn't work more like Privacy.com. If a company must have the ridiculous stance that they need to access my bank account, and Plaid is linking them together, why can't Plaid have a popup saying, "Company X will access your Bank account. Company X may not withdraw, at any time, more than $25 or <fill in the blank amount here> without your consent on a monthly basis. You may need to fill this form again if you ever purchase or subscribe to anything requiring greater amounts of money transferred. < OK > < Cancel >"
Someone might say, "that would make Plaid require a money transmitter license" or something similar. I would argue, why should Plaid not need a money transmitter license for literally handling bank account login information?
Privacy.com works like it does, giving consumer protections, because the consumer with the bank account is the customer. Plaid works like it does, letting companies take your money with no restrictions, because the company is the customer, and the consumer with the bank account is the product.
If a company offers you a service and that service is free, you are not the customer, you are the product.
I actually agree with this change, creditcards in the 2020s is just racketeering. Why? Because afaik almost all transactions are digital now, and they charge an absurd rake for every transaction they process. A 3% transaction fee seems like little until you realize the profit margin is only 6% ... why should they get 50% of the spoils?
Companies like Amzn, costco, HEB, and now cell carriers are all moving towards their own cards which allows them to greatly reduce the fees incurred. CC fees and corruption is one argument in favor of CBDC. (granted there are plenty of reasons against)
So if their problem is with credit cards can I pay them cash instead? Or mail a check? Enter a prepaid debit card? Do a wire transfer? Do they accept Venmo/Zelle/Cashapp/Paypal? Bitcoin? Nope, they want to charge the same fee for using literally any of these methods.
What they really want is to get your bank account number so they can charge you whatever they want and you have no way to dispute it.
AT&T bills me a different amount every single month: I am not using a new service or feature, their massive billing software just can’t keep it consistent. Of course ACH is appealing to them for this - I can’t complain about the amount debited then.
AT&T's billing system (Telegence) is so convoluted, even their own staff can't tell you what your month to month charges will be, it's why they only give you an estimate when you sign up for a new line.
Whats to stop a bank offering an account that you only put enough money in so they cannot draw more than you have? Kind of like Capital One's virtual card numbers which allow you to have a throwaway number per account.
This exists for incoming ACH transfers, and it is called a UPIC account. It is used so that a company can give out their account info to customers, but the bank will deny any third-party withdrawals. The money is directly transferred into the company's "real" bank account.
Tangent on this, The virtual cards sound great on paper but in practice if you get a compromised virtual card number you still have to cancel your main CC and start over which is stupid IMO. They told me since the virtual card number was tied to the CC you still have to change both which negates the benefits of having the virtual card numbers in the first place.
Costco has always had their own card. Before that, they didn't even accept credit cards so they didn't have to pay processing fees. My understanding at this point is that Costco actually made AMEX and Visa bid for the business, they actually make money every time their branded card is swiped and they pay Visa dramatically less for general processing fees than other retailers
Me too. Here in Europe credit cards are a lot less popular for daily use. Most people I know have debit cards for in person shopping. Prepaid debit for Internet shopping or they use alternative payment methods (blik, fast transfers etc). That's why I found it so annoying certain "global" companies like Google insist people pay for some of their services with a credit card or an account linked debit card(no prepaid cards). I don't see what benefit they get from forcing people to open a separate account. If there is no money in that account they will not be able to take a payment. It's exactly like a prepaid card(assuming you disable overdraft). So why don't they accept prepaid? To piss people off I guess.
When I pay with a credit card I get a couple of things:
1) Item not delivered / broken / service not what I ordered => dispute.
2) Shop hacked and 2 months later charges my credit card $20,000? The charge hits and I dispute it, but the money is not gone out of my account. Can you imagine them hitting my debit account?
I wonder if to an extent, the US tendency to use credit card "protections" is an outsourcing of consumer-protection law.
Some countries, I gather that the consumer-protection authorities have a lot of teeth, and they're a viable way to escalate on a lot of bad behaviour (denying return of defective goods, or refusing to honour warranty).
In the US, I don't think this is as common-- you might be able to raise an issue with your state Attorney General, and in 2029 he'll get to it-- so the magic word is "chargeback" to get a response.
I can. I’ve had it happen. That’s why I don’t use debit cards anymore. The fees “I” racked up were terrible because of bounced checks missed CC payments and so forth.
I'm not familiar with European prepaid debit cards, but they sound similar to what in the USA we call "gift cards": the latter are "preloaded" with a certain dollar amount which the holder of the card can spend in transactions using the gift card, and they are practically never "refilled".
If the above describes the prepaid debit card you are referring to, putting myself in eg Google's shoes re your (heavily paraphrased) question:
> why don't certain "global" companies like Google not accept payment for some of their services via prepaid debit?
I'm in business providing a long-term open ended service (cell, ISP, household utility). I want to ensure ongoing receipt of monthly payments for the service I am delivering with minimum hassle to myself and my customer. If I accepted autopay from a prepaid debit card (as I define it above), the card is certain to "run dry" at some point, guaranteeing a need for future intervention in the payment setup, and (unless the consumer is closely monitoring the prepaid card's balance as the months pass, which is unlikely) likely an interruption in the stream of monthly payments, with an associated likelihood of me interrupting service to the customer due to lack of payment (all costing me administrative overhead), resulting in me possibly losing the customer's business for good.
With autopay tied to a bank account, the primary payment risk is insufficient account balance; with autopay tied to a credit card, the risk of insufficient balance is nearly nonexistent; in general, the risk of interruption of payments from these two payment sources is low (vs nearly certain with a prepaid debit card).
You said it yourself. If there is no money in your account, google can't take payment. That isn't true of credit cards. And they're closely linked to a person's identity which is pretty useful to a company that makes hay with ads and user tracking.
I actually think we are on the cusp of the financial equivalent of the 'we no longer support internet explorer' google banner, targeting visa and mastercard. Basically every merchant from panhandlers with square readers to Walmart wants to reduce their interchange fees.
Fednow hasn't exactly caught like wildfire like Pix or the india thing whose name I forgot, but it only has to do it once and it can still happen. I think once Walmart and Kroger start to push harder on it and the Request for Payment feature is avaialble, we will see big adoption.
I’m at a FinTech and some of the merchants we’re in the same orbit with are actively moving to replace credit and debit card payments with FedNow instant payments. One is paying almost $6M/year in debit and CC interchange fees, so they are highly incentivized.
Personally, moving money between Wise and Chase bank instantly was magic the first time it happened. Finally felt like I lived in a developed country.
> I’m at a FinTech and some of the merchants we’re in the same orbit with are actively moving to replace credit [...] card payments with FedNow instant payments.
What is the benefit to the consumer of using FedNow instead of a credit card when paying for a purchase? Is the merchant planning to add a credit card surcharge, thus the sole "consumer benefit" is avoiding this surcharge?
Why would you assume there has to be consumer benefit for this change to be made? Everyone is paying ~3-5% more throughout the economy for interchange fees, some of that will remain as savings or profits in enterprises, some of that will be returned to consumers through lower prices as businesses switch payment rails.
Some people will have to pay more to keep using credit cards (whether for float, purchase insurance, or convenience), simple as that.
perhaps long forgotten, but PC parts sellers (ones who'd buy lots and then break bulk to consumers) used to charge 3% more than advertised price for CC transactions. iirc that was often the entirety, or more, of their margin.
Unlikely IMO. According to my limited research, FedNow competes with ACH and other direct payment systems (e.g. Zelle), while credit cards are loan-based.
credit cards are points-based. Many / most credit holders don't care about revolving credit, but they do care about rewards points. This may be US-only.
FedNow can't yet do requested payments. It is currently only push. I don't think it will ever have pull payments like ACH. Which means the current flow requires finding the account for recipient and put in transfer for the right amount. I heard they are working on requests, and might be possible to whitelist people to pay automatically.
FedNow was only just released, it is going to take time to add support. My bank doesn't support it yet.
Yeah, I don't like any 'pull' bill payment at all. I know exactly why they do it. It is a lot harder to get the money back after the screw you than it is to bail on a changed deal.
I completely agree. The cost of credit cards should be passed to the consumer. Right now everything I buy is effectively 3-5% more expensive to cover the credit card fees. (Ok, maybe only 1-3% because handing cash costs money too, but that doesn't change the big picture.) However if I want to oppose this I need to stop using my credit card, but my credit card gives me 2% back. So if I chose not to participate I lose money.
Mint mobile has been 100% good to me over the years, save for the rare surprising lack of network (I found a spot in the middle of a city that I get 0 coverage shockingly).
I'd recommend them to everyone, but they've been sold to T-Mobile and I'm skeptical it won't be broken soon enough.
But for $180 a year I was getting 5GB data, unlimited voice+text. I also spent about $20 a year on roaming extras when I'd go to Canada for a couple weeks.
GoogleFi was probably my best experience when on android, but they didn't support iOS and their fee was notably higher than mint too. ($65 a month iirc?). GoogleFi was unlimited, better coverage, unlimited usage in Canada (my main roaming on home sim card) , and includes a bunch of extras like storage, youtube etc.
Just going to echo that I've JUST switched to Mint from T-Mobile. Once they removed the Apple pay discount, I realized I was paying $75/mo when I'm mostly on Wifi at home anyway. I also didn't realize that T-Mobile bought Mint so hopefully I won't have to shop around again.
FWIW I paid $20/mo for 15gb for 1 year with Mint. Over 2/3rds less than TMobile (While using the same network).
If mint ends up not working out, Verizon prepaid has the same 15gb deal but for $35/mo with auto pay.
So far I have not noticed any difference when switching from T Mobile to Mint besides having to reconfigure IMessage due to the new eSim. EZ Mode.
Google FI is a bit more expensive since their QCI level is the same as T-Mobile's first-party premium plans, so theoretically you won't be slowed down if the T-Mobile tower handling your data is overloaded, while T-Mobile "Essentials" and other MVNOs using T-Mobile will be slowed down. https://fixverizon.com/2023/01/12/qci-prioritization-for-car...
I was recommended Mint but had a completely disastrous experience just trying to get service with them. They could not get my phone number moved over from Verizon even though I was unlocked and had the port out PIN.
Ended up going with Ting and it's been fine. Service is trash sometimes/doesn't work at all occasionally but I also don't want to live a life where I need my phone 24/7 so the dirt cheap pricing is attractive enough for me to stay.
I believe a lot of online services refuse to do phone verification with VOIP so there's a cost to going this route. I wouldn't be surprised if they start to block prepaid phones soon as well, they already do for some online game registrations. I hope I'm wrong though, I exclusively use prepaid phone cards to avoid these billing scams.
I have had the exact opposite experience. googlefi was terrible coverage and more expensive than t-mobile. I switched from Google fi to Verizon, 2 years of Verizon was HORRIBLE, the. I switched to att for 2 years, then I just switched to t-mobile this spring and it's been sunshine and roses. costs me less each month, unlimited everything, and the best coverage of any cell carrier to date.
This is one thing that privacy.com is great for. If it weren't for these companies no-credit card requirement, you could also use something like Capital Ones virtual credit card, and those aren't the only two offering such services.
Privacy's is especially good imo as you can set spending limits and easily (un)pause cards and create new ones pretty easily. Even outside of trying to take advantage of auto-pay discounts, it's just a nice piece of mind to be able to be a hard check on an accounting "Oopsie", mine or theres.
That said, not a fan of this overreach and general disregard for people's money. Yes, most people are terrible at managing their money, but hidden fees, auto pay not auto happening on the scheduled date, and general corporate greed, disrespect and distrust certainly doesn't help either.
Yes, there are some vendors starting to block these. I can confirm it works with ATT Internet w/ the discount. I don't see why you couldn't use it for their other services too, but AT&T is such a shit company I'm frankly surprised when anything they do that can't be explained by greed actually works or makes sense.
You could create a new checking account with your same bank that you give privacy.com access to and keep a low balance on. Still involves making sure it has enough to cover your privacy.com virtual card expenses.
It's a balance. Individuals want to insulate themselves against businesses charging the wrong amount or even committing fraud. Businesses are trying to minimize losses due to customers who fail to pay their bill. Hence the use of credit checks, security deposits, prepaying for service, requiring a card or bank account to be linked at all times(1), etc.
(1) I used to use Google Fi. There's simply no option to receive a paper bill or to pay via check.
It is not clear in the article who will keep debit cards as accepted forms of payment. At least for mobile providers who will still offer debit for payment in the future, you do not have to provide your bank account number. Though you do lose out on credit card benefits like points/rewards and the ease of disputing charges.
For those whose mobile providers will switch to only using bank account numbers for payments and want the ability to be able to block access to the account if that account number is somehow compromised, I would recommend looking into Qube Money [1]. Among many other awesome functions (like being a great budgeting tool), it allows you to create different “Qubes” (pronounced “cubes”, think digital cash envelope) that you place money in and allocate towards different bills. It’s similar to Privacy and Capital One’s virtual credit cards in that each Qube is assigned a unique debit card number. More importantly, each Qube gets its own bank account number. Closing a Qube and opening a new Qube with a new bank account number is easy. There are more great features, but I figure this was most relevant to the topic.
I second the Qube recommendation. After Simple died I was looking for a good replacement, Qube more then fits the bill and even has features I wish Simple did.
With the number of breaches T-Mobile has had (as mentioned in the article,) there's no reason to trust a company like that any more personal information than strictly necessary. If they were to to and corner people in to giving more, it sounds like a good reason to stop doing business with them.
Seems like ATT may have screwed this up even worse. They seemingly dropped my autopay discount to $5 from $10 claiming that I am using a credit card, when I'm using my checking account as I always have for the past 10 years.
In these United States, it's rather perilous to use your direct ACH bank account. The protections around this method are so minimal, hope you'll never have a dispute with a creditor.
Which is exactly why ACH is the cheapest/most discounted method.
I’m pretty terrible at this stuff but just got into a couple of CU and capital one, I’m branching out.
Help me understand, you have one checking account for one recurrent bill and then manually make sure that checking account has enough balance to cover that one recurring bill every month? That way nobody can drain your main funds, right? But what if there’s a big charge then you would be overdrafted?
I also saw qube recommended here on another thread as a simple way to make and close accounts easily (I think that’s the idea).
Unrelated, I like the extra protection credit cards give and the extra warranty and theft clauses. Hope visa and MC can get their act together.
Cell and cable companies are notorious for screwing up the bill (whoops sorry). Autopay in any form, but especially linked directly to your bank account, is just asking to be robbed.
I'll never pay direct from my accounts because these companies will 'accidentally' drain an account and put people in an awful position, whereas a credit card company will happily tell a company like Verizon to eff off.
It's all good, these rent-seeking griftcos are making it easier and easier to fire them by the day.
Switched from Verizon prepaid to Visible recently. Given that it is the same company, it feels like it is Verizon 2.0 and this is their migration path away from the legacy systems. The onboarding process was really smooth.
One monthly price, including taxes. You can also find a $10/mo discount on their top tier plan online.
I haven't noticed any difference in service quality at all, nor would I expect much.
What about at peak times? Any noticeable dips? I tried Visible in the past and wasn’t too thrilled with Verizon’s coverage in my city. Might need to revisit since I’m really tired of paying $85+ for a plan. My biggest priority is data coverage.
Yea, of course any plan is coverage dependent. My area is pretty well covered and I haven't noticed any issues in that regard. I was already on Verizon and Visible is the same network, so nothing should change there.
But, I'm sure that I'll somewhere at some point and not have great coverage. Par for the course. The only thing I can suggest is multiple providers if that is your case.
As for peak times, I haven't noticed anything bad there either. My guess is that while Visible is a MVNO, it is the main MVNO for Verizon. As I mentioned, I get the strong feeling they are Verizon v2, it wouldn't be in their best interest to provide too bad of service.
This title feels misleading somehow. I was expecting some sort of access that let them see your transactions like an open banking affordability check or to get spending habit data...but it's just a direct debit?
News came out today that MasterCard and Visa are upping their CC fees so the reasoning from the carriers makes sense. If anything it's good they're passing the saving on?
I use direct debit authorizations on all sorts of monthly payments to credit cards, telecom, etc and it's all good. Just because they have a debit authorization doesn't mean you can't contest or reverse the charge.
That they aren't up-front on pricing is unfortunate (and somewhat unethical) but it seems the hidden lede here is how usurious the CC networks charges are.
It's really time we had a modern payment network in the US (like Europe, India, Brazil, etc etc) so we didn't have to pay the CC tax.
Meanwhile, I’ve learned the hard way to NEVER do ACH direct payment for recurring charges because it’s nearly impossible to successfully resolve a dispute and you give up all control of access to your funds to unaccountable corporate giants.
I kept my credit card autopay and paid the extra, because the credit card provides some semblance of actual consumer protection.
What the hell good is a 2%-3% cash back on a credit card when they're fucking you for 26% of your balance every month?
When I was in 10th grade in 1968, our Social Studies teacher told us that any interest rate over 8% was a violation of the usury laws, to protect the public from loansharking.
So when did loansharking become legal with these credit cards?
AT&T charges me a different amount every month as it is. I can’t figure out why, the bill is too stupid complicated, but the amount varies between 10-20 month to month. Why would I ever trust those people to ACH my account an undefined amount each month? If the bill amount was actually fixed and predictable, sure. But that’ll never be the case.
I really hope banks charge the carriers for bounced checks. That’s not something a consumer should have to do if their account is $3 too low because they funded the account for whatever the bill was last month.
I have been extremely satisfied with the service from my MVNO. I am subscribed to the bottom-tier plan, with 500MiB/mo of data. I currently pay the bill monthly through electronic BillPay.
If I ever go over my data cap in a month, I will be automatically upgraded to the next tier plan. Here's the catch: my current plan is grandfathered, and no longer available to switch back. Once I "accidentally" upgrade, I'll be stuck there.
No big deal, right? It's another $5/mo. Well, guess how much the AutoPay discount is?
Yeah, thought so. I'd personally go through that in an hour. MVNOs are great but only if you barely use the service and don't care about getting throttled at peak times.
My usage patterns are quite miserly. I rarely go out, perhaps once a week. When I do, if I feel like I need constant connectivity, then I activate Battery Saver and Data Saver first, then Mobile Data.
Basically I only use text-based web pages while I'm out and about. No streaming audio or video or downloads. I suppose there's not a lot going on in the background polling, either. Of course I hop back on WiFi wherever possible, my ISP makes that easy.
I've been doing this routine for at least a year, and I have warnings set when I'm up around 480MiB. I've never gotten a cap warning, although I've had a few warnings that "Chrome has used more data than usual!"
I had the notice from t-mobile however every time i went to change my autopay settings from a CC i was presented a page saying "not available at this time". I then get to a screen where i updated debit and bank and marked it as "default" but come to find i didnt find the hidden box to migrate over to autopay. I still dont know where that it. i got stuck with the $5 hit this month.
I suspect this is due (at least partially) to the relatively recent rise in credit card rewards. Many more cards than in the past are giving rewards, and that requires increasing the fees charged during the transaction. MC and Visa recently announced a fee increase, which tracks with this trend. In response, vendors are saying enough is enough and pushing customers away from credit cards.
I checked my T-Mo today. I have autopay and it's still a CC and T-mo says still eligible for the discount, yet this article says it was rolled out in June/July. I wonder if I'm on an older plan that isn't affected by this?
A lot of credit cards offer something like "lost phone protection" whereby you get reimbursed if you lost your phone, but only when you pay the phone bill using that credit card. Such insurance must be expensive and I suppose that's why fees are increasing.
We switched to US Mobile prepaid data pools a few months ago. $9/line + $2/GB per month.
I found some code online [0] that runs every hour and purchases an additional GB if my remaining amount falls below a threshold. It’s been working great for us.
We dropped our bill for 2 lines from ~$100/mo to $21/mo.
Every time I look at major carrier's plan-offerings, I'm kind of shocked that they present "basic" or "essential" plans which are so expensive with so many gigabytes of mobile-data.
If feels like a forceful marketing push, to trick customers into constantly escalating their idea of "normal usage" until they're streaming video 24/7.
($9 x 2) => $21 - $18 = $3. You can pay $2/GB per month, and they let you buy .5GB? That's crazy they don't force whole increments. Also, you're only using 3GB per month of data? That's crazy too!
($9 x 2 lines) + ($2 x 1GB) = $20 + $sales_tax = ~$21
To be clear, the minimum increment one can purchase is 1 GB.
We're in a bit of a weird situation where we aren't in the US the majority of the time, so most months we don't use any data off our US plan.
If we do end up in the US then that bit of code keeps buying us more data 1GB at a time as needed.
Another cool thing is that our USMobile eSIM uses the 4G data from our local eSIM so that we can still make/receive calls/SMS on our US line from anywhere. It treats the local 4G like WiFi Calling. Pretty dope.
Wireless carriers are price differentiating between credit cards which cost them more to process and debit cards or ACH transactions which cost them less. This is a good thing. It will take you all of five minutes to change your autopay from your credit card to your debit card.
They shouldn't be able to set arbitrary fees on different payment methods. They should also not be allowed to advertise an "autopay discount" if they price discriminate different payment methods. It should be a "give us your bank account information discount" or something.
