Sprint 12 months of unlimited plan $0/mo +taxes (restrictions on phones)

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68

Ok, my experience.

Background: I signed up for this deal in June 2017. For whatever reason, it didn’t expire until yesterday (July 31, 2018) and like an idiot I milked it up until the last day.

Advice #1: Cancel a few days or a week before your drop dead date. Don’t stress yourself out trying to get 100% of the value vs. 98%.

Process: After hearing that you could conceivably sign up for the 1 year deal with your spouse’s SSN, I did the following.

  1. Bought 2 $5 MintSim trial card kits - you’ll need 2 kits with 4 SIM cards. Yes 4. No, I don’t know why they make you do this. But trust me, you will.

  2. Port out to Mint (which is a T-Mobile MVNO) from Sprint using their trial plan. This will keep your phone number, which is a necessity for me since I’ve had mine for 15 years now.

  3. Upgrade to whatever minimum Mint plan is available - I did 5 GB for 3 months for me, 2 GB for 3 months for my wife in case the Sprint thing failed. Rates aren’t that bad - it was $60 for 3 months for the 5GB and $45 for the 2GB plus taxes. For me, this totaled about $115.

  4. You will need to use the 2nd SIM card to swap out the 7 day Mint trial to the “full” Mint 3 month dealio. That’s annoying. But it is what it is.

  5. Once you’ve ported out everything to Mint, now you need to port it back in.

Call Mint (213-xxx-xxxx) and ask them for your account number and PIN. You’ll need it to port back into Sprint. They will ask you why you want it. Say “For my recordkeeping” and they will accept that. Your PIN will almost certainly be the last 4 digits of your phone number, but affirm it with Mint. Your account numbers will be long - longer than Sprint’s in my case anyways. You’ll need them for both phone numbers, so ask for both.

Link to the Sprint Unlimited sign up page (Google “Spring free for a year” and it’ll pop right up). Input your current information - you’ll need your billing zip code, SIM card #, and I can’t recall but I think it’s IMEI or MEID or something like that, but you can easily find whatever they ask by Googling the steps) - and then Sprint will ask you to set up AutoPay.

Input credit card info and finalize. It will spit out a screen with your confirmation # (long and alphanumeric) plus a 7 digit(?) PIN. WRITE THIS DOWN AND DON’T LOSE IT. You’ll need it if anything goes awry.

  1. Swap out the Mint SIM for a Sprint SIM and wait. They will force you to buy Sprint SIMs even if you got them locally (which I did). Which will cost you about $18 for 2 SIMs and $5 each for any additional ones.

Took more than half an hour to get my wife’s line active (primary), then she had to do some approving to get my line (secondary) added to the account. She got an email about it, so just follow whatever the email tells you to do for additional lines.

Note that you can have up to 5 phones, so you might be doing this step several times if you’re taking advantage of that element. It also means you’ll need 2 Mint SIMs and 1 Sprint SIM per line you want to add, so keep that in mind.

  1. Go to Mint’s refund page and fill out 1 form per line and ask for a refund under their 7 day refund policy.

  2. STEP I’M CURRENTLY IN They’ve asked me for the IMEI number of the chip on the accounts being cancelled, so make sure you write these down unless you want to pop out SIM cards or want to squint at the teeny-tiny numbers on a nano SIM.

Theoretically, once you respond with this information, they will refund your purchase within 7 business days. If not, chargebacks are there for you.

  1. Enjoy 14 months of free Sprint - it goes through September 30, 2019 - at whatever savings you want to impute. For me I value it at $1,400 ($100/month for 2 lines of unlimited talk/text/data and 10GB of hotstpot…YMMV).

I would conservatively peg 8 hours to do all the above. It’s probably more like 5-6, but if something goes wrong you’ll be on hold for a bit. Get a movie or two queued up and it won’t be so bad. I would advise those with offices at work to do this then - the actually amount of time needed to actively do stuff is modest, but the waiting and queuing is where the time sink is at.

If I can help, drop me a line. If I missed stuff here, I’ll come back and correct it.

But since I had to struggle through, this should help someone out there who wants to save a cool $1K+. And if you have 3 kids and a wife, it’s really more like $2K.

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69

Great write up @orthros

My savings are harder to peg. I’m only saving $35/month, but my plan never expires, so my 6-8 hour ordeal could end up being worth even more.

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70

What plan are you doing that saves you money forever? Might make sense for me to switch over to that once the next year’s up.

71

The $15/mo unlimited throttled “Kickstart” plan that was available for a limited time in mid June.

Keep an eye out in case they offer it again.

72

Even though your write-up doesn’t apply to me, it was so thorough that I’m encouraged to try to move my line from Tello to Sprint.

73

The only thing from @orthros that I would recommend trying to avoid if possible is the $115 he spent on mint. He should be able to get a refund, but if it can be avoided, that is even better. I was able to port out to tmobile for $20. But I did have a spare unlocked phone that I ported to and a sprint phone that I ported back to. Also, I don’t know what held me up when sprint was trying to port my number back in. I think it was tmobile, but I can’t be sure. It could have just been their system since the deal was expiring that day and they had a ton of people calling in about it. I didn’t finish my phone call with them until after midnight, but they assured me that I would get the deal since I called before it ended. I’m all about avoiding a call every year, so I’m glad I got the $15 plan that never expires. But after doing it once and getting it behind me, considering the savings, it wasn’t that bad. So I would recommend the yearly port in-out required for a $0 plan for people that want to save money. Like orthros said, just set aside several hours to do it. The nice part is that the sprint operator was very nice and super helpful. She wouldn’t give up. Just kept trying things until it worked (all behind the scenes while I was on hold. I have no idea what she did).

The funny thing is, when the $0 plan started a year ago, no one figured it would still be around a year later for people to port out and back into, so the fact that some people are on it for another year is a pleasant and unexpected bonus. When they switched in the first place, they assumed that after a year, they would have to change their plan anyway. It is totally worth a few extra steps to change your plan and then change back if it means another year of $0 service.

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74

A couple notes:

  • You don’t need to purchase SIM cards on Sprint’s website. If you have an old Sprint SIM that is compatible with your phone, it will work. However you will need to sign up for the plan by calling instead of using the Sprint website.

  • 10 GB mobile hotspot/month is no longer included in this plan as of mid-July.

76

Lots of great tips here.

I’ll add that I still recommend everyone consider porting out to Google Voice. Maybe not if you use an iphone, but if you’re on android for sure.

Doing that once would eliminate having to port in/out your real number. You could just sign up for a new number with tmobile and port that throw away number in.

77

As far as I know, there is no way to add hotspot as an added service through Sprint with this plan.

78

And now I’m not so encouraged. :smile:
My brain can’t follow the logic of these machinations. Are you suggesting using a Google Voice number as your “real” number and then forward your Google Voice calls and messages to whatever your current cell number happens to be?

Maybe this is why I gave up chess and stick to checkers.

79

Yes, that’s it exactly.

When you want to change service you simply cancel the cell service you have and log into Voice and change the forwarding number. Instantly everything forwards to your new service #.

You can also give away your ‘junk’ service number to anyone and everyone and just change it when you want to get rid of all the spam calls/texts.

I could go on, there are plenty more benefits to it.

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80

I’m not so sure about relying on Google Voice with a main number. People still have issues receiving/sending to short code numbers. Also it’s another added layer of voice latency which puts in awkward delays that cause me and the other person to be talking over each other constantly. That’s in addition to have all your communications archived on Google’s servers.

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81

We are currently shopping around for my wife and now that there are so many options out there, I’m thinking that a taking advantage of a free year of Sprint while they still offer it is the way to go. A year from now, I will bet there will still be some $15/month MVNO plans around.

Just to be sure, with this plan, I can leave Sprint at anytime between now and 9/30/19 and it won’t cost anything. There is no contract, correct?

82

Correct. No contract.

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83

Get paid to use Sprint?

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84

My procrastination on signing up again pays off. Thanks msy

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85

Same here. Saw this and signed up Friday night. I’m not counting my chickens, but I was going to get the sprint account anyway, so might as well try for the $100 too.

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86

Update: $100 showing as pending in my BeFrugal account.

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87

(NM - jcohen73 already confirmed this works.) I am preparing my plan to recycle this deal when it expires in Jan 2019 for me. Here are my thoughts.
Port out of Sprint back to VZ PP for $14 via ebay sellers. Then sign up for a new Sprint account under a the opposite family member and port from VZ back to sprint under a new free agreement. Has anyone been down this road yet?

88

Bumping because I’m reupping finally.

Signed up as spouse last night, went through befrugal for 80$ cashback.

My process:

Used a spare dead phones ESN to sign up. Also signed up for a new email account and Google voice number.

Bought the SIM. I could have cancelled my service and used my current SIM but I think $13 is worth having a working phone nonstop right now.

When the SIM arrives I’ll document my swap. I plan on using a placeholder phone to swap my current service to that and then completing the sign up and port of GV ($3 to port out). Lastly I’ll cancel my current service.

Net would be $16 -$80 for another year of seevice. Plus $3 a month.

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