It would be awesome if you offered one or more of the following
- Free calls between numbers on the same account
- Free incoming sms
- Free incoming voice
- The XS plan could allow for 5-10 free units (minutes, messages, MBs) before bumping you up to the next tier
Comments
Brian, thanks for your suggestions. We get these a lot, but in our mind, it's one of the reasons the cellular industry has gotten itself into such a mess.
We don't believe anything in life is 'free'. Somebody has to pay... either you, or the company you're buying service from.
When the 'other guys' come up with a plan for free incoming minutes, they make a guess that X% of their customer base will only have Y usage.
Knowing this, they'll create an overpriced plan with FREE stamped all over it. 90% of their users will use less than the estimated usage and they'll spend every waking minute treating the other 10% (who used over their budgeted estimates) like criminals for eating all of their profit margin.
So you have two groups of customers: The 90% who are paying too much for the privilege of FREE and the other 10% who get treated like criminals for actually USING the service. The cellular industry is the only industry that actually penalizes their best customers.
At Ting, we want to offer reasonable pricing to 100% of our customers and we want to celebrate those who use us a TON.
We'll never want to build a plan that would have either of use resenting each other later.
-Ben
That makes a lot of sense and is pretty much what I expected. I still like my last idea though. It would add a little bit of cost to you but it would be excellent for customers with mostly accidental usage.
Would free Ting to Ting customers really place that much of a burden on the company? Or what if instead of both phones using the shared minutes on a plan, only one phone number gets charged for the minutes. Say for instance I call my wife and we have the L plan, what if only I was charged for the minutes. I think this may have been brought up elsewhere on the forum, but I can't recall now. Thanks!!!
since ting is on the sprint network, would ting to sprint users be free
I have a feeling that Ting pays for minutes no matter how they are used. It is not the same as Sprint to Sprint because Ting does not own the network they are just paying to use it.
Hi Rodney. Yes that's correct.
Michael: It's not only about the burden to us: it's about a fight to keep things simple. At most carriers, the #1 source of customer service calls are billing related. Users who don't understand their complicated bills, and in some cases, billing mistakes made by the carrier.
Our customers don't want to have to think about who they're texting, or what time of day it is.
Regardless of who owns the network, there are usage fees built in everything a customer does on the network. Choosing to ignore these fees, incurs a deficit that is often recovered somewhere else, often by penalizing high usage customers, or increased prices overall.
Regardless of the time of day, who they're talking to, where they're downloading from, texting, Ting customers know exactly what their paying for a voice call, an SMS and megabyte.
It's our strong belief that customers would rather have their mobile carrier be straight with them on their usage, rather then play a complicated game of free calling between your five favorite friends or free calling amongst subscribers.
Thanks for all the questions everybody. I think they're important and we want to be as transparent and explanatory as possible when it comes to stuff like this.
-Ben
Appreciate the feedback Ben. Very much so. Look forward to using Ting for quite some time.
I would like for the $6 device fee to include say 2 text messages, 5 minutes of voice, and 1 MB of data. Just using one of these features bumps you up $3. I typically only receive a couple text messages a month from people that haven't caught on that I don't text from this number. Regardless of the reasons, having a couple minutes/texts/MBs included would go a long way to not having to incur charges for some inadvertent usage.
Solution: turn off texting and web access.
If you go into your phone settings you can disable things like texting
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