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There’s a new Mint Mobile Amex Offer today which is giving $30 or $45 back when spending $90 or more. While this wasn’t overly interesting when I first saw it this morning, another announcement by Mint Mobile today caught my eye and has me seriously considering moving our cell phone service over to them.
The Deal
- Spend $90 or more in a single transaction with Mint Mobile & get $45 back, or
- Spend $90 or more in a single transaction with Mint Mobile & get $30 back.
Key Terms
- Expires November 9, 2020.
- Offer valid online only via mintmobile.com and merchant mobile app.
Quick Thoughts
I’ve been happy enough with our Google Fi service since switching to them as a result of their excellent deal a couple of years ago, so when I saw this new Mint Mobile Amex Offer this morning, I didn’t think much of it.
Later on this morning though I saw an announcement that Mint Mobile had launched a new Unlimited plan costing $30 per month when paying for an annual plan in advance.
Mint Mobile offers 3, 6 and 12 month plans. The nice thing is that when signing up for the first time, you can choose the 3 month plan and get the cheaper 12 month pricing (pro-rated) for those first 3 months. If you continue renewing every 3 months the price would increase, but you can switch to an annual plan to maintain that pricing if you’re happy with the coverage and service after that initial 3 month period.
If you’re interested in their Unlimited plan, that means you’d be paying $90 up-front for those initial 3 months of coverage which would in turn trigger the statement credit from the Amex Offer. That reduces the cost to $45 (if you have the $45 statement credit version of the Amex Offer), plus you can get up to $20 cashback through a shopping portal. Getting Unlimited talk, text and 5G/4G LTE service for 3 months for a net cost of $8.33 per month is an excellent deal.
This means you can test out Mint’s service for 3 months, then decide at that point if you want to continue. I’m therefore very tempted by this opportunity and think I’ll be taking advantage of this offer.
Our Google Fi bill for Unlimited service is ~$130 per month for me and my wife, whereas it’d effectively only be $60 (plus tax presumably) per month with Mint Mobile. Both Google Fi and Mint use T-Mobile for service, so there likely wouldn’t be much of a difference in our experience. Google Fi automatically seeks out open Wi-Fi networks with which to connect your phone while you’re out and about and automatically routes your data through a VPN when doing this. That rarely happens though, so missing out on this automatic functionality with Mint Mobile wouldn’t be a big deal, especially seeing as we could manually connect to the public Wi-Fi networks ourselves anyway if we needed to. Besides, that feature is less important when you’re on an unlimited plan like we are and so don’t need to conserve our data allowance.
Another feature we’d miss if moving away from Google Fi is free texting and data when overseas. While that’s nice to have, it’s not like we’re going to be spending a ton of time overseas in the next year. Besides, even if Mint Mobile costs us $65 per month once taxes and fees are taken into account, free international texting and data isn’t worth the additional $65 per month (or $780 annualized) cost with Google Fi. We’d be much better off just buying a data package for when we’re overseas.
Google Fi allows you to pause service for up to 3 months, during which time you won’t get billed if you’re currently with them like we are. That’s a great feature which you could in theory use to test out Mint Mobile. The downside of this approach is that you wouldn’t be able to pause your plan while simultaneously porting your phone number to Mint. You’d therefore have to use a brand new phone number for 3 months with Mint which I’m not sure is worth the hassle; I’d much rather just port my number to them and cancel Google Fi service, then transfer back to Fi if Mint doesn’t live up to expectations. While that’s a bit of a faff, it’s certainly easier than having to update my phone number with I don’t know how many companies and then back again if unpausing Fi service further down the road.
Mint Mobile is owned by Ryan Reynolds and he miraculously managed to wheel out Rick Moranis out of retirement for Mint Mobile’s unlimited plan announcement today, so if that’s not a reason to give Mint Mobile another look, I don’t know what is.
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Interesting offer. Note it says 5Gig limit for Hot Spot for unlimited plans, which is a bummer.
Do you know if you can split payments when placing the order to take advantage of the AMEX offer from multiple cards.
I’m not sure about split payments I’m afraid; I’m assuming not, but I haven’t placed our order yet. I was going to set up separate accounts for my wife and I seeing as they don’t offer cheaper pricing for paying for two people together, so that way we can use the offer on each of our cards.
thanks, I don’t see a way to split either. It’d be nice to call “customer service” and have them process it manually, but doesn’t look like that’s an option either. I suppose that’s cost of not paying premium rates for service. I think I’ll go give them a try anyway.
Over on doc, I saw people talking using a wallet feature in Mint once you sign up to load $90 at a time.
That’s good to know – thank you!