I've had a FreedomPop phone for about a year now. Too good to be true? 500MB/mo isn't very much data. Plus, they cut you off before the 500MB mark unless you have auto-top off enabled. In other words, you might get like 400MB/mo free, not the full 500MB advertised. If you leave the auto-top off enabled, when you get close to 500MB they start automatically billing your credit card for extra data. That would be one way they make money from careless users.
Premium Voice service costs an extra $7 or $8 a month (I forget), but it's really the only way to get semi-reliable voice service -- VoIP only is pretty atrocious to use. I ended up dropping Premium Voice (since I have an old T-mobile voice-only phone that doesn't cost me much) and just pay $3.99/mo for data rollover, which lets me bank up each month's 500MB of data that I don't fully use. They are making some money from me, but certainly not a lot.
Does Freedompop rip off their customers? I don't feel like I've been ripped off so far, but their website is definitely tricky to use for opting out of all the extra services and whatnot. I can easily see someone getting ripped off because they couldn't find the small print when trying to disable the various ways they might bill you. I had to call their voice mail support line to get the hints on where to find the various buttons I needed to push.
The Gov't/FBI/NSA wants everyone to have a smart phone so that they can snoop on us. I wouldn't be surprised if FreedomPop makes money from gov't kickbacks by giving the gov't wide open access to your phone and its data. I don't have any proof of such a connection, but I agree, 500MB/mo of genuinely free data would seem too good to be true -- unless there were some sort of kickback going on. If FreedomPop did get a kickback from NSA, are they ripping us off? All of the Internet service providers are presumably tapped by NSA, what's the difference?
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Premium Voice service costs an extra $7 or $8 a month (I forget), but it's really the only way to get semi-reliable voice service -- VoIP only is pretty atrocious to use. I ended up dropping Premium Voice (since I have an old T-mobile voice-only phone that doesn't cost me much) and just pay $3.99/mo for data rollover, which lets me bank up each month's 500MB of data that I don't fully use. They are making some money from me, but certainly not a lot.
Does Freedompop rip off their customers? I don't feel like I've been ripped off so far, but their website is definitely tricky to use for opting out of all the extra services and whatnot. I can easily see someone getting ripped off because they couldn't find the small print when trying to disable the various ways they might bill you. I had to call their voice mail support line to get the hints on where to find the various buttons I needed to push.
The Gov't/FBI/NSA wants everyone to have a smart phone so that they can snoop on us. I wouldn't be surprised if FreedomPop makes money from gov't kickbacks by giving the gov't wide open access to your phone and its data. I don't have any proof of such a connection, but I agree, 500MB/mo of genuinely free data would seem too good to be true -- unless there were some sort of kickback going on. If FreedomPop did get a kickback from NSA, are they ripping us off? All of the Internet service providers are presumably tapped by NSA, what's the difference?
Thank you!