T-Mobile's new Price Lock guarantee is guaranteed to confuse everyone

T-Mobile’s new Price Lock guarantee is guaranteed to confuse everyone

If you’re a current T-Mobile subscriber who may be eyeing a change of service plans, be aware that your rights as a customer will be affected by a needle-in-the-haystack change to some terms and conditions. Even if you’re just jumping on board, you may want to watch when you add new lines to your account.

The changes concern Price Lock, a cost guarantee that took effect on April 28, and the program it replaced calledUn-contractwhich the carrier launched in 2015. Internal documents as posted byThe T-Mo Reportshow that the two policies are substantively almost identical: mainly, that subscribers will never pay more — perhaps they may even pay less — than the original advertised price of their chosen plan for as long as they’re on it. Of course, the promise didn’t apply to external costs such as non-data add-on features, taxes, fees, equipment, and other things. But one thing that did fall under the umbrella of the promise was the price for additional lines.

That is now not the case for either Un-contract or Price Lock. From this past Thursday onwards, adding a new line will cost both new and old customers the currently advertised price and not the billed price from when they initially started their account. This gets tricky if you’re on a deprecated plan like T-Mobile ONE, Simply Unlimited, or even one from Sprint, pre-merger — new line prices vary depending on service tier and there seems to be corresponding guidance on how to reconcile them between legacy and current plans. All that said, the guarantee ensures that customers won’t pay more than that price for the additional line.

Price Lock also opens up the potential for a future where T-Mobile may drop its price guarantee, noting that if customers “migrate to a new plan not covered by Price Lock, they will lose the Price Lock.” That may be the case with theBase Essentials planthatrecently debuted. Furthermore, the policy doesn’t just lock in the plan price, but also specifically the ability to access “an AutoPay discount” — which sounds like the amount can change at any time — as well as the amount of data customers can use before being throttled or subject to traffic management policies if there are any. On a related note, T-Mobile raised the prioritization threshold on its unlimited plan customers from 32GB to 50GB back in 2017.

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