How to Get Started With Prepaid Cell Phone Service

Fill Your Bucket With Services

Prepaid cell phone service now offers much more than just voice telephone service. Like the postpaid, contract based cell phone services, most prepaid providers now offer text and multimedia messaging, email, web browsing as well as a host of calling features like voice mail. Those don’t translate directly into minutes so they had to come up with a way to essentially deposit funds against which these additional services, as well as voice calling, can be debited. While there are different ways to refer to this deposit account, referring to it as a bucket has become common. Simply put, you deposit money to your bucket by whatever payment method the carrier accepts and future services draw down the balance in the bucket. As long as there’s money in your bucket, you can take advantage of any of the provider’s services.

Most prepaid wireless providers offer the option to fill your bucket when you choose or you can set up an automatic transaction to occur whenever the balance gets down to a pre-agreed level. If you choose to fill it manually, they’ll send notification when the balance reaches or is approaching the low limit.

Automatic Renewal

The most advanced, and generally most advantageous, prepaid cell phone plans renew automatically each month. While this may seem to be similar to the contracts required by postpaid services, the major difference is that you can cancel the arrangement anytime you like without being subjected to an Early Termination Fee (ETF). On the automatic renewal plans, your credit card or bank account is charged monthly and service continues based on the plan you’ve selected. This arrangement is necessary to take advantage any of the monthly service plans. In general, it is these monthly service plans, especially the unlimited ones, which have made some of the best prepaid cell phone providers completely competitive with the prepaid services. Automatic renewal is also required when taking advantage of the daily plans which can be a money saving alternative, notably for customers who don’t use their phones on a daily basis.

Prepaid cell phone providers offer many alternatives to the stereotypic image of the past. No two providers handle their offerings in precisely the same manner but this article should prove helpful in generally understanding how the services operate. We suggest perusing the reviews contained within our Prepaid Cell Providers site when getting started. Once you’ve narrowed your choices, take a look at their respective sites for specific details. At TopTenREVIEWS, We Do the Research So You Don’t Have To.™