Verizon is shaking up its cellular plans, with a new “My Plan” setup that allows customers to pick and choose the perks and features they want. But it comes with a catch, which is that it’s probably going to be more expensive.
Available starting May 18, “My Plan” from Verizon is a plan that allows customers to pick and choose what they get. There are two base plans, “Unlimited Welcome” and “Unlimited Plus” which start at $30 and $45/month on accounts with at least four lines. With “Unlimited Plus,” customers unlock 5G Ultrawideband as well as 30GB of “premium” mobile hotspot data. That plan will also discount smartwatch/tablet/hotspot lines by 50%.
After picking a base plan, customers are then able to add “perks.” These can include network boosts, such as 100GB of mobile hotspot data for $10/month, or “Smartwatch Data & Safety” for $10/month. There are also a bunch of discounts on subscriptions, such as the “Disney Bundle” of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ for $10/month which saves customers about $5/month. Apple One is available for $10/month, down from $17.95, and Apple Music Family is $10/month, down from $16.99. Walmart+ is $10/month, down from $12.95.
The customized plans look like a solid deal, with Verizon offering discounts on subscriptions by bundling them into your bill that you’d pay more for elsewhere. But, really, this is going back on similar offers the carrier had with its previous plans.
Things will certainly be different from customer to customer, but it’s hard to imagine where most customers see a price drop here. Personally, I took a look at my own family’s plan. We have five lines on our account, four of which are on the $30 “5G Start” plan, with the last on “5G Play More” which costs $40 and adds hotspot data.
If we were to move over to “My Plan,” our bill would potentially go up – it’s hard to say for certain looking at the existing data. The “Unlimited Welcome” plan is the same as our 5G Start plans, but “Unlimited Plus” is comparable to “5G Play More,” and comes with an additional $5 cost. But, more than that, it also removes all of the perks that came with the “5G Play More” plan, which came with free Google Play Pass (worth $5/month) and, previously, free Disney+.
Update: Verizon, in an email, notes that Unlimited Welcome costs $5 less per month compared to 5G Start ($65 per line versus $70) and that Unlimited Plus is comparable to the Get More plan that costs $90 per month, for $10 less. Our coverage has been updated to address this.
Our Max Weinbach further broke this down, calling out that the existing “5G Get More” plan costs $90/month with several perks, and the comparable “My Plan” substitute would end up costing the end user $130/month after adding the same perks.
The main pitch for Verizon’s new plans seems to be “control,” which customers not paying for a “one size fits all” that they might not even use in its entirety. But, realistically, these new plans are more expensive unless you skip all perks and are only using the absolute base plan. But, even then, you’re losing out on value that was attached to these plans previously.
The only way customers save money is by using “Unlimited Plus” without any perks. An example of that would be Verizon’s existing $55/month plans which currently total $220/month for a family of four. By cutting out perks, you get the same network access for $180/month under the new setup. But as soon as even a few of the previously available perks are added, it ends up adding $10 over the previous bill.
No matter how you slice it, many Verizon customers are looking at a higher bill with these new plans. Luckily, Verizon generally won’t force customers to move off of their existing plans, at least for a while.
Max Weinbach contributed to this story.
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