Boost has just killed off its best value plan. Time to shop around again
When my son started high school a couple of years ago, I did some extensive research to determine the right mobile plan for his first smartphone.
I wanted to go prepaid so he didn’t bankrupt me watching video on his commute, and ended up signing up to Boost Mobile’s $180 365-day expiry plan. It was such good value, I moved my own number over to it, and my wife’s. When my daughter got her first phone, she ended up on the same plan.
In the years since I first signed up my son, the plan has gone up from $180 to $230. But that was okay, because that annual fee gave you 160GB of data to use over 365 days, or about 13GB per month. (Note – it now offers 170GB, but when I last recharged it was only 160GB, so that’s what I’m describing).
But Boost has just confirmed that it is ending that plan. If you want a 12-month plan prepaid plan from the provider, you need to pay $300 for 240GB, or $365 for 365GB.
Because I’m big on value, let’s take a closer look at the three 365 day plans to show why this is so disappointing.
| Plan | Price per day | Data per day | Value Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| $230 for 160GB | $0.63 | 0.44GB | 0.6 |
| $300 for 240GB | $0.82 | 0.66GB | 0.396 |
| $365 for 365GB | $1.00 | 1GB | 0.4 |
Calculating the value score
When you’re looking at prepaid mobile plans, price is more important than the amount of data, though data is still important.
So for me, to calculate a Value score, I weighted the price factor at 60%, and data at 40%. You may feel differently, but that works for me.
To create the score, I normalised both the price per day and the data per day numbers to ensure they sat between 0 and 1, and then multiplied them by the weighting.
As you can see, with this weighting, the Value of the $230 plan is significantly higher than the other two remaining plans, which are essentially the same.
Shopping around
I’m pretty upset by this decision from Boost. Because I prepaid for 12 months, I’ve got another 3 months before I need to do anything about it.
But when I do, I’ll be shopping around.
There’s no shortage of mobile plan options these days, but the range of 365 day long-expiry prepaid plans does seem to be reducing.
And that’s a shame for those of us that love value.
If you’re not mid-way through a long-expiry plan, you can still grab the $230 12-month option until 22 October. It’s great value, and you’ll have a full year before you need to shop around, like I will.
[Boost]
