SaskTel customers might be paying a bit more for their prepaid service. The company has introduced a minimum monthly charge of $8, which will apply to all prepaid accounts. Most customers, however, won’t even notice. Customers who spend more than $8 per month on SaskTel prepaid minutes and text messages will pay nothing extra. Instead, those who use less than $8 per month will pay the difference between $8 and their usage. So if a customer uses $5 in minutes and messages, she’ll have to pay an additional $3 to cover the $8 minimum. While this change won’t affect most customers, it certainly will hurt emergency users. People who only use their cell phones for emergencies typically look for companies that have lengthy expiration periods. The $8 minimum monthly fee hurts that. Then again, it’s better than the $10 to $15 monthly top-up requirement other carriers offer. Those who use their phones only for emergencies will incur $96 in fees annually, but will basically get up to $8 in free minutes every month (if that’s how you want to look at it). Like most carriers, SaskTel wants to get its customers on a text messaging bundle. To that end they’ve increased the per-message text rate to 20 cents from 15, which covers Canada and the U.S. International text messages will also cost 20 cents. Two text bundles are available: $6 for 100 messages and $13 for unlimited. They also offer a $20 plan which covers unlimited text messaging and 50 local minutes per month. Finally, SaskTel is increasing its directory assistance fee to $2. ]]>
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