It’s not super uncommon for MVNOs to feature specific deals aimed at certain types of customers. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but it looks like Red Pocket has launched some Verizon powered plans which can only be purchased through Ebay. These exclusive Ebay deals not only offer LTE through Verizon, but also seem to support Verizon phone activation.
Here are the two deals:
- $199 per year for 1000 minutes, 1000 texts, 1000 MB (500 LTE) per month for 12 months
- $220 per year for 1,000 minutes, unlimited texts and 1000 MB (500 LTE) per month for 12 months
As far as I know, this will be the first time that Red Pocket has allowed customers to activate Verizon phones on its CDMA plan, and getting LTE is also pretty sweet. That’s not even covering the fact that when you break down the deal into how much you’re paying monthly, it comes out to $16 – $20 per month. Which, really, isn’t that bad for a Verizon MVNO. If you were to purchase a similar monthly plan from Red Pocket, you would pay $30. There’s also a Verizon-specific plan for $20 which only includes 300 minutes and 1 GB of reduced speeds. So this is quite a deal. Check out Red Pocket’s plan list
on the website.
The catch (and there always is one) is that the top-ups available for these plan will not roll over, which means that depending on how your usage goes, you could end up spending $10 – $15 for only a few days’ worth of service. But I suppose that’s a risk you take with a yearly plan.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Ebay, and that is a lot of money to hand over to an MVNO. However, I did some double checking and it does look like it’s legit. Red Pocket customer service assured me that Red Pocket is the seller of these Ebay plans (not some shady third party) and that it will be honored. Additionally, Dennis over at
Prepaid Phone News did some reporting and looking into it and got basically the same responses that I did.
The risk of paying for a year’s service up front is that the money is non-refundable and as we all know, MVNOs have a habit of collapsing and shutting down with little notice. Of course, Red Pocket has been around since 2006, so I’d tentatively say that it’s probably stable enough to make this not as much of a risk as a new company would be.
You can read more about or purchase one of the
exclusive Red Pocket Ebay deals here. If you’re not familiar with Red Pocket, I might recommend taking a peek about the
Red Pocket website to get a feel for the company, plans and services available. Red Pocket offers plans through Sprint, AT&T and Verizon.]]>
