Eric Ravenscraft
T-Mobile’s prepaid brand MetroPCS is getting a new name: Metro by T-Mobile. To go along with the new coat of paint, the company will now include Google One and Amazon Prime subscriptions with its unlimited plans.
Currently, MetroPCS offers a $50 unlimited data plan with no allotment for tethering. For $10 more, you can get an unlimited plan that comes with 10GB of mobile hotspot data (after which, your tethering speeds will slow down). All of this uses T-Mobile’s network which has gotten pretty good over the years.
However, under the new “Metro by T-Mobile” banner—which we will all almost certainly refer to as just Metro—the company is sweetening the deal. Now, a $50 individual plan ($80 for two lines, $140 for four) will come with 5GB of hotspot tethering. As a bonus, you’ll also get a subscription to Google One, the storage plan that gives you 100GB of space in the cloud. It’s not a bad little extra.
The next tier up, though, is where it gets interesting. For the $60 a month individual plan ($90 for two lines, $150 for four), you get the same unlimited data, plus 15GB of mobile hotspot data, and a subscription to Amazon Prime. That gets you free two-day shipping, Amazon Video, and all those other benefits that come with the subscription.
That $10 a month difference between unlimited plans is, as it turns out, exactly the same price as Amazon Prime itself costs. Unless you’r grandfathered into a lower rate, Amazon Prime costs $120 a year, or a clean $10 a month. Which means if you’re a Metro customer and don’t need that extra hotspot data, then there’s no difference between upgrading to the plan that includes Amazon Prime, or just paying for Amazon Prime separately. If you pay for the whole year, that is. If you pay for Amazon Prime by the month, it costs $13 per month.
Bundling Amazon Prime is a curious decision on Metro’s part, but it makes more sense from Amazon’s perspective. A solid majority of households in the US already have an Amazon Prime subscription, which leaves very little room for growth. Bundling the subscription with a budget cell phone bill—and giving users essentially the yearly price, paid monthly instead—might just give Amazon a few new customers.
Source: John Legere
