Hi meetuu, thanks very much for your thoughtful response. I totally can relate to your desire for that feature and I hope you do not feel ashamed for it. Your phone is a personal device, and it ought to exist to serve your personal preferences so that you may live the best possible life with the thing (toleration or enjoyment)!
I think it can be confusing now, that they have become so impersonally social, that we can be made to feel strange for wanting them to behave in different ways. And I appreciate your desire for simplicity and wanting to get to the essence of your communications.
At what point did you finally decide to leave your smartphone behind and how severe of a lifestyle change have you had to make in order to operate and function as you have come to expect of yourself?
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We currently offer unlimited talking and texting for $15/month + state taxes and FCC fees, or ~$18.
Interesting service - how did it get started? I see that you're all over the site, assuming youre "Strategy Team James"... Are you the founder of this service?
Who backs the network you talk to?
Would you have a data-only-text-only SIM plan? (i.e. could I have a ~$3/month SIM that ONLY allowed Text? or a $5/month plan that ONLY allowed text+SOME data?
I'd like to put sims in some IoT devices - and want to find the cheapest method to allow this.
I have some other ideas I'd like to talk to you guys about if these sorts of things are something you're open to.
Hi Sam, I started a previous company (caffei.net) and during this time of selling network software that improves end user privacy, battery life, network performance, and total data used to the folks building all the apps all the people use for 2 years, I grew disgusted with how little regard they have for all of the many prepaid people in the world... for whom a sloppily set up RPC connection for some trash 30 second video ad will cost them $0.40. This is why we had that lemonde.fr teardown on HN several months back: apps stuff themselves with third parties that hog up the network and thus battery life and aren't penalized for it. So the phone company we started became a way to exact the proper practices we know we can deliver, and we know that folks would benefit from. But then we started finding a lot of people in far worse situations with their big phone company providers, paying more than $300 a month for less than 2 gigabytes of data (using less than 50mb a month) etc etc. So our morals pushed us because we couldn't find anyone else helping them! Yes, Consumer Cellular, and yes GreatCall, are supposed to be good, but in practice for about 5% of users, they are really, really bad. And yeah I'm a founder.
We use AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile networks. We also peer with a few hundred regional carriers around the world.
What is your business application and how big of a cost component are these SIM cards and how many of them would you need? Have you checked out hologram.io? They have a card built for this IIRC.
Always open to ideas! I am james@communityphone.org
Absolutely. Our most popular family plans involve two unlimited everything plans for the kids ($45 each for two, or $50 for one) and then a $35 2gb plan for the parents with an additional line of unlimited t&t for $10 sharing that 2gb pool, or $45 + $90 = $135 plus taxes and fcc fees for the 4 lines.
hi again james, the problem with phone abuse became apparent, so long ago that i cant even remember. my wife bought a smartphone for me to use and it took less than a week for me to begin raging. the greatest peeves involved a "certain browser corporation" baking in thier browser, and requireing a sign in to a "G / G+ account" the lack of controll over basic functions, and camera use. It seemed that every time i wanted to snap a pic of a moment never to be seen again, the process was interrupted with suggestions, or a suddenly critical update [turning off OTA updates would be wonderful]. The life style adjustment that was presented to me was 1 device many uses , like camera, GPS, note taking, sharing of information. But it was a false promise as these things came at the price of not being able to actually use thes features in an effective manner. I was unwilling to adjust my life style to accomodate this "mess" so i have a task bag with SLR camera, GPS, FRS/HAM radio, PDA, laptop, and pocket router hotspot. This is my lifestyle, and im called a fossil, a dinosaur, older than dirt etc. if i had a device that was all of these things [basically a smartphone] but allowed me to ^totally^ controll it up to and including selection and design of an operating system and firmware of my own choice i would not balk at paying $900 on hardware that sits in the palm of my hand. Please all you hardware devs out there i hope you are listening as well. Thanx again James it sounds like you have a good price point as well, but im just interested in giving constructive feedback, i hope your company is able to be a suffiently successful competitor, and reset the bar for all others.
Hey Meetuu, I'm happy you've been able to find and fashion yourself a solution to these problems you've experienced. I worry about the people who agree with you, but who might not be smart enough to realize it, and instead choose to acquiesce to the mainstream pull of sterile veneer throwing up lowercase I prepends all over the place.
If I comment back here in a few months, or years, will you receive my notification? I would like to give you updates and receive more of your constructive criticism as we move forward :)
Maybe you are a fossil, how could I know, but we've figured out how to fashion literal fossils into the black goop that's brought the entire world this far... fossils of all kinds must have a lot of potential!
At what point did you finally decide to leave your smartphone behind and how severe of a lifestyle change have you had to make in order to operate and function as you have come to expect of yourself?
- We currently offer unlimited talking and texting for $15/month + state taxes and FCC fees, or ~$18.