Today, I am excited to share something that I am really passionate about: free cellphone service. My monthly cellphone bill comes to $0, and I owe it all to FreedomPop and Google Voice.
With FreedomPop, a freemium based phone company that is an MVNO on the Sprint and AT&T networks, I am allotted 700MBs of data each month.
Currently, I have a boatload of SIM cards and phones activated on FreedomPop’s free plans. While this company is certainly gimmicky, I have been using FreedomPop for a little over 5 years now, and I have gotten the hang of outmaneuvering their system.
Though FreedomPop offers a VoIP app which can theoretically act as your primary messaging and dialer app, I have found the latency to be sub par to other competitors. Also, there is a limited number of texts and minutes.
For these reasons, the sole purpose of my use of FreedomPop is to take advantage of their free data, which I use in conjunction with Google’s VoIP based service called Voice.
The Voice app offers unlimited texting and picture messaging when on data or WiFi. As a bonus, it also has a recently redesigned messaging web interface that works flawlessly. Also, a dialer for calling is integrated into the app, and it works really well.
Google has been made some significant improvements to Voice. From revamping its design to making the service more streamlined and easy to use, Google has created a VoIP phone service that is incredibly underrated. Even if you aren’t looking to use it with FreedomPop, you can still use it on WiFi to get free phone service.
I have really enjoyed using Google Voice and FreedomPop since their inceptions, and I have learned so much from them. Not only has it developed my passion for living a freemium lifestyle by showing me how we don’t all need to pay a ridiculousness amount of money for a phone plan, but it has also improved my understanding of phone plans and data networks, the power of the global internet. Also, FreedomPop gave me valuable insights into the fickle nature of freemium companies and made me realize that one is always at the mercy of their rules. The trick is to find a way around them or, at the very least, learn to live by them.
As a final note, its important to realize that WiFi is everywhere. One way that I benefit from this is by using it to power my cellular needs with Google Voice. Whenever I’m not around WiFi, I can just fallback on FreedomPop data for texting and calling.
Merry Christmas!
-TFF
Leave a Reply