Google Project FI: Review

Dis­claimer: This post con­tains affil­i­ate links. I’m also an incred­i­bly sat­is­fied cus­tomer and hap­pi­ly sing their prais­es even with­out an affil­i­ate link. 

I’ve been a Ver­i­zon cus­tomer for 8 years. Ever since I got my first (incred­i­bly crap­py) pay as you go flip phone as a Junior in high school, they’ve been my go to car­ri­er. Big Red had the best cov­er­age for my home­town and some of the coolest phones. My first smart­phone was a Droid X and it was the best phone out there. I had unlim­it­ed data and a hotspot, so I could avoid suf­fer­ing through my uni­ver­si­ty’s sub par wi-fi.

Using my hotspot allowed me to for­go get­ting inter­net when I was an intern. I used almost 20 giga­bytes of data a month that sum­mer, and saved rough­ly $200 plus I did­n’t have to mess with the cable com­pa­nies. Ain’t nobody likes that.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, despite all the good times we’ve had, I had to break up with Ver­i­zon in Novem­ber. Sev­er­al years ago, they dis­con­tin­ued my unlim­it­ed data plan. While I was grand­fa­thered in, this meant I had to jump through all kinds of ridicu­lous hoops to get a new phone. Not being able to use my upgrade, hav­ing to buy my phone for full-price and being para­noid every time I went into a store for help was not fun.

I was will­ing to pay a pre­mi­um to have the best cov­er­age, but the straw that broke the camel’s back came when Ver­i­zon announced they were rais­ing the price of the unlim­it­ed plan by $20/month. For those too lazy to do the math, that’s an extra $240 a year on top of the already high prices.

Over the 8 years I’d been with them, I’d been charged just shy of $10k for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing ser­vice with them. That’s a lot of mon­ey for a broke high school/college stu­dent to be fork­ing over! How­ev­er, that was one area I was will­ing to splurge on.

Not any­more.

Mr. Mon­ey Mus­tache has for years advo­cat­ed Repub­lic Wire­less. See here, here and here for his thoughts. I always read the arti­cles with inter­est, but the newest, bright­est, and biggest smart­phones kept bedaz­zling me away from sav­ing lots of mon­ey. And then one fate­ful day last Sep­tem­ber, I changed my tune. MMM pub­lished this arti­cle on Google’s new phone plan Project FI and I got very excit­ed. I’m also a huge Google fan (fan­girl?) so any­thing Google puts out I want to use. Ok maybe not Glass or Card­board, but every­thing else has been pret­ty cool. Espe­cial­ly Google Fiber.

Then, when I went to Ecuador, I got to see it in action with my own two eyes. Not only did Mr. Mon­ey Mus­tache have it, one of the oth­er guys on the trip had it as well. While their data sig­nal was­n’t always the great­est (but I mean, we were in the mid­dle of the rain­for­est in Ecuador), they were usu­al­ly able to text no mat­ter where we were.

I was lim­it­ed to Wi-Fi only on the trip for every­thing. No call­ing, no tex­ting, noth­ing. I had to use third-par­ty apps to com­mu­ni­cate with peo­ple back home, and was lim­it­ed to places with free Wi-Fi. Which, as you can imag­ine, are a bit dif­fi­cult to find in the mid­dle of the rain­for­est. We also expe­ri­enced some prob­lems with the inter­net at the resort, so for 2 or so days I was com­plete­ly cut off from the rest of the world. Not exact­ly the world’s worst thing to ever hap­pen, but it would’ve been nice to check in with the fam­i­ly. I’m also lucky I did­n’t need to look up direc­tions, or places of inter­est like I expect I will when I vis­it Lon­don this fall.

Any­ways, the phone plan looks like this:

$20 for unlim­it­ed domes­tic call­ing and tex­ting, unlim­it­ed inter­na­tion­al tex­ting, a Wi-Fi hotspot and access to cel­lu­lar cov­er­age in 120+ countries.
$10/GB for data

My plan looks like this: $20 for the plan, and $20 for 2 GB of data per month. Add in $3 ish dol­lars in tax­es and that’s it. That’s all there is to my bill, unlike when I was a Ver­i­zon cus­tomer. My bill was a crazy hot mess of this fee and that fee and I could nev­er get a straight answer on why any­thing was the way it was.

Over­all, the cov­er­age at home has been less than stel­lar since I switched. Again, not sur­pris­ing because I went from the best net­work to a con­glom­er­a­tion of the two worst net­works. Access­ing the net­work was even more dif­fi­cult for me as my first SIM card was defec­tive. For my trou­bles of deal­ing with the faulty SIM card, I was giv­en a $25 cred­it towards my next bill. That’s amaz­ing! Ver­i­zon would’ve told me, too bad, so sad, not our prob­lem. Google did not do that, and I already love them for it. My bill the sec­ond month was just shy of $18! That’s sim­ply incredible.

In order to get on the FI plan, you must have one of 3 phones: Nexus 5x, Nexus 6 or Nexus 6P. This posed a slight dilem­ma for me. I had just bought a new Droid Tur­bo that I loved, but was­n’t com­pat­i­ble. So after crunch­ing some num­bers, I decid­ed it was time to give up the cool fan­cy phone and go for the cheap­er option. LIt­tle did I know I could have both! I went with the Nexus 6P short­ly after it came out. I was slight­ly appre­hen­sive as peo­ple online were report­ing all sorts of issues, but I got lucky and end­ed up with a per­fect unit. It’s big, it’s bright, and it takes excel­lent pic­tures. Not to men­tion I splurged on the 128G option, so I have more than enough stor­age space for the fore­see­able future. Plen­ty of space for all my cat pic­tures! I also love hav­ing a phone with the new stan­dard of USB con­nec­tor on it. No more fum­bling to make sure it’s going in right side up, since it works no mat­ter what side goes in.

Here’s the math I used to make my choice. You can see that even with hav­ing to pur­chase all the sup­plies that came with the phone (case, new cables, screen pro­tec­tors), I’ll still make my mon­ey back in less than 6 months!

Old:
$110/mo x 6 months= $660

New:
Phone cost ($690) + acces­sories ($25) — $ from old phone sale ($300) + 6 mos ser­vice ($233) = $648

In addi­tion, the next 6 months would see me save at least $400 with the dif­fer­ence between the two car­ri­ers. I might be able to save more, as Google reim­burs­es me for the data I did­n’t use in the pre­vi­ous month. For exam­ple, this billing cycle (which ends on the 2^nd for me), I’ve only used 249 MB of data. I have one week to use 1.7 GB, so I’m antic­i­pat­ing I’ll see most of that back. If I used 300 MB, I get 1 pen­ny back per MB I haven’t used, to equal a cred­it of $17 on my next months bill. Add in tax­es and I’ll pay $26 next month. Which means I could actu­al­ly get my mon­ey back way faster than 6 months!

Over­all, I’m incred­i­bly glad I switched, and I sus­pect those feel­ings will only get stronger when I’m in Eng­land and won’t have to drop off the face of the Earth while I’m there. I’m not far from a Wi-Fi net­work these days, so the best data net­work in the coun­try isn’t real­ly need­ed any­more. When I’m not on a Wi-Fi net­work, I’m usu­al­ly dri­ving or hang­ing out with friends, which means I def­i­nite­ly don’t need to be fid­dling around with my phone.

To recap, the advan­tages I’ve gained by switch­ing to a Google Project FI phone plan are as follows:

‑same price inter­na­tion­al data and texting
‑cool new phone with fin­ger­print sen­sor, excel­lent cam­era, and USB C connectors
‑MUCH low­er month­ly costs
‑Not giv­ing Ver­i­zon any­more money

What car­ri­er are you using? Can you switch and save any money?