“Share Everything” family plans for Verizon introduced, coming June 28th; may not be right choice for everyone
Verizon have announced their new “Share Everything” family plans, a crop of options that’ll allow you to share a pool of allowed data, text messages, and voice minutes with others on your plan. The new options will become available June 28th.
The idea is that it’s supposed to help people save money by allowing all lines (up to 10) to sip from the same pool. Take a look at how exactly this works:
How Share Everything Plans Work
To get started on a Share Everything Plan, customers first select the devices they want on their accounts. The next step is to choose a plan that includes unlimited minutes, unlimited messages and a shared data allowance that begins at 1 GB for $50. Customers adding a tablet on their Share Everything Plans can do so for an additional $10, with no long-term contract requirement. The following matrix shows pricing for an account with several different devices, such as a smartphone, a tablet and a basic phone, billed to the same individual.
Along with the 1GB for $50 plan scenario mentioned above, they’d also have 2GB, 4GB, 6GB, 8GB, or 10GB for $60, $70, $80, $90, and $100 respectively. Get more details regarding the plan options using this handy PDF file.
After doing some quick math on my own grandfathered family plan with unlimited data, this would actually cost more per month than what I’m currently paying for two phones.
Many will surely benefit from these new options, but there are sure to be some who won’t. There’s belief that these plans will benefit certain tiered data users more than anything, but this probably isn’t beneficial for a large amount of Verizon’s customer base who are likely still grandfathered into better options that Verizon’s since gotten rid of.
Regardless, most folks are grandfathered in and will remain so. This’ll change this summer, of course, when Verizon will force those who wish to upgrade their phones on-contract to switch to tiered data, but that can be avoided by buying any new smartphones and devices off-contract. If you do wish to switch to the new plans, there is no fee or contract extension for doing so.
What do you all think of these new plans? Is this something that will save you money and be beneficial to the way your family uses data, or is there a negative effect for your specific situation? Go ahead and let your thoughts be known in the comments section below.
