> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.
That makes it sound like this is the minimum that you have to pay to get a smartphone and service to get by in modern life.
$200/mo is definitely high for that. An iPhone 17 Pro Max with maxed out storage (2 TB) is under $85/mo for 24 months.
A Visible+ Pro prepaid plan is $45/mo ($37.5/mo if you pay for 12 months at once) if you don't use one of their frequent promo codes to get a discount.
That includes unlimited premium data on Verizon's 5 G UWB, 5 G, and 4 G LTE networks, support for a cellular smartwatch, 4K UHD video, and unlimited mobile hotspot. By "premium" data they mean no deprioritization. Visible users get the same priority as user's of Verizon's own postpaid plans.
The hotspot is only 15 Mbps, so you probably wouldn't want to rely on it if you have frequent or long internet outages, but I've found for the occasional short outage it was fine for email, HN/Reddit/etc, and YouTube videos.
This will be massively more than enough to cover the smartphone hardware and service needs for everything probably 99% of the US population needs to get by, at $130/mo.
Note that includes getting a new top of the line iPhone every 2 years. With a more modest phone and keeping it for 5 years we are looking at more like $60/mo.
> I pay that at least much for my family, hence why I used it
and your article says
> Having a $200/mo smartphone is now a participation cost for many things such as getting access to your banking information remotely, medical records, and work / school.
It sounds like you're trying to communicate that you pay at least $200/month per smartphone for your family? Or you don't value precision in communication.
I know you've got a lot going on with a small business, and a new kid... but if money is important to you, maybe spend the time to switch to prepaid phone plans. There's lots of options [1], whatever network you need, you can do direct operator plans, MVNO owned by the operator, or like actual MVNO. If you're short on time and T-Mobile's network works for you, MintMobile has a promo going right now where $180 pays for 12 months of "unlimited" which is $15/month if you divide it out.
> I also pay $1250 per month to TriNet for the privilege of being able to buy their health insurance in the first place - sure, I get some other benefits too, but I’m the only US-based employee currently so this overhead is really 100% me.
Do you live in a state with a reasonable healthcare exchange? You might want to shop and see if an off the shelf plan from the exchange is better than paying TriNet to get access to their insurance; it may well be, but you should check. If you only have one US employee, and it's you, there's a lot of expense for not a lot of value IMHO. It's not really Apples to Apples though --- I think a lot of the TriNet plans have out of state coverage where a lot of exchange plans don't.
You're moving the goal posts here. You have to have service, realistically, in order to use it like a real person.
My family has two phone lines for $50/mo, plus we buy two ~2 year old iPhones every 3-4 years, which adds maybe another $20/mo average to the cost.
I pay $70/mo for 2 phone lines. Unlimited everything (well, OK, 5 GB data cap before slowing down).
