Best Prepaid Plans in Australia 2014

Phone companies have to be extremely careful when they are advertising their plans as unlimited. The word itself is slightly sacred in Australian Telco. There have been so many situations in which Australian customers have been ripped off by the telcos using the word unlimited, that it is hard to get the word past the legal team – unless, the plan you’re buying is genuinely unlimited. Unlimited plans give you peace of mind that you can talk and text as much as you like and be sure you are never going to get a bill which surprises you. These plans appeal to super high end users, often business people or extremely socially active people. And our recommendation on prepaid plans with unlimited calls is the same as those we have mentioned above.

If you want the best unlimited call prepaid plans in Australia, choose Amaysim.

• Unlimited calls with 3G data If you want unlimited calls and SMS in Australia and 3G data is fine for you, choose the Amaysim $44.90 plan. It is a genuinely unlimited plan which offers all calls and texts to Australian numbers for a flat monthly fee of $44.90. You will also get 5GB of data.
• Unlimited calls and SMS with 4G data If you want unlimited calls and SMS in Australia plus 4G data speeds, choose Optus $2 days. Every day you use your phone, you will get 500 MB of data.

Prepaid Plans under $30

The majority of Australian prepaid plan recharges come in under $30 and there is a huge array of value and competition. For plans under $30, we recommend Cmobile :

• Best value at low end : Cmobile offer a suite of plans under the $30 price point and, uniquely in Australia, a choice of networks for you to access them on.

• Discount Telstra network access : Cmobile’s Blue plans operate on the Telstra network and start at $19.90 which will give you enough for slightly more than 2 calls per day and 100 MB of data. This plan is ideal for feature phones , second phones and older users who want access to quality Telstra reception in rural areas but don’t want to pay Telstra’s prices.

• Huge inclusions for city areas : Cmobile’s Red plans have two price points under $30.

• For $19.90, you’ll get an enormous 5 calls per day and 500 MB of data on the Vodafone network.
• For $29.90, Cmobile red will provide more than 8 calls per day and 1.5 GB of 3G Data.

• Cmobile is entirely Australian owned. While they are a young MVNO, their website has all the facilities you’d expect from a modern telco incuding usage alerts.

Link It is head and shoulders above the other SIM Only plans in market and costs just $18 per month. Most of the operators offer the following types of prepaid mobile phone plan :

• Standard included value Spend $20, get $20 of value. These plans have low call rates ( such as 9c per minute ) They tend to expire after 28 or 30 days

• Long expiry plans These plans hold value for a long time, often 6 or 12 months. They tend to be used by people for second phones. A spare to keep in the car for use in emergency, for example.

• ‘Caps’ These plans offer included value. For example, spend $30, get $600 of value.

Why Prepaid Has Taken Off In Australia ?

The reality of the Australian and indeed global phone market is that, initially, there was a huge amount of progress in the way phones worked. Starting with the iPhone’s release in 2007, phones’ capabilities improved significantly with each new iteration. However, recently, the rate of change in phone revolution has slowed. Even flagship device releases have been disappointing to the market and customers alike. It’s hard for phone companies to get people excited about a new phone with a single feature. Or a new phone where the feature is the colour. Enter prepaid. Prepaid customers already have phones they love. On a budget of $100 – $150, you will get a new Android phone which does 80% of what the latest releases do. Double that to $200 – $300 and you’ll get a phone which, while it might be one or two generations later than the new Samsung Galaxy phone, does 95% of everything that phone does. Once you’ve got a new device, all you need is the plan. Post-paid plans ( these are the contract plans you often get a phone with ) from the major operators start at $30 per month and inclusions are usually around the $200 value + 200 MB of data. On prepaid, as you have seen above, the value you get is enormous. Why ? Because the phone company hasn’t given you a new phone so they don’t have to claw the money back from you again within the plan.

Prepaid Plans are one of the smartest ways to get phone service

It used to be that the only people who bought prepaid plans were mums. They’d give the SIM or the recharge to their children so the family was absolutely certain there would be no bill for several hundred dollars coming in. It’s still true that one of the great benefits of prepaid is how predictable the costs are.But it’s no longer just mums buying them. Prepaid services are now taken out by some of the most advanced users in the market. The best Australian prepaid plans offer great rates, offer the flexibility of not being tied in to a contract. Prepaid plans let you bring your own device and change it when you want and the freedom to move up or down plans, without penalty whenever you want to. If you don’t like the service you end up with, you can just leave.

Who typically uses a prepaid service ?

The prepaid mobile voice market is huge in Australia, worth around $4bn. Prepaid voice services make up about 40% of all the mobile voice services in Australia when last measured by the ACMA back in 2011. Don’t be fooled. Prepaid is no longer for teenagers. The best Australian prepaid plans are hidden gems which the smartest people in the market for a mobile phone buy. Often, the rates you get for calls in a prepaid plan are better per minute than the equivalent in a postpaid or contract plan. In addition, prepaid offers the following inclusions. Prepaid might make sense for you if :

• You get some of the best value in the market The plans we think are the best value prepaid plans in the Australian market, Amaysim, Vaya and Optus’ $2 days cover any potential requirements that you might have. If you’re considering prepaid, you already have a phone you love. When you take out a prepaid plan with one of these providers, you will be getting literally, the best call rates in the Australian market. There are no other plans which offer more, at these price points, that we are aware of.

• Flexibility With prepaid, you’re not tied in to a contract. You can move up or down plans whenever you want to. You can change your phone company if you’re going to be spending a lot of time in an area which has poor coverage. Prepaid plans offer the best flexibility of any Australian plans.

• You’ve already got a phone you love. Phones are getting cheaper and this year’s phones have only a few features more than the ones which were released last year. Perhaps you’ve already got a phone which you enjoy using and your contract is about to end. Or, you’ve been given a new phone. Or, you’re thinking of getting one on eBay. However you get hold of your new phone, the truth is, for $100 – $350, these days, you get a lot. You get so much, in fact that you an afford to buy your new phone and the SIM service separately.

• You want total predictability Possibly the best thing about prepaid is it’s total predictability. If you put $30 on your prepaid service one month, you’re going to spend exactly $30 that month. There are no ‘out of bundle’ fees like a $500 data bill when you come back from holiday !

• You like flexibility of tenure. Prepaid offers flexibility in terms of how long your cap lasts too. Prepaid plans in Australia can have very long plans with expiry of up to a year.

• You want the best calling rates in Australia Prepaid plans are so simple to understand, they are the first port of call for companies looking to move in to selling phone plans. In the last year alone, both Kogan ( now no longer selling phone plans ) and Aldi have entered the market. These new phone companies or ‘MVNOs’ minimise their costs and pass the benefits on to you as super low rates.

• You want the best of both worlds The phone companies have finally gotten their acts together. Whichever phone company you’re with, you can now set up an Auto-recharge facility. That means when you get to the end of your credit period ( e.g. after 28 days ) or when you run out of credit, you can auto recharge your service. Prepaid auto recharge means that, in some ways, you get the best of both worlds. The convenience of a contract plan – so you don’t have to buy a voucher from the supermarket. And the freedom the prepaid gives you.

The bad bits about prepaid

There are very few bad things to consider about Australian prepaid plans. Here they are: 

• You won’t get a new phone When you take out a contract with a phone company, in exchange for a 2 year commitment, they will give you a new phone. The reality is that they recover the cost of that phone in the rates they charge for the plan. There are times when it makes sense to get a phone under contract. In certain circumstances, usually, when they’re chasing sales, the phone company will subsidise more of a phone than they usually would. It’s possible that, for some people, the up front cost of a phone would be a strong enough barrier to prevent them taking out a prepaid plan. Put simply, if you don’t have $750 lying around, it might make sense for you to buy an iPhone 5s under contract for $60 per month.

• In some situations, prepaid services can run out of credit when you need it most  In the middle of a call to tell your girlfriend you’ve left your wallet at home, your prepaid credit runs out and you can’t recharge because, that’s right, you’ve left your wallet at home. New smartphones have all but removed this problem from Australian prepaid. Most of the phone companies zero rate their own sites. To you and me that means that even if you have no call credit, you’ll be able to browse to your phone company’s website. Once there, using the details you have saved on their system, you’ll be able to recharge. These days, this risk applies most to people who have older feature phones and who leave their credit card at home a lot.

How much is average usage ?

Usage trends change all the time. We follow them rigorously.

• Average data usage Calculating how much prepaid data you’re going to use is a challenge. Obviously, average usage varies according to the individual. However, if you have one of the latest smartphones, you are likely to be using, on average, around 1GB of data per month. If you are unsure about how much data you are using, all of the phone companies we mention on this page have a self service facility so you can verify the amount of data you are utilising.

• Average voice There is more information available about the average voice usage. Average voice service utilisation is decreasing slightly, year on year, as people substitute away from their prepaid phone service to data apps like Skype or WhatsApp. However, people make roughly 5 calls per day. The average duration of a call is a surprisingly short 2 minutes of network time.

• Average SMS Average SMS utilisation on a prepaid service varies enormously according to the demographic you’re in and the plan you’re on. If you are young and on a plan which allows unlimited SMS then you are likely to use substantially more SMSs each day than if you are slightly older and paying 25 cents per text. However, mean average usage is between 15 – 20 texts per day.