So the Ting subreddit asks, “Any plan for a price drop?”
I think by the time people read this article, the news is probably out that we have indeed dropped our data rates pretty significantly, particularly at the high end. If you are a Ting customer, it’s very simple. You do nothing. Your bill is about to go down. If you have been looking at Ting or if it’s been a while since you’ve looked at Ting, please do come take a look at the rates page and and do some math around how much you could be saving now.
So I’ll give you a bit of background on the the price drop. When we launched the service in 2012, and then we lowered our prices in 2014, we were really comfortable that just about everybody would save money on Ting and we encourage people to calculate your savings based on your current usage. Come over use the the phone exactly as you do and just about everybody would save a lot of money. Over the last couple of years, what’s happened is really two things. One, data usage has gone way up as there are more exciting things to use data on the go.
Then the second is, the carriers have dropped their prices a bit. Now all of a sudden, we found ourselves being thought of as “the service that’s great if you use very little data.” And we hated that because we really wanted to appeal to a much broader group than that, so we went to our carriers and and we pushed back and we said we need to be more competitive than this. We need to be more affordable. We want to save people more money. And they came through for us with a rate cut and we pretty much passed that cut entirely on to our our customers. I mentioned going to the carrier partners and pushing back on our wholesale rates for a couple of reasons. One is sort of a thank you to them. We’ve got great partners, and we’re grateful and allows us to to be able to offer such great rates.
The second is, I hate for people to think that we’ve been greedy all this time and that we could have always charged less. The truth is we really charge as little as we can. We price as aggressively as we can based on our costs, and we really needed for our costs to come down to be able to reduce our rates exactly as we did. One thing I’m really proud of it. I want to make sure people understand about this rate decrease is how different it is from what people are used to seeing from cell phone services.
There’s tons of promotion and noise in the category and carriers are always coming out with new plans, but if you look closely, it’s almost always a promotion or a plan that’s intended to attract people to the service, and it’s hardly ever giving anything to the customers who are already with the service. It’s crafted so that you’re spending as little as possible on the customers you already have and trying to get as many new ones as you can. With Ting, the way we do it, and the way we did it two years ago, and the way we’re doing it now, we simply dropped our prices. For people who are with Ting, your bill is going to be less immediately. Of course, if you’re considering Ting, we just got a whole lot more attractive.