My wife and I used to purchase new phones through Verizon every two years with monthly payments and fold them into Verizon service (not really a contract since you can pay off the phone and exit the service with no penalties). After a few 2-year stints of that, I got tired of $200 phone bills.
It wasn't just the cost that bothered me, it was more the realization that new phones have diminishing returns-- 10 years ago a new phone every 2 years entailed some significant upgrades in speed, camera, battery life, etc. I'm not seeing that anymore and am comfortable with a 5 year replacement.
Long story short, we kept our two year old phones (instead of trading them in), ditched Verizon, and shopped pre-paid plans. After a lot of research, our short list was:
Mint (T-Mobile towers) $20 per month (8GB at the time, now upgraded to 10GB data, unlimited everything else)
Redpocket (can choose any major carrier with caveats [see below]) $20 per month (8GB), now $19.00 per month with 10GB, everything else unlimited
We decided to try both, Mint for me, Redpocket for her. Cost was equivalent and we figured with separate carriers, if one of us didn't have service on a road trip / rural area, the other might.
Wife initially chose Redpocket with Verizon service. Didn't work out-- turns out where I live, Verizon subcontracts to a third party, Bluegrass Wireless, for coverage in a large swath of Kentucky. When you get pre-paid Verizon service through a third party (Redpocket) you don't get those perks (subcontracted service). So unless she was near the interstate or a larger town / city, she didn't get service. Switched to AT&T towers through Redpocket and it's been absolutely wonderful. The wife is hard to please with phone service and she's been thrilled with it. Had a hiccup at renewal where they told us we needed to renew a month earlier than we should have; when we renewed, we lost the month we paid for-- an E-mail fixed that. Zero complaints.
My Mint service? Worked fantastic for what I need it for. Decent service where I work and at home. My only complaint is that the coverage area with Mint (T-mobile) is rather poor compared to my wife's AT&T Redpocket. So much so, that I can't recall a time where I ever had service when she didn't. But the opposite happened a LOT. We took vacations to central Colorado (in the mountains) and the very northern tip of New Hampshire (by Canada) this year-- and I've lost count of how many times I had to user her phone to place calls/text someone because my phone didn't have service.
I would have been happy to renew my Mint service-- I don't talk/text and drive (even with hands-free), so the coverage didn't really bother me terribly, and on road trips, I almost always had my wife's phone to fall back on. The deal breaker is that Mint added about $50 in recovery/regulatory fees at renewal, which made their plan $24.16 per month compared to RP's flat $19 per month (with a few dollars extra in taxes). So in my mind I was paying more for worse service with Mint, so decided to jump ship and join my wife with Redpocket.
That said, I have nothing against Mint, it was great for me, and worked fantastic 99% of the time with zero hassles. It was the odd trip out into the country or road trip where I noticed it fell short. It's worth mentioning that neither of us have 5G phones (or need it), so we could not compare that feature between the two carriers. It's certainly possible T-mobile/Mint has better speeds/5G service in larger metro areas, but that's not something we care about or could test.
