that's really cheap consider how much you use, but i think most people use data nowadays.
In month I probably only use 5% maybe 10% of my both plans, I wouldn't call that a great deal. I'm really buying a lot more than I need only because that is the most minimal configuration.
i guess you are one of those rare individual with a low usage for communication.
Being partially deaf and since childhood perceiving mobile data as luxury helps. I remember that in dark 00s I was really excited to buy 20MB. Back then mobile internet was only WAP and thus it barely used few kilobytes on basically any site. I remember that JAVA games were 60 kB, maybe with some really uncommon game approaching 100 kB. And surprisingly enough in that tiny amount of space it was possible to fit some rather complex games. I remember there was full Asphalt (maybe 5th) with career mode, many races, different locations. Mind you driving physics were really basic, SNES level at best, but that's still something. There was Gangstarr, GTA close with top down view and full city with missions, cars and obviously car stealing. My phone had too low JAVA version to run that, but other could. I think my Nokia was S30 something. Another impressive titles was College Basketball. A full basketball game with maybe 20 teams, full career mode and probably even team building. The only clear downside of that game was that my phone ran it quite poorly, probably 10-15 fps, so playability wasn't great, but for 60 kB, it's awesome. Today you need 20-30 gB for what is essentially the same game, but with nicer graphics and physics. Speaking of 3D games, I remember there were bunch of Counter Strike 1.6 clones, but those all needed S40 version and were several hundred kB big. It's really impressive what kind of games actually ran on very modest hardware. And I guess that explains why 20MB of data was a lot back then.
If your provider does raise prices, you will see other competition raise similar price but maybe with different price plans to be competitive.
I've seen some countries have plans at $149 dollars per month and people do sign up for it because of perks like.. $600 dollars off phones, spotify premium, netflix, unlimited data, calls, messages
Some people just can't do math. That's literally 4 months of saving up for that same discount and everything else in plan like spotify, netflix is really just shovelware, that carrier probably doesn't even pay a dollar to buy. Unlimited data, calls and SMS sound really cool, until you realize that you only need so much of them and that you are basically paying for something that doesn't truly cost that much or likely doesn't even cost anything. Pandemic has shown that data caps are basically a scam, if carrier says that it's for traffic control or else their network will be overloaded. And I highly doubt that just wireless equipment maintenance costs much. Maybe a dollar or two for each customer if even that much, not just cents. Considering that coverage in US is like 65%, which is not great at all. Here in Lithuania, it is 94-97%. And likely with as much speed as they can provide and as much as your device can receive over LTE.
I should be more like you and monitor more of my usage so i can plan on saving more money with the right plan.
I don't really have any good monitor for such stuff. My own operator's app has almost 1 day delay in measurements and in Opera Mini I only see how much it manages to compress data over all time. If I need entertainment I would rather download videos for offline viewing, same with books. Things like Youtube are WiFi only. I don't use things like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram or Tik Tok. I don't even know how they all look, except for Facebook. I also disable background data usage on all apps. I have zero auto synchronization, no auto updates, no online only maps. I have disabled some stock bloat and removed some of it with adb. Over data, I try to only use Opera Mini as it compresses websites. It helps, but how much depends on web sites. Sometimes 20%, other times nearly 70%. I use automatic level of website compression and highest picture compression. Now one disclaimer about compression, phone itself doesn't compress any websites it just sends website and user compression settings to Opera server and it sends back already compressed websites to phone, so that could be a privacy concern and if you use manual website compression levels some websites will break. Auto seems to be the best mode, but even then some websites can be broken as Opera Mini is somewhat worse at rendering websites than full Opera.
