How this site works

Carrier comparison has a credibility problem, and it's earned. Most sites rank by whatever price the carrier is advertising this week, take a commission, and mention that somewhere near the bottom. This page is the counter-offer: here is exactly where the numbers come from, what's been tested, and who pays.

Where the prices come from

A script opens the plan page of every carrier here once a day, records every price it can see and a fingerprint of the page, and commits the result. It doesn't try to parse plans into a table, because plan pages get redesigned and a parser that quietly breaks is worse than no parser.

When the fingerprint moves, I open the page myself, read what actually changed, and update the plan table by hand. That's why every plan carries the date it was last read and the page it was read from.

So far: 11 carriers tracked, 22 carrier-days successfully read, 0 genuine price changes recorded. Plan table checked by hand on September 21 to 22, 2026, currently 29 plans.

Including the days it failed

Carriers block automated requests, and they do it intermittently: while this was being built, Spectrum answered a request with a complete page and refused an identical one an hour later. A blocked page has no prices on it, so counting it as data would publish a price change that never happened.

So those days are excluded from the change counts and listed separately in the log with the reason. No day has landed in the log that way yet; the handling is in place for when one does.

Why the prices here look higher than everywhere else

Because they're the regular prices.

Many plans are advertised at a first-year number. US Mobile's Unlimited Starter is $199 for year one and $270 after. Mint sells Unlimited at $15/mo and renews it at $30. Visible+ Pro's new-member annual plan is half its regular rate. Xfinity gives you a line free for twelve months and then charges $30.

Ranking by the intro price makes a comparison table look good and makes the reader's next twelve months someone else's problem. It is also, specifically, the reason people end up searching for a new carrier: the price they agreed to stopped being the price. So the tables here quote what you'll pay once the offer ends, and the intro price sits in its own column with the size of the jump next to it.

One carrier goes the other way: Cricket's first month costs more than its regular rate, because the AutoPay discount starts with the second bill. That isn't a cliff and isn't reported as one.

What each page claims

Every article carries a box saying what's actually real on it. The labels are not decorative:

First-party

I paid for this service and used it. The title says for how long, and gets rewritten as the months accumulate, because a review written after a week isn't worth reading.

Research

I have not used this carrier. Everything on the page is read off their published plans and terms, with the date I read it. Every page about Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile is this.

Interviews

Built from conversations with people who use or left the carrier. The box says how many.

Household

A line on my family plan, which I managed and paid for, but wasn't my daily phone.

Tracker

Generated from the daily price log. No opinions, just the record.

Pages also flag specific evidence: real bill screenshots, speed tests with dates, an actual port-in or port-out timeline, whether I contacted support. If a flag isn't set, that thing didn't happen.

How the money works

Right now, nothing on this site pays me. No affiliate program has approved it yet. When one does, this page and a notice at the top of every affected article will say so by name, before the first paragraph rather than after the last.

If you use an affiliate link, the carrier pays me and you pay exactly what you'd pay going to them directly. You get nothing extra for using it. I'd rather say that plainly than imply a discount that doesn't exist.

What this site won't do

• No personal referral links. Several sites ranking for these searches post their own referral code, which pays both them and the reader. It converts better than an affiliate link for exactly that reason. US Mobile's terms restrict referrals to individuals rather than businesses and promotions, so this site doesn't use them, even where competitors do.
• No ranking by commission. Which carriers pay and how much has no effect on order. The calculator sorts by what you'd save, computed from the plan table.
• No paid placement. Nobody can buy a position, a review, or a mention.
• No invented experience. If a page doesn't say I used something, I didn't.

Corrections

Prices change, terms change, and I get things wrong. Pages carry the date they were last updated, and the price log shows independently when a carrier moved a number. If something here is wrong, tell me and I'll fix the page and say what changed.

Every correction is logged here with what the page said, what it says now, and the source that settled it. Entries are never removed.

Written by the person who writes this site. The price log and the code that produces it are the parts of this site you don't have to take my word for.