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The Common Cents Service

Common Cents is a pre-paid mobile service provider. As mentioned earlier, it uses the Sprint backbone. The phone doesn’t come with any minutes. You have to load the minutes after you purchase a Common Cents Refill Card at Wal-Mart. This card is shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: A refill card

The USD 20 card shown is good for up to 30 days, and you can also purchase a USD 30 card that is good for 60 days.

You can also refill your phone with a credit card online. If you don’t want to be bothered with monthly or bi-monthly refilling, you can set up an auto-payment plan. You can purchase a $150 refill card online that will be good for a full year. (This option is currently only available online.)

Getting the minutes into the phone is a matter of simply entering the card number either online or by calling Common Cents.

The most notable difference between Common Cents and other prepaid services is that Common Cents Mobile charges 7 cents per minute with what they call “Round Down Minutes.” That means that if you talk for 1 minute and 50 seconds, you will be charged for 1 minute instead of 2 minutes.

It is difficult to put the savings of the round-down option into perspective, but here’s a sample. A USD 20 plan gives you 285 full minutes at 7 cents per minute. If you make 95 three minute calls and half of those calls would normally round up, then you get an extra 47 minutes or USD 3.29. Obviously, the number and length of your calls could save you more or less, but there is undoubtedly a cost savings here.

Also 7 cents per minute compares favorably with other services. Tracfone charges 10 cents per minute and AT&T and Verizon charge as much as 20 cents.

If you use text a lot or plan on using email on this phone, Common Cents has an offer for unlimited SMS, MMS, IM and email for USD 20 for 30 days. You can access the web at USD 1 per megabyte or for 24 hours access.

There are no contracts with this service. The service is nationwide and there are no activation fees, and no roaming fees. When moving to this service, you can arrange to keep your current cell number, if you like.

International calling is possible with the Common Cents service. The rates vary by country.