Design for the web.

Trudy tells me that she is looking at buying an iPhone soon, but where to begin? By now, everybody and their uncle are offering iPhone plans. Since all the major providers support the uber popular smart phone, there is a lot to be decided when it comes to picking a plan for you. Enter myCELLmyTERMS.com. Some of you might have seen them on Dragon’s Den on CBC recently.

This website allows you to build a customized cell phone plan proposal and submit it to all the service providers like Bell and Telus. They will either accept your plan, or reply with a counter-offer.

I created my ideal iPhone plan and released it into the wild to see which provider would bite.

Here are the main specs:

As you can tell, I was aiming for the cheapest, no-strings attached iPhone plan possible. Getting a new iPhone for $110 without a contract at only $50/month would be amazing, but of course, very unlikely. But I figured you might as well see what you can get and go from there.

I was surprised at the turn around. I had 2 offers within an hour or so of submitting my proposal.

Here was the best counter-offer I received (from Telus):

Not bad really. Their offer was $50 more for the actual phone and $10 more per month. Escaping the 3 year contract is just about impossible if you aren’t paying full price for the phone. I was happy to see they offered 150 more minutes than I proposed and their data plan is a whopping 5.5 gb more! I got my evenings and weekends slot too (many providers start at 9pm instead of 6pm). The big surprise was the $300 bill credit bonus. That works out to be about 4 or 5 months free. At this point you can counter-offer their counter-offer and so forth.

This site serves as a pretty useful tool for those of us that want to avoid getting sucked into broad, feature-saturated plans that we really don’t need.