"Marshawn Lynch Is Paying Your Service For A Year" is the headline over at a Beast Mobile landing page right now. The Sprint and AT&T powered MVNO is offering one year of free service to the first 500 customers who buy an unlocked LG K40 from the company for $199.99. Those that do, will have their phone bill paid for a year by the NFL's now unretired RB.
Beast Mobile launched a couple of years ago and is the brainchild of wireless industry vet Leigh Hunt and in collaboration with Marshawn Lynch.
Beast Mobile's Free Year Of Service Offer Fine Print
Beast Mobile only offers two phone plans. One plan for $24/month on the AT&T network, and one plan for $50/month that uses the customer's choice of either AT&T's network or Sprint's. Both plans include unlimited talk and text with taxes and fees included in the prices shown. The $24 plan includes 1GB of hard capped data, and the $50 plan includes unlimited data with the first 10GB each month at 4G LTE data speeds.
Beast Mobile normally charges a $10 activation fee and a $5 number porting fee to new subscribers. Those fees are being waived for this promo.
The plan being paid for by Lynch is the $24 plan on the AT&T network. The amount of data included with the plan is a small amount, but customers can add more to their plans at any time if needed at the following rates:
Data Add-Ons
- 100MB LTE Data - $1.00
- 500MB LTE Data - $5.00
- 1GB LTE Data - $10.00
- 5GB LTE Data - $50.00
Customers can also use the Beast Mobile app to accumulate more data. Beast Mobile subscribers can use the app to earn credits for taking surveys, watching ads, or engaging with personalized offers. The credits earned for doing so are immediately applied to the subscriber's account and can be redeemed for more data.
LG K40 Specs
- Screen Size 5.7 inches, Screen Resolution 1440 x 720 pixels
- Battery Capacity 3,000 mAh Non-Removable
- Rear Camera Resolution 8 MP
- Front Camera Resolution 5 MP
- Processor 1.8 GHz Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon™ SDM450
- Memory 2 GB RAM
- Storage 16GB (up to 8GB usable)* expandable with a microSD card
- Android 8.1 (Oreo)
Is It A Good Deal?
To my eyes, if you are a limited use mobile data consumer interested in the LG K40 and service using AT&T towers, it appears to be so, and here's why.
The LG K40 is normally priced elsewhere for $179.99 but right now is on sale direct from LG for $149.99 and is the same price at Best Buy. Using the BestMVNO phone plan finder, you can see plans from other pay by the month providers with unlimited talk and text and 1GB of data on the AT&T network start at $10/month. The $10 price point is for service on Unreal Mobile. Good2Go Mobile is the next cheapest at $15/month, and unlike Unreal Mobile, Good2Go Mobile does not use VoIP to provide voice service to customers. So adding it all up, using Unreal Mobile's price point, one year of service on Unreal Mobile would cost you $120 and then you'd pay an additional $149.99 for the phone bringing the total price to $269.99 plus tax. Using Good2Go Mobile's price point, the total cost for the phone and one year of service would cost you $329.99. So at a minimum, taking Beast Mobile up on their offer would save you $69.99 over the course of a year compared to buying the phone elsewhere and signing up with a competing provider.