Telstra’s latest prepaid plan costs just a dollar a day
$1 a day for unlimited talk, text and 100MB of data usage.
In the prepaid mobile plan space there are plenty of deals to be had, depending on your usage patterns, but to date relatively few carriers have opted for day-to-day deals. Optus has long had its My Prepaid Daily Plus offering at $2 per day, but beyond that if you wanted a short-term prepaid plan for any purpose, you were mostly out of luck.
Telstra’s latest prepaid deal undercuts Optus’ by half, offering what it’s calling the Day2Day plan with pricing starting at $1 per day. That dollar buys you unlimited calls and texts to standard Australian numbers plus 100MB of data usage in a single day. Recharge amounts start at $5, which logically enough gives you up to 5 days of coverage. You can also buy recharges in $10, $20, $30 or $60 denominations.
It’s not quite as simple as dividing your recharge by day, however, because there are additional fees, depending on your usage habits. For an extra dollar per day you can add unlimited standard calls to one of ten popular international calling destinations, including Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the UK or the USA. That charge is applied as soon as you make a call to any of those destinations, and is charged per destination. Call both India and the UK and you’ll be charged an extra $2, for example.
Equally if you go over your data quota and still have recharge funds left over, you’ll automatically be topped up with another 100MB of data to use, at a cost of (you guessed it) an additional dollar. It's worth noting that the Day2Day plan qualifies for use of Telstra Air, so if you were canny you could use data on that service and save your own credit for other purposes.
Usage charges kick in at midnight of every day when you have credit, regardless of when you actually use services, although unused credit will roll over if you recharge within your expiry period.
This is a deal with appeal only to a limited niche, because if you really want unlimited calls and texts, it’s not that hard to pick up a prepaid SIM that will give you a month’s worth or more for far less than a dollar a day, and often with quite a lot more inbuilt data usage. For very short-term use, such as for visiting tourists, it could have some value, however.
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