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Can’t I just pay, like, $10 extra and get….?

People sometimes say to us, “hey, I can get a smartphone for like $10/15/20/25/30 extra per month!”

We’ve written about the ways cell phone companies play gotcha before.

Here is somebody’s real iPhone bill from AT&T. You know how you read about “oh it’s only like $70/month…” Well, this is how much it is really ($94.50 per month):

Ryan Block who is one of the masters of the tech blog universe wrote a blog entry just a couple of weeks back about when he got his new phone; it’s called “How hidden charges doubled my iPhone bill“.

Or, here is the New York Times reviewer’s take on his first iPhone bill:

It’s a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer confusion.

For starters, although I signed up for what iTunes told me was a $60 plan (450 minutes, unlimited Internet), the bill says I have a $40 voice plan and a $20 Internet plan, and lists them on separate pages.

The first bill, believe it or not, comes to $150. It’s filled with unexplained services and features that were never mentioned during the signup process, like MEDIA MAX, EXPD M2M, VOICE PRIVACY, and AT&T DIRECT BILL.

Hey, we’re not picking on the iPhone, by the way. (If we wanted to do that we’d link to all these 300-page, $500 bills: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

All the carriers and all the smartphones are about the same!

We did some of our own experiments a while back. We searched and search and snuck onto a secret carrier plan that they don’t even advertise or offer any more (we tried to re-order it last week, and it had gone up by $10). But the plan was really unique: we bought our own smartphone devices off of Ebay so we wouldn’t have to sign a contract, we found a plan we could add to it that would not require a new contract and that would come with zero voice minutes — the minimalist possible plan! We searched and searched and only one of the four big carriers had such a plan, but we got it.

We got a Sidekick “unlimited” plan for $29.99/month and a Blackberry “unlimited” plan for $29.99/month…and they both keep coming to us each month as $37.57. Hmm….

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