Maybe I shouldn’t be as pissed as I am but, for me, I like using my Apple card for autopay because I get 3% back with T-Mobile charges. What I like to do is use my CCs to max my rewards / cash back and then pay off my card each month.
Maybe I’m overreacting, but I’m not happy about this. Of course I don’t want to pay an additional $40 a month on my phone bill so yes, I’m switching autopay to a Privacy card, but F—, man.
Okay, I’m done lol
Edit 6/6/1023: So I made a new virtual card but when I add it to my T-Mobile account the site adds it and says it’s not supported for the discount. They’re going to force me to enter a physical debit card or bank account or pay an additional $40/month.
T-Mobile really has been sucking with their service strength in NY. But they’re doing very well at driving me crazy.
Check out Google Fi. It uses the T-Mobile network here (US), and I get unlimited data, no rate limits. I have three phone numbers on my account and it costs me $85 a month total. Also the phones from the Fi store are super cheap if you stay on Google Fi. My pixel 7 got $300 off at purchase and $100 for my old phone. They are unlocked, too. Something I hate when buying from other providers. One of my phones had a Verizon sim and a Google Fi e-sim, so I can switch services with easy. Here in the mountains, service can be spotty in places with TMobile. Wifi calling is also available though, so that helps, too. I abandoned US Cellular entirely.
My only concern is being even more locked into Google. I already feel like I have too many eggs in their basket and they are basically impossible to deal with if something goes wrong. I don’t want to end up locked out of everything with no data and there’s no customer support person I can call up to maybe sort things out with because Google is too cheap to pay for actual customer support staff.
I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.
I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.
This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).
I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.
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