Skip to content

Family Share Plan

The AT&T Family Share Plan’s vanishing discount—don’t get burned

The popularity of this article led me to write two followups:

Please give these a read if you'd like to know even more about AT&T Next.

Tomorrow (starting at 12:01am Pacific time, apparently) you can order a new iPhone 6/6 Plus. But you probably already knew that. What you may not know is that if you're on AT&T's Family Share Plan, and you enrolled in that plan with phones on a two-year contract, you'll see a large increase in your bill if you upgrade to a new on-contract iPhone 6—even if your current contract has expired and you're now contract-free.

Why would your bill go up, simply moving from an older to a newer iPhone? That's never happened in the past. But we've not had the Family Share Plan in the past. And when AT&T rolled out this plan, they gave folks an incentive to move to it: they offered a discount for on-contract phones, from a $40 per month per device cost to either $25 (for under 10GB of shared data) or $15 (10GB or more) per month per device. So if you look at your bill, you'll see something like this:

That discount was applied to the under-contract (at the time) iPhone 5 I moved to the Family Share Plan; the other two lines we have in the plan show the same discount. But if I buy a new iPhone 6 under contract, the discount will go away. If we upgrade all three phones with contract iPhone 6's, that'd be another $75 per month!

[continue reading…]