- It looks complicated, but T-Mobile says its new T-Mix proposition is worth it
- Customers can use “Picks” toward a range of benefits that span streaming, music, gaming, food delivery, AI, device promotions and more
- T-Mobile is calling it an “industry-first” approach as the only wireless provider that lets consumers choose which benefits are included in their plans
It might be hard for some to believe that T-Mobile is introducing another set of postpaid price plans, but it’s in full swing – and possibly one of the most telegraphed “un-carrier” moves in recent memory.
Details about T-Mix have been leaking for weeks, and with a pilot in the Kansas City market underway since October 1, it’s no wonder that online forums are lighting up. Not a bad way to generate buzz ahead of a launch without spending a huge chunk of cash on national advertising.
According to T-Mobile Chief Marking Officer Allan Samson, who’s been living and breathing this stuff for the better part of a year, T-Mix is the product of an endeavor that involved multiple rounds of research trying to figure out what T-Mobile and prospective T-Mobile customers want and don’t want.
A theme that kept popping up was this feeling of paying for stuff bundled into a plan that the customer doesn’t need, want or use. Whether it’s a specific streaming service or something else, the “perks” stuffed into the bundles often include items that go unused.
Related to that is the “silent subscription problem,” he said, which revolves around all those subscriptions that people are getting billed for but aren’t using. Based on the research, “most people think they’ve got about $80 to $90 of subscriptions a month, when in fact they have a couple $100,” a trend that companies like Rocket Money have latched onto with offers to flag and cancel unwanted subscriptions.
For a lot of folks, it boils down to this: “They stop watching something, but they forget to cancel,” Samson said.
There’s another component, too. Some people travel a lot and love having 5G global roaming in Europe – whereas others have no plans to go to Europe in the next 10 years, so why do they need it? Same with hotspots. “Some people live and die by tethering off their phones,” he said. “Some people have never done it once.”
T-Mobile figured it could address some of these trends.
“The reason why we think only T-Mobile can do this is … we’ve developed tremendous partnerships with Netflix and Apple TV, Hulu, Delta Airlines” and more, he said. “We’ve been building up this arsenal of long-standing relationships with a giant ecosystem of partners that not only have worked with us but have come to trust that we can put together economically viable programs with them.”
T-Mix plans: Standard, More and Loaded
Here’s how it works. Every T-Mix plan will include access to T-Mobile’s 5G network and T-Mobile member perks, which include T-Mobile Tuesdays, exclusive hotel and rental car perks and premium experiences at festivals and events around the country.
From there, customers can use their Picks toward a range of benefits that best fit their needs.
Picks include some old favorites like Apple TV, DoorDash, Pandora and SiriusXM as well as newer benefits that include partners Apple Music, Delta SkyMiles, Google Gemini, Paramount+, XBOX Game Pass and YouTube Premium. Picks also can be used toward benefits like T-Satellite, optimized video calls and device promotions.
T-Mix Standard starts at $55/month for one line with AutoPay and includes 1 Pick. T-Mix More starts at $75/month for one line with AutoPay and includes 2 Picks, while T-Mix Loaded starts at $95/month for one line with AutoPay and includes 3 Picks.
How is T-Mix different?
Samson described three overriding themes around T-Mix: choice, flexibility and value.
Customers use “picks” to choose the services they want rather than receiving a fixed bundle, giving them choice. They can remix their picks every 90 days through the T-Life app, providing flexibility.
The “value” proposition might be the most difficult to articulate, but basically, “we’re going to increase your value,” he said. “What do I mean by that? If you think about the construct today, a good, better, best is hard coded. We're going to give you Netflix on us, whether you want or not.”
Now with T-Mix, “the value is you get to pick everything and then change your mind,” he said.
Samson noted that most phones are financed for three years, so a phone “pick” would be a 36-month commitment. Other picks are for 90 days. “So if you load up on phones, those picks will be locked up until the phone’s paid off, and then they come back to you and you can use them once the phone’s paid off,” he said.
What if you want to change before 90 days are up?
Samson said customers can change their picks every 90 days (with the caveat that phones are usually paid on 36-month installment plans). There is a way to change your pick after, say, 45 days, but there’s a “small fee” involved, he said.
Part of that has to do with how T-Mobile has negotiated these picks with its partners. “We’re guaranteeing them at least three months of revenue on each one of these picks,” he said.
Everyone is freaking out about SpaceX. What about that?
Samson declined to comment on Starlink Mobile’s plans, saying he “can’t really speak to what they’re doing.”
While there’s been a lot of noise, most of it has to with how Elon Musk plans to build a terrestrial network to go alongside his satellite empire to challenge the Big 3 U.S. wireless carriers – as opposed to what kind of rate plan they plan to offer to entice mobile customers.
In terms of a satellite service to cell phones, direct-to-device (D2D) T-Satellite is not included in the standard T-Mix plan but is listed as one of the T-Mobile Picks.
That’s in part because based on its research, T-Satellite fell into the category of “things I feel like I’m paying for that I don’t use,” he said. Customers might use T-Satellite during the summer months when they’re visiting national parks, but not the rest of the year.
Therefore, it makes more sense as a “Pick” that customers can choose when they need it.
“By the way, that gets you T-Satellite on all your lines, so it's not one pick per line. And what we've heard customers say in the pilot is, ‘Hey, this summer I'm going to go to the national parks. During that 90-day window, I'm going to pick up T-satellite, so everyone in my family has data and texting and all the things, but when we come back from vacation in my next 90-day windows, I'm going to turn that pick in and pick up a streaming service so we can all watch our shows this fall,” he said.
“That's exactly how this is designed to be built. You know, what's the family doing this next 90 days? What's the right optimal mix of our picks? And that's where that value just keeps paying off again and again because you're in control,” he added.
Getting rid of legacy to make room for new
Many T-Mobile customers will remember when earlier this year, T-Mobile told customers who were on old legacy plans that they were going to be booted off those and moved to newer plans. That led to some angry customers and churn.
Some suspected it was designed to clean up the old to make room for the new. That, in a sense, is exactly what happened.
“What we did this summer was we basically eliminated about 1,500 different plan codes and we moved people up to a much smaller subset of our current 5G plans with all the good stuff,” he said. “That action frees up my IT development time.”
With T-Mix, there are a lot of moving parts. “The best way to let your IT guys run wild and do their best work is not to have 1,000 backward compatible use cases that you’ve got to test for,” he said.
“I would say we cleaned up our product catalog. We’ve cleaned up our digital infrastructure that manages that product catalog,” enabling the new plans, “so we can innovate and bring the next generation of service constructs that we think are going to be valuable. This is really the payoff of that work,” he explained.
“It’s not about ‘we got rid of some plans just so that we can go make it complicated’ by creating new plans. We needed to free up our infrastructure so we could innovate this way, and that’s essentially what we’re doing,” he said.
Read more stories about T-Mobile on Fierce Network:
T-Mobile’s 5G ‘refresh’ triggers customer backlash
T-Mobile says older-plan customers need 5G refresh