Sprint Has Two New Unlimited Plans and Holy Sh*t, the Asterisks are Too Much (Updated)

Sprint announced two new unlimited data plans this morning called Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Basic. While we appreciate the straight-forward naming scheme, unlike Verizon’s hilariously buzzy wordbarfing, attempting to keep straight what Sprint is doing here is some kind of headache-inducer. Let’s see if we can explain it all.

These two new unlimited plans from Sprint will go live tomorrow, July 13 and will replace their current Unlimited Freedom plan. As you might have expected, they are similar to Unlimited Freedom, only with a few tweaks here and there, plus all of the throttling and non-unlimited unlimitedness you would expect from a US carrier.

Unlimited Plus features unlimited talk, text, and data, full HD (1080p) streaming, 15GB hotspot data at LTE speeds (3G after), unlimited talk/text plus 10GB of data in Canada/Mexico, and subscriptions to Hulu’s limited commercial option and Tidal Premium. Music streaming is throttled to 1.5Mbps as it always has been.

How much does Sprint Unlimited Plus cost? I have no idea. Sprint won’t offer straight-up pricing, though we’ve asked for it and will update this post if we get it. Instead, Sprint is running a promo for 5-lines and is doing an average price-per-line of $42. How that translates into 1 or 2 lines is some math sh*t my brain just can’t handle this early in the morning. Looking at the footnotes, this is what it should cost:

$50/mo for line 1, $30/mo for line 2 and $10/mo/line for lines 3 – 5. Add’l $20/mo/line without BYOD/Full SRP phone.

So if you bring your own phone, a single line Unlimited Plus account would be $50/mo. If you don’t bring your own phone and lease one from Sprint, it would be $70/mo.

Unlimited Basic is a similar plan only with more throttling. You get unlimited talk, text, and data, 480p video streaming, 500MB of hotspot, 5GB of roaming data to Canada/Mexico, and a Hulu limited commercials account. Music and gaming are throttled to 500Kbps and 2Mbps, respectively.

How much does Unlimited Basic cost? Like with Unlimited Plus, Sprint isn’t very forward about this, but the footnote on their press release says:

$60/mo for line 1, $40/mo for line 2 and $20/mo/line for lines 3 and 5 with AutoPay.

So that’s $60/mo for a single line, which I’m assuming is the price if you lease a phone from Sprint. I’ll let you decide if that’s a good value or not.

UPDATE: Here is a clearer pricing breakdown, courtesy of Sprint.

Again, both Unlimited Plus and Basic go live tomorrow. Sign-up here.

// Sprint