Nearly every week I get an email asking me the same question. “What is the cheapest home internet provider?” Frankly, we frugalites have figured out how to cut our cable bill by streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime. We’ve ditched our landline for mobile plans with unlimited minutes. But that pesky home internet bill. How can we save there?
Cheapest Home Internet Provider
Meet FreedomPop. FreedomPop is the answer to “what’s the cheapest home internet solution?” In fact, it’s so cheap that it’s free. (I’m not kidding) Yes, the basic FreedomPop home internet plan is free. You do need to buy their modem/router for a one-time fee of $98 shipped, but after that you can get free home internet. As in f-r-e-e. (Details below on how to get the modem)
FreedomPop Home Internet Plans
If I haven’t said it enough, yes FreedomPop’s basic internet plan is free. But, it only gives you 1GB of data transfer per month at a not-so-high speed before you’re charged an overage fee for every megabyte you go beyond 1GB.
FreedomPop’s upgraded plans, although they aren’t free, are still incredibly low-priced (I beg you to disagree):
- $9.99/month for 5GB of data at speeds up 1.5Mpbs
- $14.99/month for 10GB of data at speeds up to 3Mpbs
- $18.99/month for 10GB of data at speeds up to 12Mpbs, which is twice as fast as my DSL. Plus, your first month is free.
What’s the Catch?
If there’s any catch it’s the overage fees. These plans will allow you to use the internet as much as you want, but after you’ll pay a pretty penny for it once you exceed your plan’s limit.
To mitigate that risk you can pay $2/month to get usage alerts. With a usage alert FreedomPop will email you a head’s up as you approach your usage limit. It’s probably a well-spent $2 per month. I’ve shown you how to opt out of these alerts, if you desire, in the image above.
How to Get Cheap Home Internet from FreedomPop
- Input your information on FreedomPop’s website to confirm service near you (I have a second email account I use exclusively to sign up for online offers like this)
- Pick your service plan. Notice that you will pay an overage fee if you exceed your plan’s data limit
- Opt in or out of usage alerts. Like I said, this is $2/month well-spent.
- Buy your modem. You pay a one-time fee of $98 shipped to have your Freedom Hub Burst modem/router sent to you (pictured above)
- Activate. During the checkout process for your modem you are also authorizing FreedomPop to charge you monthly for any services you’ve subscribed to.
FreedomPop also has similar free and really cheap offerings for mobile phones and wireless hot spots.
Who’s going to check this out? (Since I make a living online I can’t live with a 10GB data requirement or I’d be all. over. this. Instead, I’ll live vicariously through you and your home internet savings!)
Carrie, I have Centurylink for internet. How would I know how much I would need?
I didn’t know about this til about a month ago but if you have children in school that qualify for free or reduced lunch you can get internet thru comcast via internet essentials for 9.99 a month
Thanks Dana!
I’m a long time user of FreedomPop, both for wireless internet on the go, and for my cell phone service. Both of those services are free for the basic plan as well. I
I have gone over my allotted data in a couple months, and I think I ended up having to pay about $10 extra that month, even without the alerts/etc. Not a big deal.
This plan is perfect for folks that aren’t doing much video streaming or other intensive online activities. For example, if you mainly just surf sites like this one and check your email online, this plan will probably work just fine for you. If you’re watching a lot of Netflix and Amazon Prime video streaming, you’re likely going to have overages.
My question is how do I know if 10GB plan is enough to keep me doing what i do online without going over it.
Sheila, There isn’t a firm way to know. For me, I looked at my mobile data usage as a gauge. I know what I do on my mobile phone data wise and I can see a firm measure of how much data that uses. In my mind I extrapolated that out to what I use my home internet for. (That said, I couldn’t find anything on my Centurylink bill or in my online Centurylink account that showed my home data usage. I *didn’t* try calling Centurylink to ask. That *might* be an option).
As an example – to show you how much data it uses, a typical 2 hour movie at regular quality on Netflix will use about 600MB of data. At high quality (1080p HD video), it could use closer to 4-5GB.
So in other words, if you’re doing a lot of video streaming, the free plan probably won’t be enough for you. If you don’t do a lot of video it’ll probably be fine.
With the 10GB plan you could watch a few movies a month and still be fine – as long as they’re not high quality streaming. You can probably forget about those 10 hour marathons of your favorite shows though.
Hi. I live in Wisconsin and was looking into this internet. It says we would get a refurbished device for internet. All we have available in this area is 2g. Would this service be good for our household. We use the internet alot with alot of devices. Wii. smartphones, computers, Nook. We have 3g of internet speed and paying about $50.00 a month. We have Tmobile for our cell phone provider. Just would like to pay less for internet.
We don’t stream movies, but use the Internet and stream music thru Pandora. We have smartphones and simply use the smart phone mobile Hot spot to provide a connection for our tablet and laptop. We cancelled home Internet once we upgraded to smart phones and just set usage alerts on the phones. Super easy, and we can connect anywhere as long as we have the phone with our tablet or computer.
Not available in my area.
Sally, I have Centurylink, too, and there is a way to find out! I was curious so I did an internet chat with customer service and got my usage for the last six months. I don’t make my living on the internet but I figured it was used a lot, and I’m very glad I checked. Our six-month average was 78.2 GB, with the lowest being 47.8, so we would have gone over every month.
No available in my area, yet. I did sign up to receive an e-mail when it happens.
My computer (with Window 8/8.1*) has a setting that tells me how much internet we use. I can’t find the control menu for it or I’d share the information. It is there. somewhere.
(*Windows 8 & 8.1 – We’re all finding it difficult to use, including the teens! Here’s to hoping something more 7 or simpler is coming out soon.)
I have been looking very seriously at freedompop for my cell phone service. I am living in a suburb of St. Paul and I’m wondering who out there is currently using freedompop’s cell service and are they happy with it?