Sprint Launches Yet Another Early Upgrade Program, This Time With No Monthly Discount

(Maulleigh)

Only days after Sprint pulled the plug on its 4-month-old One Up early upgrade program, the wireless company is unveiling yet another promotion aimed at people just feel compelled to constantly upgrade their devices. This time, however, Sprint has basically removed the main reason for signing up.

See, the one real redeeming value of the now-dead One-Up program was that members received a $15/month discount. That made sense because members were paying full price for their new phones, meaning they shouldn’t have to pay the full monthly rate that subscribers with Sprint-subsidized devices pay.

Both T-Mobile and AT&T have recently changed their pricing so that customers who own their phones outright, or are members of early upgrade programs that require them to ultimately pay full price for those phones, pay less for service.

But the new Sprint Easy Pay program offers no such discount. You still pay the full monthly rate for your phone service.

Under Easy Pay, you make a down-payment on the full price of a new phone and the rest of the sticker price is spread out over 24 months. The difference between Easy Pay and the other programs is that there is technically no waiting period before cashing in on your upgrade. That said, you’ll need to pay the remaining balance on the phone.

So it’s not really an early upgrade program so much as it is a program that lets you space out your payments until you’re ready to pay the whole sticker price.

Another minor concession is that when you eventually pay the full tab on that old device, Sprint will let you then trade it in. If you can still get a few hundred dollars for that device, then maybe it’s a decent deal, but you won’t know until it’s actually time to trade that phone in.

One big caveat to Easy Pay is that Sprint is listing it as a “limited time” program, which is incredibly vague. So I reached out to Sprint for some sort of clarification.

“This is a limited time offer and there has been no set time to discontinue,” replied a Sprint rep. “It’s similar to many other special offers in the marketplace. So, we encourage customers to take advantage sooner rather than later.”

Considering how quickly Sprint pulled the rug out from under One-Up, we’d encourage people to really think twice before signing up for Easy Pay.

by Chris Morran via Consumerist