Prepaid cell phones are a great choice for users who would rather not go through the hassle of setting up a contract as well as the risk of overspending on calls. There are many great prepaid plans becoming available on many wireless networks, attempting to offer all the benefits of postpaid. With so much choice, it can be hard to know whether postpaid or prepaid deals offer the best value for money, and especially difficult to compare these offers on different networks.

Most of the popular cell phone networks are offering both prepaid and post paid plans, so it is worth comparing the costs and bearing in mind the amount of free minutes that come with the plan. For example, the Virgin Mobile pay as you go plan includes roll-forward minutes, meaning that unused minutes from one month can be saved for the next. This is one of the advantages of a postpaid plan, but Virgin conveniently offers it in a prepaid version, and for 200 minutes a month, users can pay $20 on a prepaid plan. Their postpaid equivalent is $24.99 per month for the same amount of minutes. On the surface it may seem like no question as to what the better deal is, but there is more to consider.

There are quite a few factors to consider when finding the cheapest option available to you. First, you must compare the postpaid to the prepaid plans offered by one mobile service, and then you can compare them to other networks to see how good the deal is. When comparing, it will only be valid if you estimate roughly how much you will call and how much you will text. Many prepaid plans include daily access charges, so it is also important to work out how many days of the month you will be using the phone and having to pay these charges.

On the Virgin plans mentioned above, cost will be added to the prepaid plan in the form of text messaging, which comes a lot cheaper with their postpaid plan. So if you like to text a lot, it might be better value to go postpaid. However, their prepaid cell phone plan is unique in the fact that it does not charge daily access fees, which is useful to know when comparing it to networks such as Verizon, for example.

Services such as Verizon will add daily access charges to the cost of plans. So while it may seem cheaper to go with the prepaid cell phone option, postpaid will eliminate these charges, and the cost for users who like to use their phones on most days of the month. The prepaid plans offered by Verizon include less of the benefits of the Virgin Plans, and this is also something to look out for when choosing a plan.

In short, the main benefits of postpaid used to be: included monthly minutes, a set monthly price for those minutes and no daily access charges. If you are looking for the best deal, then look for prepaid plans that replicate these great postpaid benefits, such as the Virgin plans. You may find they can sometimes cost slightly more than their postpaid equivalents, but in many cases the convenience more than makes up for this fact.

Read an article about why you should consider a prepaid cell phone.