Better ways to limit data usage on shared plan?

Verizon has a service for $5/month to allow me to limit data usage on specific phones. Are there alternatives that I don't have to pay for, ie apps and/or settings directly on phones?

Thank you!

Verizon let me reduce the speed of my connection for free for the last 3 days of our billing cycle since my kid's phone ate up all our data by then. So, I didn't pay extra for the overage, nor for the data management process. However, my phone data speed was slowed down as well. Not that I noticed much since I have an old slow phone.

This option was presented when I got the notification that I had 10% of my data left.

(Interestingly, it may have been auto-backups to iCloud that used much of the data -- it wasn't using our WiFi for some reason).

I have a tmobile android...there is a way to set data limits, but anyone can always raise the limit....so you can get a kids limit to 2gb, but they hit the limit and just raise it themselves......I do this for myself, because often it loses the wifi connection and next thing I know I am out of data in a few days....this way if its not on wifi, it shuts itself down once it uses a little data

You have to pay to reduce your bill? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. They make profits with you coming and going.

No idea. AT&T charges for this service too. $5 for one line and $10 for up to 10 lines. Per month! It seems like a lot, but presumably it's cheaper than going over data? It still bites though.

berkeley said:

Verizon has a service for $5/month to allow me to limit data usage on specific phones. Are there alternatives that I don't have to pay for, ie apps and/or settings directly on phones?

Thank you!

It makes little sense to me. It's $15 or $20 for another chunk if you go over, and that effectively doubles my allowed data for the month. If it happens a lot, I can look at where the usage is and then either curtail usage or increase the plan.

If you have a family plan with shared data and rely on data for work, $5 a month is worth it for avoiding arguments and unpleasant surprises.

Last time I checked you could go from 12 to 16 GB of data on Verizon for $10 extra dollars a month.

fed123 said:

Last time I checked you could go from 12 to 16 GB of data on Verizon for $10 extra a month.

I did this. Actually increased from 8GB to 12GB. With a corporate discount I paid only $8.00. So for the price of a glass of wine I get 50% more data and no anxiety of running out.

fed123 said:

Last time I checked you could go from 12 to 16 GB of data on Verizon for $10 extra dollars a month.