How We Collect and Verify Plan Data
Every price on this site has a date attached to it. This page tells you what that date means, how the number got here, and which carriers we currently cannot check — because a comparison site that hides its gaps is not worth trusting.
Right now 64 of our 73 plans (88%) were confirmed on or after 1 July 2026. The rest are listed below with the reason we could not re-check them. Three carriers own the networks in the United States and dozens of MVNOs resell them. Advertised prices also routinely assume autopay, multiple lines, or both, which makes like-for-like comparison harder than it should be.
How a price gets onto this site
- We fetch the carrier's own page. Prices come from the carrier, never from a press release, an aggregator, or another comparison site. Many carrier pages are JavaScript applications or sit behind a bot filter, so we render them in a real browser rather than downloading the raw HTML.
- We read the plans out of the page by hand. A person reviews the captured page and records each plan. This is the slow step, and it is deliberate — it is where errors like a multi-line rate quoted as a per-line price get caught.
- Automated safeguards run before anything publishes. If an extraction returns fewer plans than we already had, it is rejected rather than applied, because a partial capture would otherwise read as a carrier discontinuing plans. Carriers missing from a run keep their existing data instead of being emptied.
- The date you see is the date a person confirmed that price. Not the date the page was built, and not the date we last attempted a check.
What each carrier's data is worth today
Sorted by confidence. "Current" means every plan for that carrier was confirmed on or after 1 July 2026; "partly current" means some were and some were not.
| Carrier | Plans | Last verified | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| AT&T | 7 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Cricket Wireless | 6 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Holafly | 6 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Saily | 6 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Airalo | 6 | 3 August 2026 | Current |
| Boost Mobile | 4 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Google Fi | 4 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Mint Mobile | 4 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| T-Mobile | 4 | 1 September 2026 (oldest 3 August 2026) | Current |
| Tello | 4 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Total Wireless | 4 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| US Mobile | 3 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Visible | 3 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Xfinity Mobile | 2 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Verizon | 1 | 1 September 2026 | Current |
| Straight Talk | 5 | 1 March 2026 | Not re-verified Straight Talk’s plan page is behind an Incapsula block with the same behaviour: fine for a human visitor, closed to us. |
| Metro by T-Mobile | 4 | 1 March 2026 | Not re-verified Metro’s plan page is behind an Akamai block that refuses automated requests, including from an ordinary residential browser. The page works normally for a person visiting it. |
Why we leave stale plans up
When we cannot re-check a carrier, we have three options: delete its plans, quietly leave them looking current, or leave them up with the date visible. We do the third.
Deleting them would be worse than useless — a carrier being hard for us to read says nothing about whether its plans still exist, and dropping two of India's largest carriers would make the comparison less useful, not more. Leaving them undated would be dishonest. So the date stays on the page, and you can weigh it yourself.
We only remove a plan when there is positive evidence it is gone, such as the carrier renaming or retiring its whole lineup.
Independence and money
This site is not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any carrier. Some links are affiliate links and are marked with an asterisk (*); if you buy through one we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That is what pays for the site.
Affiliate relationships never affect rankings. Plans are ordered by the filters and sort you choose, computed from the plan data. There is no paid placement, and a carrier cannot buy a better position. Several of the best-value plans we list earn us nothing at all.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Carrier representatives are welcome to write directly — we would rather hear it from you than leave a wrong price up. Point us at the page, tell us what it should say, and we will correct it, usually within a day or two.
Corrections of fact are always free and always welcome. Requests to change a ranking, remove an unflattering comparison, or reorder results are not the same thing, and we decline those.
Write to us: hello@americanphoneplans.com