T-Mobile has a new 'essentials' plan that is "unlimited data" and less expensive that current plans

T-Mobile may have said last week that they had no current plans to increase pricing on their unlimited offerings, but that doesn’t mean they won’t continue to make changes. This morning, the UnCarrier announced T-Mobile Essentials, a new budget plan that features only the…essentials.

T-Mobile revealed most of the details of Essentials, but the basics are that it’s supposed to be a plan that only includes unlimited talk, text, and data. With that said, it does include hotspot data at 3G speeds, 2G data use in Canada and Mexico, and 480p (DVD) quality video streaming. If you use over 50GB of data per month, you may get throttled during times of congestion too.

On August 10, T-Mobile will released the T-Mobile Essentials plans with a starting price of $60/mo for a single line. If you add a 2nd line, that’ll be an extra $30/mo. For lines 3-6, you can add on $15/mo per line. For a family of 4, that would be $120/mo or $30 per line. To get those prices, don’t forget that you’ll need to sign-up for autopay, otherwise the price is $5 higher per line.

How does this differ from T-Mobile ONE?

It’s almost identical, except T-Mobile ONE costs $10 more per month per line and features free Netflix with 2+ lines, Gogo in-flight WiFi access, unlimited 2G speed data in 210+ countries, and 5GB of LTE data in Canada and Mexico.

If you are a heavy Netflix user, then T-Mobile ONE might be worth the $10/mo upgrade. If not, and you don’t ever go to Canada or Mexico, then I’m not sure why you wouldn’t downgrade to this new Essentials plan.

T-Mobile basically has 4 plans now

In case you were having trouble keeping track, T-Mobile now has 4 different unlimited plans. That’s worth pointing out because they spent a portion of today’s announcement clowning the other carriers for all of their options that cause confusion. But if you look at T-Mobile, they now have T-Mobile Essentials, T-Mobile ONE, ONE Plus, and ONE Plus International. That’s four. Verizon has three plans. AT&T and Sprint each have two.