“T‑Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T‑Mobile ONE plan.” That was the promise. The Un-contract. The whole reason millions of customers picked the magenta team over Verizon and AT&T in the first place. Now T-Mobile is retiring legacy 3G and 4G-era plans — Magenta, ONE, Simple Choice — and automatically moving customers onto “modern” 5G plans at higher monthly costs. Billing changes hit mid-July for the current wave. The company that swore it would never surprise you with a rate hike just sent the notification.
The catch is that it’s “unlimited” in that sense that the mobile companies have made people accept now, i.e., deprioritized. I’m on Visible, which is Verizon’s MVNO; my plan has unlimited deprioritized everything, and it’s $25/mo, with $5/mo discount for the first two years so I’m actually paying $20/mo for now. It’s mostly good enough for my purposes; I’m usually on Wifi anyway. When I was leaving a protest and turned my phone back on, I couldn’t get enough access to check the bus schedule or text my family, so that was frustrating; dense crowds are a problem. But I was previously paying like $130/mo for Verizon, so it’s more than worth putting up with. I got some mesh radios for emergency comms.