Best Deal on Prepaid Minutes - Tracfone Airtime Guide

Airtime Comparison - Which Tracfone Card Should you Buy? 

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Best deal on Tracfone Minutes

Is it cheaper to buy the 60 minute card every three months or the 1 Year Card? What is the cheapest way to buy service days? We hear these questions, and more, quite often, and wanted to share the answers to these questions, as well as others, with our readers.

Further on we also compare all of Tracfone's airtime cards to better understand which ones offer the best value.

With Tracfone airtime cards, there isn't a 'best' card for everyone, because it all depends on how much airtime you use, and if you use your data and texts often.

So we have included several common scenarios, with the best airtime card for that situation.

Cheapest Way to Add Service Days:
Go to the Tracfone website, under regular airtime cards add the 30 minute (online only) card for $9.99 to your cart.Proceed to next page, where you should be offered several add-ons including 365 service days for $50. Add that to your cart and checkout.

Cheapest Way to Add only Texts:
The cheapest way to add texts to your phone is to buy the 1000 text card for $5. This card is only available for smartphones.

Cheapest Way to Add only Data:
The cheapest way to add data to your smartphone is to buy the 1000 MB card for $10.

Best Deal for Texts and Data (and some talk minutes):
The best deal for adding both texts and data is to add the 300 minute, $20 smartphone card which gives you 1000 texts, 1000 MB data, 30 service days and 300 minutes. This breaks down to essentially receiving the 300 minutes for less than $1 which is a fantastic deal. If you don't need service days or talk minutes, just add the text and data only cards. If you want more talk time, consider the 750 minute $35 card which also gives 1000 texts and 1000 MB.

Best Deal for Talk Minutes
Tracfone doesn't offer a talk card like their text and data cards. So if you only need talk minutes, you have to purchase a card that includes texts and data as well.

The 500 Minute card ($25) and 750 Minute Card ($35) are both good options, where you get a good number of talk minutes along with texts, data and 60 service days.

If you find that you only use talk minutes, you probably want to avoid switching to a Tracfone smartphone. Stick with a regular cell phone where all the airtime goes into a single pool. In this case, the 450 minute card is the best value for non-smartphones.

Best Tracfone Airtime Card
The best airtime card to buy is the one that fits with the amount of minutes you use. Some cards are a better value than others, but if you're not using the airtime anyway, it doesn't really matter. Of course, airtime never expires, as long as you still have service days.

The 500 Minute ($25), 750 Minute ($35) and 750 Minute ($50) smartphone only cards are all less than $20 a month, and give the best value on talk, text and data minutes.

Conclusion:
With Tracfone, you get to monitor what you use, and purchase the airtime you need. Airtime usage may change from month to month, allowing users to purchase a different airtime card depending on the need.

If you prefer not to worry about purchasing more airtime every few months, Tracfone's auto refill might be a good option. We have already created a Guide to Tracfone auto refill which includes a look at the best value.

Tracfone Airtime Comparison - Smartphone Cards vs Regular Airtime Cards

Many of our longtime readers will know that we've already compared Tracfone's airtime cards in this post. But we wanted to create a more simplified article, and also include several new airtime cards, such as the $20 Smartphone card Tracfone recently added.

This comparison will look more closely at how much each airtime card really costs so that our readers can see which one might be the best deal for them, and also to back up the information we provided above.

Let's get started.

This table includes Tracfone's regular and smartphone only airtime cards with the talk, text and data amounts on the left side, and how much each talk/text/data minute costs. On the far right we have also color coded which cards are 'better' or 'worse' deals with green for good, yellow is ok, and red is bad.

Notice that the smartphone only cards are generally a better deal, this is because they offer more data and texts compared to the regular airtime cards.

The new 300 minute smartphone only card (for $20) is the best value for airtime. If you subtract the cost for texts (1000 texts equals $5) and data (1000 MB data equals $10) and service days (30 service days equals $4.17) then you get 300 minutes for just $0.83. That is about 1/4th of a penny per talk minute. However, you are getting a lot of airtime and only 30 service days, so if you don't use that much airtime, it is probably best to use a card that offers more service days.

This next graph illustrates this for each Tracfone airtime card.

Tracfone Airtime Card Comparison - How Many Talk Minutes you get Per Dollar

The graph above shows how many talk minutes you get per dollar once other variables are removed.

We factored out the cost for texts, data and service days, and then divided the number of talk minutes you receive by the remaining cost.  As you can see, most of the airtime cards are somewhat close together, but the 300 minute smartphone only card is a winner when it comes to value.

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We hope this information is helpful, and please leave a comment with any thoughts or questions. Be sure to also follow us on Facebook with a growing community of Tracfone users.

If you're still new to Tracfone, consider our Beginners Guide to Tracfone which will share a variety of information to get you started.

Make your airtime stretch even further and use a Tracfone with Triple Minutes for Life.

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