The article itself needs to be updated as well, T-Mobile finished it’s acquisition of Mint. So it’s point of “Well Verizon technically owns the towers”, is bupkis.

Does Mint Mobile have prepaid and registered plans?

I got three months for $45 from them at Target (comes w sim card). The sale is “introductory” and running now at Target and Best Buy for Black Friday. It’s supposed to be 40Gb before throttling, but I got terribly slow speeds well before that trying to stream a video. The price was the same as the 5Gb cards though.

The store clerk just scanned something in the packet and maybe a cash receipt number. Then, I still had to do something online at home, and troubles with that led to a long chat with tech support. They had me pick a phone number (you can use one you already have instead). I never used the phone number, but Mint has sent short-code texts to promote their service and remind me to purchase more service as the term expires. If I burn the sim card and the phone number, might I get by with a new “intro offer” purchase? Or, is the phone ID’d and quickly disqualified.

The 5Gb plan in the article is $180/year == $15/mo, but is it a registered plan? Where can I get a prepaid data sim card, and have you seen that with 10-15 Gb data for ~$15/mo?