Tello Mobile Service Review: My Honest Review About Its Crazy Cheap Starting Prices

For this Tello review and all our mobile reviews, we give a rating based on four main criteria:

• Dollar value ↓
• Network coverage ↓
• Data performance ↓
• Customer service ↓

Then, we average the scores to make an overall score.

Tello offers a range of prepaid plans that run on T-Mobile’s 5G network (offering the fastest 5G speeds). That means you get T-Mobile coverage for a lot less. So if paying as low as $5 per month on your cell phone bill sounds unbelievable … believe it.

Unless you need for tons of premium data, you don’t have to stick to your big carrier and its big monthly bills. A Tello Mobile cell phone plan gets you a lot more than you think for its crazy low price. Most importantly, you don’t have to commit to the same phone bill every month with Tello—it’s all in your control.

Here’s a quick overview of what you can expect from a Tello Mobile cell phone plan:

Pros:

• Cheapest prepaid starting prices
• High-speed 5G and LTE T-Mobile network access
• Customization for data and minutes
• Mobile hotspot data included on all plans
• No annual commitments to unlock discounts
• Mix-and-match family plan options
• Surprisingly good customer service
• Tello cell phones

Cons:

• Deprioritized data during network congestion
• No promo pricing or extra perks
• Hard data cap on all plans (minus Unlimited plan)
• No data and minutes rollover

As I mentioned above, you can customize your data amounts on Tello. Remember, Tello has hard data caps on all their plans (minus its Unlimited plan), and that means that once you reach your data limit, your speeds aren’t just slowed. They stop completely until the next billing cycle—unless you upgrade.

Tello allows you to upgrade and downgrade for free and instantly. What does that even look like? I spoke to Jay on a Tello Reddit forum who explained the process: He’s upgraded for more data in certain months but also downgraded for less data (as well as changing the minutes). He says the changes take 15 seconds or less. I find this an excellent feature. For example, if you’re a parent and you want your kid to have more data on a weekend trip, you can change it for the weekend and then back on Monday. Or like Jay, some months you want to pay less so you use less data. You not only control your phone bill month to month, you also control it throughout the month.

Tello doesn’t allow minutes and data to roll over month to month, which might feel like these features go wasted at times. But according to real customers I interviewed, there’s actually a way to do it.

Jay recommends that you check when your next auto-renewal is on your home dashboard. Keep in mind that Tello is based on EST for billing and plan renewals. You must wait until the day before your auto-renewal date—wait until it’s 12:01 AM EST (the day before your plan renews) to manually renew, then your remaining data and minutes will rollover and add onto the new prepaid monthly plan. If you don’t manually renew and allow your account to auto renew at the time Tello sets for you, then you’ll lose the remaining data and minutes—it will adjust to the current plan you have set in your account.

Built into every Tello plan is free international calling from the US. Even on the smallest and most customized plan, you can use those same minutes to call over 60 countries (including Canada, Mexico, India, China, and more) with the minutes being deducted from your plan balance as if you were making domestic calls in the US. You don’t need to pay extra for an international add-on.

For destinations not included in this list of 60 countries, you can purchase something called Pay As You Go (PAYG) for low and discounted rates.

If you want to physically leave the United States, all you have to do is connect to Wi-Fi while abroad and you can use your plan minutes (no roaming fees). Connecting to Wi-Fi abroad is the key to not getting charged expensive fees. If you know you’re going to use tons of data while travelling, don’t rely on Tello and look for a local mobile plan where you are travelling to.

As of May 2025, Tello lowered its roaming rates:

Voice: 5c/min. (instead of 25c/min.)

Text: 1c/min. (instead of 5c/min.)

Data: 1c/min. (instead of 5c/min.)

When Wi-Fi is unavailable, roaming is available in over 200 countries and territories. It requires the Pay As You Go Credit (PAYG), and must be enabled in your account for a minimum of $5. The great thing about the PAYG Credits is that the credits remain valid as long as the plan is active. Otherwise, they will expire in three months.

To my surprise, I’ve seen the best customer reviews for Tello. As a skeptical prepaid customer myself who has witnessed firsthand how unhelpful customer service can be, I take these positive reviews at face value. With nearly 14,000 total reviews on Trustpilot, Tello has an overall rating of 4.5/5 with many reviews praising the agents by name. As of October 2025, Tello also has an A+ rating from the BBB.

There’s only one negative thing I noticed about Tello’s customer service: There’s no online chat option if you’re not a customer. It seems that unless I call their number or I become a Tello Mobile customer myself, I can’t just open up the Tello website and start chatting with someone. This seems like a huge hindrance to communication. For that, I can’t give it a full five stars in this category.

Tello Mobile is not the only MVNO that runs off of T-Mobile’s network. But it has some of the lowest starting prices for a prepaid cell phone carrier ($5 per month!). Read on below to see how other carriers (T-Mobile and other prepaid carriers) compare to Tello Mobile in terms of price, data, and network.