Phone Plan Shopping Is Broken — Here’s Why

I’m old. So old that I remember calling travel agents to book airfare and flying with paper airplane tickets. Of course, booking travel became much easier when you could go to the airline website to buy your tickets, but that still required hopping around site to site, checking prices and flight times.

Then Kayak launched in 2005. That was a game changer. Where are you flying from? Easy. Where are you flying to? Easy. Departure and return dates? Easy. Click search and … voila. Magic. I could see all the carrier flight options, flight times, and prices in one place. I probably saved hundreds of dollars finding the lowest cost flight for my travels, but even more priceless (to me), was the time I saved.

Fast forward to 2026. Phone plan shopping is broken, just like flight shopping was broken before Kayak. How do you find a plan that’s less than $50 per month, offers unlimited data, and has coverage for where you live and work? Here’s how you might do it…

• You could go to Verizon’s website and find a plan that fits your needs. You find one, but how does its price compare to similar plans?
• Then you click over to AT&T’s website. You find a lower-cost plan, but now you need to confirm coverage.
• You go to AT&T’s coverage map, but all it says is whether there is or is no coverage. It could be great coverage to support streaming or just enough coverage to make voice calls. That’s it.

Sound familiar? For most Americans, this is the default experience when shopping for a new plan.

Oh, and unlike flights, where price and time are standardized, wireless plans are intentionally fragmented: different definitions of “unlimited”, inconsistent definitions of deprioritization, and vague coverage claims.

Phone plan shopping is intentionally vague and fragmented. It’s tedious. It’s broken. 

This is why we built Goji. We believe phone plan shopping should be fast and easy. And we believe consumers should be able to compare all the best prices and deals to maximize their savings, especially with rising fuel costs and overall cost of living. If most people are already using Wi-Fi for 70–90% of their data, the industry’s push toward expensive “premium unlimited” plans starts to look less like necessity and more like positioning.

Globally, prepaid phone plans already represent roughly a 150 billion dollar market and are expected to grow about 7% annually, a clear sign that more people are shifting away from expensive postpaid contracts toward flexible, lower-cost options. We’re seeing the same pattern in our own data: 73% of user searches are for prepaid plans, and 74% of plan views are for MVNOs.

And by switching to prepaid plans from MVNOs like Mint Mobile, Visible by Verizon, and US Mobile, you could save more than $500 per year. I did this with my daughter’s first phone plan – Mint Mobile’s kids plan is the way to go here – and recently switched my dad to US Mobile’s Unlimited Flex plan for only $17.50 per month because he never leaves his house and even 10GB of data feels too much for his usage.

Flight booking didn’t get easier because airlines got simpler. It got easier because someone finally organized the chaos. Wireless is overdue for the same shift.

That’s the shift we’re building toward at Goji. See it for yourself by browsing plans on gojimobile.com.