If you’re on a Vodafone Red plan and seeing red over excess data charges, Vodafone’s giving you some options today that might help you out – but you’ll want to check your usage carefully before you sign up.
The Passes remove data usage from the included services from your monthly plan usage, but they also limit your use of the service to 1.5mbps. The Pass price recurs monthly, but you can cancel it any time.
What Services Are Included?
Vodafone is offering four Vodafone passes:
Chat Pass – $5/mo
- Facebook Messenger
- Viber
Social Pass – $10/mo
- Snapchat
Music Pass – $10/mo
- Spotify
- SoundCloud
- Amazon Music
- Deezer
- Tidal
Video Pass – $15/mo
- Netflix
- Stan
- Amazon Prime Video
It’s an interesting trade-off – you can get unlimited data use on Netflix on mobile, for example, but you won’t be able to stream in HD (maybe that’s ok on mobile?).
There are also a number of exclusions – ads on particular services won’t be included in the Pass, and neither will the traffic you use to sign in to the services.
Most importantly, Vodafone Pass isn’t going to pay your service subscription. You still need to pay for Spotify each month.
Is it for you?
Given the generous data inclusions on offer in Vodafone’s Red Plans, you’ll want to check your data usage to see whether you’ll benefit from the new Pass options.
Fortunately, your phone can tell you just how much data you’re using from each service each billing cycle – if you’ve set up your mobile data usage monitoring, it’s broken down by app.
Make sure you only count the apps included in the particular Pass you’re looking at, too – some Passes have a few limited options on them, but if your usage pattern matches what’s on offer, you could be in for a treat.
Check how much data is heading to each of the apps in your billing cycle — perhaps you can move down to a lower plan and pay less per month, but add on a Pass to make up for it.
You can find out more about the Vodafone Pass options at vodafone.com.au/plans/passes.
Netflix, Stan and Amazon Prime, these services allow to download videos and watch offline. Why will I pay $15 per month for it ?
Had it been You tube, it makes sense, though even youtube video can be downloaded IF I get youtube Premium.
The range of apps is far too limited to be viable.
Seems like a rort!
Agreed. They will charge for services that companies such as Optus include for no additional cost. I know where I am headed once my contract expires.
A sad day for network neutrality.
it is heading into very murky waters for sure. Not impressed tbh.
Might have had a point if it included Google services. Netflix I can just download eps at home.