T-Mobile's Forced Plan Migration Blows Up, Deletes Free Lines and Invents New Charges
T-Mobile is having a rough week. The carrier's mass migration of customers onto new rate plans has gone sideways in at least two distinct ways: some users have had their free line promotions silently dropped, and others have had a hotspot data add-on they never asked for appear on their bills. Both result in higher charges. Neither was supposed to happen.
T-Mobile has admitted the free line issue is a technical error and says it's working to fix it, including backdating any missing discounts. "Those free lines remain free, and we're restoring the discounts, backdating them where needed, and reprocessing accounts to ensure customers receive the benefits they were promised," the company told Ars Technica. Fine words. Whether every affected customer actually gets made whole without having to fight for it is a different question entirely.
The scale of the disruption is significant for some users. One person posted on Reddit that they had three paid lines and six free ones, paying around $50 a month. Their first bill after being migrated to T-Mobile's new Experience Signature plan came in at over $300, with no free lines reflected anywhere. Another reported a $200 monthly increase. One T-Mobile support rep apparently told a customer that their free line was "ineligible" under the new plan and offered a year's worth of credit as a consolation prize rather than actually fixing it.
On the phantom hotspot add-on, T-Mobile's position is that some customers may have previously had that add-on and are simply choosing to remove it now that hotspot is bundled into the new plans. That's a convenient explanation. The company says it does not add paid features without consent and is investigating. Worth watching.
The forced migration itself was already contentious before any of this emerged. T-Mobile is eliminating around 1,100 legacy billing codes in a push to simplify its back-end infrastructure, moving customers off plans from the 3G and 4G era onto modern equivalents. COO Jon Freier described the situation in a leaked internal email, noting that nearly half of affected customers won't see any price change, but those who do will be hit with increases of up to $6 per line per month. The upside, per T-Mobile, is better data allowances, improved international coverage and a five-year price guarantee.
The free line promotions being lost in this process were handed out over the years as loyalty rewards. A promotion from March 2025, for instance, let customers who had been with T-Mobile for at least a decade add a free line if they already had two paid ones. These were supposed to carry over to the new plans. Clearly, in at least some cases, they didn't.
This isn't T-Mobile's first time breaking a promise to long-term customers. In 2024 the company ended its lifetime price lock, hiking bills for users who had specifically signed up for plans marketed with a guarantee that prices would never go up. The backlash was significant, producing FCC complaints and a class action lawsuit that is still grinding through the courts, with T-Mobile attempting to push plaintiffs into arbitration.
Some of the customers now facing the $6-per-line increase are the same people burned in 2024. One customer, Kathleen Odean, switched from Verizon to T-Mobile back in 2017 specifically to get the price lock on a 55-and-over plan. She and her husband are now looking at their second price increase in two years. Her complaint to T-Mobile got a generic email in return.
T-Mobile says the free line losses are unintentional and will be corrected. The $6-per-line increases, however, are not a mistake. Those are staying.