Do you prefer to pay as you go or be bound by a contract?

If pay as you go had all of the benefits as the contract, I'd rather use the prepaid plans! Contracts has the insurance for the phone and you have access to better phones! Prepay phones has to be purchased and upgrades the same! The main prepay benefit is, ur not penalized if u can't pay for the next month, which is very attractive! Taripre$

I use to use prepaid phones but I got tired of putting money on them and the phones I wanted was expensive. Now I am on a family plan with my mom from T-Mobile which has a contract and I can upgrade my phone if I want to in 90 days.

I prefer prepaid. It's just a phone, and not a big deal to me, so I do not want to be tied down at all with a contract.

Oh here in my country prepaid kind is widely used. well I think the reason behind this is they all prefer prepaid because it is not hard on the budget, here you can have a credit for as low as 50 US dollar cents. SO a lot here uses prepaid. I am too, I use prepaid, post paiud plans here are expensive and I know I will lose control of my usage

I am on a plan with a two year contract, my 2 years will be up in April 2009. I am not going to do an update so I will not be obligated for another 2 years. My first phone was a prepaid phone, I didn't like that.

prepaid. its nice to know that if something happens i'm not going to be forced to pay a monthly bill at the risk of ruining my credit. And today the selection and features of prepaid are the same level as contract phone plans. So why would anyone have a contract? prepaid is the way to go.

It all depends on usage habit. Because of my job, if I were to get pay as you go, I couldn't afford it. Even though my bill seems little higher than normal, after everything being said & done, my per minute average is cheaper than pay as you go. My typical monthly bill is around $116 a month & that's including tax & other fees that goes with the phone & it's contract. I have unlimited plan. I'm paying $99.99 for the "unlimited talking" part of the plan & also I have unlimited email access & messaging & data access for additional $19.99. Even though it's not much, I get a corporate discount for working where I do. So, sub-total comes out to $119.98, then less $18 for the discount which brings the sub-total down to $101.98. Then adding all the tax & other fees brings the bill back up to $115.64. I don't plan to get rid of my cell phone any time soon so contract doesn't really mean anything. If I really break it down, last month I used 3974 minutes & that's just talking part of the cell phone. That comes out to about 3 cents a minute. Last time I checked, prepaid phones are somewhere between 10 cents to 15 cents per minute, some places even more. So even if I went with the cheapest prepaid plan, my bill for last month would have been almost $400. That's not counting messaging. Because of work related issues, and of course bit of personal use as well, I used 2047 messages last month. I'm not sure how much prepaid services charge for the text messaging, but combined with my "talking" part of the bill, it would've been well over $400, possibly $500. Then there's internet part. All in all, if I went with prepaid & use it the way I currently do, it would be close to $600 a month if not more. What I would pay in 2 month of prepaid, I can keep my contract for a whole year. Time I would've spent running around looking for pay phone & keep feeding it quarters wouldn't be so cheap either in my case. So after all this, I'd rather be "bounded" by a contract. Besides, another year, I would complete my 2 year contract & I would be on a month to month basis with the same plan in which I can cancel it at any time.