Hey all, I will be switching to T-mobile in the near future and am looking for honest positive or negative opinions as to whether Protection 360 is worth it. Hopefully I will be getting the $0/a month S23, and having an $18 monthly charge kind of defeats the purpose of having a free phone. I am always super careful with my phones and I've never had one break---however usually I get a phone around $300 or less so I've never been too worried about it either.

Bonus question: If I don't get P360 and something DOES happen, do I owe the whole balance or just what hasn't been "paid" off? And could I potentially just put the sim card in another unlocked phone until the 2 years is up and nobody would ever be the wiser?

So there are 6 tiers to Protection 360 Insurance.

Tier 5 is listed as Tier 5/BYOD, the monthly cost is $18 and the deductible is $99.

Tier 6 is for high end devices and the monthly is $25 and deductible is $199.

Currently a BYOD is defined as "Any device that is compatible with the T-mobile network that was not bought from T-mobile or it's subsidiaries."

And Tier 6 is defined as the tier for high end or expensive phones, and verbiage in the terms and conditions all point to Tier 6 phones being bought from T-mobile, keeping it separate from the BYOD category.

So I'm trying to find out where this exception in the BYOD categorization is defined.

If it's not defined properly and they've been overcharging everyone with a BYOD high end device, it could spell class action lawsuit, just saying.

This all has come about as I'm one of the idiots who actually reads this kind of paperwork, and I can't find anything publicly available in any of the documentation saying that BYOD category has exclusions or exceptions, or even that Tmobile has the ability to change terms at will. Because it has to do with insurance signed contracts it seems pretty locked up from what I can read, and what they're doing by bumping high end BYOD devices is actually breaking contract with high end BYOD owners.

Anyways, I'd love to see if someone can show me something I missed, because I can't find anything.

Thanks!

Official response from T-Mobile:

Upon investigating in the system, I found that Galaxy Z Fold3 5G is the only device with us which comes under Protection <360> due to it's higher purchase price. This device was not available when the documents was prepared due to which all other BYOD phones come under tier 5 of the Protection <360> plan. Since the Galaxy Z Fold3 was launched later, being the highest tier phone, it by default went under tier 6. I hope this clarifies the situation.

Unfortunately this isn't how contracts work, and unless they officially amend the contract or email updated terms and conditions, they can't just arbitrarily go against the verbiage of the contract.

Edit: Welp, apparently either no one's going to read this post, or they're going to try really hard to read between the lines or whatever. I apologize in advance for not writing this post 140 characters at a time in a twitter thread so people can better understand it.