Phone Plan Optimizer

Compare the true 24-month cost of owning a cell phone plan + device combination across US carriers.

Enter your line count, the device you want, how many lines need a new device, and your trade-in situation. The app computes the total cost of ownership over 24 months for every carrier plan × purchase path combination and ranks them:

• Carrier financing — full retail spread over the carrier's term (typically 36 months), with promotional bill credits applied where your plan tier and trade-in qualify. Because carrier terms outlast the 24-month window, the balance still owed at month 24 is reported separately.
• Manufacturer 0% financing — Apple/Samsung installments, with the manufacturer's trade-in credit reducing the financed amount.
• Buy outright — retail minus manufacturer trade-in, paid upfront.

Options:

• MVNOs / prepaid — Visible, Mint, Metro, and Cricket can be included with a toggle. MVNO rows carry an asterisked QCI badge (e.g. *QCI 9): QCI is the priority your data gets during network congestion — lower is better, and QCI 9 traffic is served last on a busy tower (deprioritization, not throttling). The badge and the per-row math explain this.
• Per-line customization — toggle "Customize each line" to give every line its own device and trade-in instead of one model for all.
• Device options — pick which acquisition paths to compare: finance through the carrier, finance through the manufacturer, buy outright, lease/upgrade program, or bring your own (plan-only baseline). Lease rows appear only for devices with a lease offer in the data (currently Apple's iPhone Upgrade Program); the app says so when a selected device has none rather than estimating one.
• Device availability — each device lists which carriers sell it (soldBy). If a selected device isn't sold by a carrier, the app says so and prices that carrier's row as a manufacturer purchase instead.

Running it

It's a static page — open index.html in a browser, or serve the folder with any static server (python3 -m http.server). Pushes to main deploy to GitHub Pages via .github/workflows/pages.yml.

Data

All pricing lives in data/offers.js and network priority (QCI) values in data/qci.js. Every entry carries the source URL it was taken from, and each file records its retrieval date. Multi-line prices the sources didn't publish are marked estimated: true and shown with an asterisk in the UI.

Refresh policy: data is refreshed monthly — a scheduled workflow opens a reminder issue on the 1st. QCI values rarely change but are checked on the same cadence. When a new carrier is added to data/offers.js, its QCI entry must be added to data/qci.js in the same change. The app shows a staleness warning when the data is more than 35 days old.

Carrier pricing changes constantly. The data here is a point-in-time sample of major US offers, not an exhaustive or live feed. Verify any result on the carrier's site before making a purchase.

To update offers, edit the data/ files only — the engine in app.js hard-codes no prices or QCI values.

The data pipeline

GitHub Pages is static, so freshness comes from a pipeline around the data files rather than on-demand fetching:

1. Manifest — every price, feature, promo, and trade-in value cites a source URL; scripts/data-pipeline/collect-sources.js assembles them all (plus the aggregate research surfaces Navi and WhistleOut), and the BDD suite requires every data item to contribute one.
2. Detection — a weekly workflow probes every source and opens an issue listing unreachable sources and content drift against the last snapshot (npm run check-sources, --write to refresh the snapshot).
3. Validation — updates land as ordinary PRs; the BDD data-integrity scenarios (sources present, ids resolve, line counts priced, QCI entries exist) gate the merge.
4. Deploy — merge to main ships to Pages immediately.

Carriers publish no pricing API, so the research step stays with a human or an agent session; the pipeline's job is to say what needs re-verification and to make updates safe and small.

Disclaimer

This tool is for comparison purposes only and is not affiliated with any carrier or manufacturer. Taxes, regulatory fees, and activation fees vary by locality and are excluded unless you enter your own estimate.