83% of Cellular Users Overbuy their Plan

In the very early days of working on Foneshow (the slide deck days) I was chatting with a VC with an enormous amount of telco industry experience. His comment about Foneshow was:

"The cellular carriers are going to HATE you. They make a fortune on breakage, subscribers who overbuy their cellular plans and have unused minutes."

That advice changed the way we thought about the business. It made us re-evaluate our list of potential strategic partners.

I just saw some numbers on Alec Saunders blog about how extensive the breakage issue is (I also stole his graphic).

83% of cellular users overbuy minutes.

50% of cellular users have more than 30 minutes a month left over.

Only 16% of users go over their allotment

This is great news for Foneshow. One of the common challenges that is made to us is the "minutes issue". It turns out that in reality, most users are already paying for plenty of extra minutes. Foneshow increases the value of the cellular plan you are already paying for.