Sprint is running an offer to get a free year of Unlimited service by simply switching to Sprint from a different carrier. A long list of devices are eligible for this offer. It’s not clear until when the offer will be available for signup, but if you signup now, the offer will give you free Unlimited talk, text, and data through July 31, 2019.
The offer has been around for over a year now, and many people jumped on this last year, meaning that their year is finishing now. You can’t get another free year directly since the offer is only for new subscriber’s, but reader David sent in tips on how someone finishing their free year can get a second year free:
If you have another SSN to deal with (e.g. if you and your spouse share a plan), you can port out your Sprint number to another carrier, then immediately port it back in under the new SSN. Easiest way is to buy a T-Mobile starter kit and port the number out to T-Mobile.
- Order the Tmobile prepaid/pay-as-you-go SIM card. Here’s a $10 T-Mobile starter kit on Amazon (affiliate link). I believe this $8 kit does the same job, though the $10 kit has faster shipping and an option for one-day shipping.
- Once you receive the SIM, call T-mobile customer care and ask them to port your sprint number to T-mobile. No need to signup for any type of plan. Just give them your Sprint account number, PIN and phone number, as well as the T-mobile SIM card number. Be sure to have all that information ready.
- Your number will be ported to T mobile in less than 5 minutes.
- Your Tmobile Account number will be your phone number prefixed by 1 (ex: 1-234-567-6789) and the pin number will be the one that you setup initially during the porting or activation process.
- Note that each of your T-mobile prepaid lines will have a separate account number – it’s the phone number of each line prefixed by 1 for that line. Again PIN number is whatever you set during the number porting/activation of that line.
- Wait for about an hour and then initiate a chat with Sprint Customer care and verify that your Sprint account is cancelled or you can check online here and it’ll tell you if you device is eligible.
- Now call back the Sprint tele-sales number and port your T-mobile number to Sprint with the new SSN.
- All in, you should only be out of service for a couple of hours, and you’ll then have another year of free Sprint service.
If you don’t have a new SSN to use, you’ll have to wait 45 days from when you port out until you are eligible again. We don’t know the offer will still be around in 45 days; it has been going on for a while so it is possible it’ll still be here. If it is, you can port back into Sprint with the same SSN and get another free year.
Keep in mind there is a hard credit check when signing up for this Sprint deal. For further reading, you can check out this highly detailed Slickdeals wiki from which a lot of the above information comes.
[Readers mention two other alternatives to T-Mobile: 1) Buy a Mint starter kit which comes with two SIMs for $5. Mint is a T-Mobile MVNO, and their SIMs will activate directly in the T-Mobile interface. 2) Port your number out to Google Voice and accomplish the same thing without having to deal with buying a SIM card.]
