Prepaid Phone Cards

Buying Tips

Expiration dates

Most prepaid phone cards expire 90 days after first use, although it may be as few as 60 or as many as 180.

If you are uncertain how quickly you will use your prepaid phone cards, then you should buy one that has a low denomination. Most cards come in $5 denominations. Because of monthly service fees, it's usually better to buy a low denomination card anyway.

Time Rounding

While most prepaid phone cards round to the next whole minute, some round to multiple minutes, and some round to seconds. Seconds-rounding is usually reserved for services that bill you monthly. (They need something to brag about.) and it doesn't help the customer much anyway.

Seconds rounding

With six-second rounding, if you make long calls (and use prepaid phone cards suited to long calls), then you would save an average of one-half minute at the end of each call. Since you make the fewest number of calls on a long call card this adds up to very little time for you.  For instance, six-second rounding for eight calls would provide a mere four minutes of extra talk time—the equivalent of less than 15¢.

Six-second rounding is non-existent on short-call cards. Why? Because you make many calls on a short call card. Were you to make forty calls on a short call card, six-second rounding would give you an additional twenty minutes of call time. Ain't gonna happen, folks.  

So keeping in mind that 6-secord billing only applies to long-call cards, and that it saves you little money. Six-second rounding is more of a marketing tool than a customer benefit.

Multi-minute rounding

Multi-minute rounding (e.g. 3-minute rounding) is a different story. Talking in 3- or 6-minute increments can be inconvenient, but getting the benefit of a low per-minute rate is worth the effort of managing your talk time.

Despite rounding, our rates are still excellent. For instance, consider a card for calling Mexico that charges 8¢ per minute, with 6-minute rounding. Sounds bad, but think of it instead as a 6-minute call for 48¢. That is only 10¢ more than a local payphone call within the USA!

Phone companies figure that you are not going to see two minutes disappear from each call. But they don't know GBS customers!

By the way, if you use all your minutes in a single call, you'll get the value of all your minutes, regardless of multi-minute rounding. 

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