They're both ripping you off.

If you like T-Mobile's service, use one of their MVNOs, Mint or Metro. Metro is owned by T-Mobile IIRC, not sure about Mint but they use T-Mo towers.

If you like Verizon, Verizon operates Visible. Visible is $30 a month. Metro and Mint are priced similarly.

"But I got a free phone with T-Mo/VZW!" Okay, look that phone up on Amazon or whatever. (Better yet, the official site. Samsung or Apple or Google.) Take the price, divide it by 24. Add that to the $30 I pay Visible. Is it more, or less than what you pay your carrier a month? If it's more, you're getting ripped off. If it's less, you're one of the few who's beating the system — and everyone else is subsidising you. Congrats.

"But deprioritisation!" Most MVNOs give you a generous helping of priority data. Past that, it's low priority, but that really only matters in major metropolitan areas. With Visible you get like 50GB of priority. Manage your data (I use 5GB/mo tops) and you'll never hit the threshold. If you think it's a problem, ask if it's really worth it to pay for a major carrier.

I completely agree with this. I've been using either Imvinos or Iminos prepaid brands for over a decade now. I do not finance my phones with carriers ever. I buy them myself unlocked so that I can take them to whatever network I please.

Unless you're an iPhone user, you should also buy phones from the manufacturer so the carrier doesn't add an ad for their service to the boot sequence. Yes, they do this and specifically T-Mobile does it. My wife and I both brought Galaxy phones (and an iPhone, they had a 3 lines for the price of 2 deal) to T-Mobile and now, even though we're no longer subscribers, our phones play a T-Mobile ad every time they boot. Not the iPhone though, Apple doesn't play that shit. Her phone also got loaded with about a dozen shovelware games she can't uninstall.

That is a very good point.