FreedomPop Eliminates “Active Status Fee”

One of the strange “gotchas” of the FreedomPop “free” mobile WiMax was the “active status fee” of 99 cents. Basically, if you don’t use your account, they charge you 99 cents to keep your account open. It’s counter-intuitive that they charge you for not using something but banks regularly pull shenanigan like this all the time.

However, according to their blog, they have eliminated this fee.

“Active Status Fee”-We used to pass on a .99 cent network fee to keep an inactive account active on our partner network each month. The reason we did that is because we actually get charged by our partners, so we were hoping our users could just turn on their device once per month so we’d all avoid that nominal cost.  However, it has caused more confusion than it’s worth so we have suspended this charge going forward.

Upon contacting support via twitter, they told me that they are “working on it” for existing and new accounts. I’m not sure what that means exactly but it’s good news anyway.

Now FreedomPop’s mobile WiMax truely is FREE!