

Update: This offer is no longer available.

I just received an email from Ting this morning with a promotional offer of giving a free $5 Starbucks Gift card to current AT&T and Verizon customers just for using the Ting cost savings calculator. Since I’m still an AT&T customer (ugghhh) and have already been considering switching to either Ting, Republic Wireless, or Airvoice; I figured what the hell, it’s free five bucks worth of Starbucks.

Also, if you are a current Ting customer, you can still get in on the action by getting $10 worth of credit to your Ting account if you take a friend out for a coffee and tell them how good Ting is, you can then upload your receipt to get the $10 credit.

You can get the offer at the following URL which is only available through December 11, 2013:

https://ting.com/coffee

Of course in order to get the $5 gift card you’ll need to submit your user login data for either your AT&T account or your Verizon account. Once this is submitted Ting will calculate your cost savings over two years. Here is what my cost savings chart looked like:

Essentially what Ting is doing, is looking at your past phone, text, and data usage to see what the difference in cost is. Assuming the calculations are correct, then this cost savings of approximately $1,200 over two years is pretty significant. I’m not surprised either since I know I’ve been getting screwed by AT&T for quite a long time.

The nice thing about this Ting calculator is that it also lets you factor in the cost of buying a new device which is useful since you can’t use either Verizon or AT&T devices on the Ting network due to them being a Sprint MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator).

For those worried about Ting having access to your account username and passwords, their blog had this to say regarding how they use that information from their blog post on the subject:

We do not see or store your AT&T or Verizon login or password nor do we store your personal data. We’re only interested in the actual usage data from your last few bills and what you ultimately paid as it pertains to your savings calculation. Could AT&T and / or Verizon see what’s happening, get worried and make changes that would make it so their customers couldn’t see their savings with the Ting auto calculator? They could indeed. Do we have a contingency plan for if that happens? You know we do.

I’m still not sure which service I’m going to move to yet but it’ll likely either be Ting or Republic Wireless, but I think that this is a nice gesture on Ting’s part and will make me further consider them as a provider. Although the good news with both of these providers is that they don’t have contracts that lock you in, so if you don’t like them you just pick up and move to another service.

Regardless of what I end up doing, I hope this promotion works out for the Ting people since I think they are offering a great alternative to the big guys like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. And I did see a quote from their VP of Marketing which makes me hope this doesn’t flop because it sounds like they put a good portion of their marketing budget on the line:

“I may have just spent my marketing budget for the next three years on free coffee,” admitted Michael Goldstein, Ting VP of Marketing. “But people are shocked when they see how much they would save by switching to Ting. I think it’s worth the investment to get those numbers in front of them.”

Let’s see how it works out for them, but in the meantime if you’re an AT&T or Verizon customer it’s worth checking out Ting and at the least getting $5 in free coffee.