Looking to save a few bucks on your broadband bill? If you live in some Texas cities, Time Warner Cable has a plan for you. In a blog post earlier this week, the cable ISP announced plans to bring back usage-based pricing—but only if you want to cap yourself. TWC's new "Essentials" plan will knock $5 off your monthly bill as long as you keep your usage below 5GB.

TWC will provide you with a meter so you can track your usage up to the minute. They'll charge you $1 per GB when you go over the limit, and give you a 60-day grace period so you can tweak your usage patterns to your new capped reality. You can opt out at any time if you decide you like your broadband unlimited after all.

Time Warner famously experimented with bandwidth caps back in 2008. New subscribers in Beaumont, Texas were capped at a max of 40GB per month, and paid $55 for the privilege—along with a $1 per GB overage fee. Budget-minded subscribers were charged $29.95 for a 5GB cap.

The company was hit with a barrage of criticism over the usage-based billing trial, which was seen as a cheap attempt to reduce consumer demand and avoid making needed investments in cable infrastructure—like upgrading its network to DOCSIS 3.0. Critics also pointed out that the caps would discourage subscribers from using services like Netflix which, to an extent, competes with the company's television offerings. Less than a year later, the trials were over, and the good citizens of Beaumont could resume gorging themselves at the broadband buffet.

TWC learned from the 2008 debacle, as the company readily admits. "Yes, we did try this before, a few years ago," wrote TWC director of communications Jeff Simmermon. "And yes, pretty much everyone agrees that it didn’t go so well. So we listened to customer complaints. A lot."

The biggest change is that customers don't have to opt-in to usage-based billing if they don't want to. It's targeted purely at budget-conscious light users who are looking to save a few bucks. A "Lite" (up to 768Kbps down) subscriber in San Antonio can shave her bill from $19.99 to $14.99 per month. Standard (10Mbps) tier pricing would go from $29.99 to $24.99. Overall, TWC's pricing is much more reasonable this time around.

Still, 5GB is not very much Internet. And TWC's setup prices "normal" Internet use at 10GB per month, which seems absurdly low to us. Unless you don't do much other than e-mail and light browsing, you'll likely find yourself hitting the cap quickly and paying full price anyway. Simmernon acknowledges this, saying that the plan is targeted towards "those who want to save few dollars on Web capacity" they are "never going to need."

For now, TWC appears to be alone among major US wireline ISPs in embracing usage-based billing. The largest ISP in the US, Comcast, is happy to keep subscribers capped at 250GB per month and avoid tiered pricing. "We have a very high customer satisfaction rating and we don't really want to rock the boat on that product," Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis said earlier this week at a conference in San Francisco, according to Multichannel News. "I give [TWC] credit for trying different things. We have real momentum in that business and the goal is to keep it."