Order is being restored to the smartphone-pricing universe. And while you might not be happy about that at first, you should be.

A few weeks ago, Sprint quietly revised its iPhone Forever lease program — and by “revised,” I mean “made immensely worse.”

Previously, that program could have saved you as much as $26 and change a month compared to the $27.09 cost of buying a new entry-level iPhone on the installment plan. But with this revision, you now save all of 70 cents a month. And, in return, the carrier gets to seriously constrain your choices as a customer.

History of the price wars

iPhone Forever (first called iPhone For Life, but that may have been too reminiscent of a dictatorial job title) is the Apple flavor of Sprint’s leasing option.

The carrier apparently hoped that leasing would replace the old system of subsidized phone purchases — in which we all bought our phones at artificially low prices in exchange for signing those two-year contracts — which all four carriers have now abandoned.

When iPhone for Life debuted in September 2014, $20 a month got you a new iPhone 6, with the promise that you could swap it for the latest iPhone two years later at no extra cost.

That program attracted enough customers that T-Mobile decided to add a lease option of its own the following June. Its Jump! On Demand program also cost $20 a month — $15 if you traded in a phone — but it let you upgrade for free up to three times a year.

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A month later, Sprint responded with iPhone Forever, a less attractive deal in which $22 a month ($15 if you traded in a phone) got you a new iPhone every year.

Then, with the September 2015 launch of the iPhone 6s, things got a little crazy. T-Mobile announced that — for a limited time — you could pay just $5 a month for an iPhone 6s (and any future replacements) if you traded in an iPhone 6. Sprint responded a day later, saying it would lease you a 6s for a mere $1 a month — again, if you handed over an iPhone 6 first.

“There’s no need to ‘own’ an iPhone,” Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure told USA Today at the time. But Claure might now want to eat his words.

Walking it back

Barely a month after the iPhone 6s inspired all that price-cutting, T-Mobile quietly rewrote the terms of Jump! On Demand: Now, if you didn’t trade in a phone, a new iPhone 6s would cost $27 a month — the same as if you actually bought it on the installment plan.

It then downgraded the trade-in discount to a one-time credit that’s not as good. For example, you could get $210 for your good-condition AT&T iPhone 6 — almost $12 a month in savings over the 18-month term of a Jump! On Demand contract–but your next upgrade would yield no such credit.

Then, on January 8 — the same day Sprint unceremoniously dumped two-year contracts altogether — the company hiked its monthly lease rate to $26.39.

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Sprint’s story, per spokeswoman Kristin Wallace: “Sprint is making this change to stay competitive and to continue to offer customers a great deal on the iPhone 6s.”

Don’t be sad

One analyst’s interpretation: Neither carrier can afford to keep lighting money on fire.

“I think the simple answer is that both companies had a lot of short-term promotions in place to leverage new iPhone sales to drive customer acquisitions,” Jackdaw Research’s Jan Dawson said. But “they can’t afford to massively subsidize them indefinitely.”