I hadn’t heard of Grl Mobile till earlier this year when passing an Aust Post store and seeing their packaging in the window. I thought to myself that I must remember this brand name and look it up. Unfortunately I didn’t remember it as quickly as I should have. Never the less, we have had Grl Mobile and their prepaid mobile and prepaid broadband plans listed on our website for several months now and from what I can see lots of people are looking at their offer.
So who and what is Grl Mobile. They are essentially a niche offer from Vodafone, focusing at the female youth market and are available from a range of retail outlets and online of course. You can also follow them on Twitter www.twitter.com/grlmobile
I am actually quite glad I waited to review them till today because over the past few weeks, the Grl Mobile product offer has had some major medications done to it to make it ultra competitive. The biggest of these changes is that Grl Mobile now offers all prepaid mobile users free calls and txt between Grl mobile phones. This is something that I harp on about on this site. Choosing the right prepaid mobile plan isn’t just about getting the right price or expiry on your credits, it’s also about evaluating what provider the people you mostly call are on. If you and your children or friends all began using a service like Grl Mobile, then you could in effect get a lot more value out of your credits, because you could call each other for free. Now I am not sure about a fair use policy (I am sure somewhere deep it exists and will find out).
The other change Grl Mobile has done this week in fact is introduce a $79 Cap. These changes are much in line with what is also on offer at Crazy Johns (also owned and operated by Vodafone). In fact the plans are all the same.
Now let’s take a look at the call rates and credit etc. They are unfortunately a little on the high side; 39c per 30 sec with a 35c flag fall is a little steep. You do however get free talk and text time with each of their caps. This starts at $60 for the $19 Cap and increases to $700 for the $79 Cap. Based on my calcs, with a $19 Cap you would get about 31, 2 min calls from that credit. So that is one call a day. At the other end, the $700 Cap would give you 366 calls. The expiry of credit begins with 30 days on the $19 Cap and gets to 60 days on the $79 Cap. An added bonus offered by Grl Mobile is that it allows you to rollover any unused credit up to $1000 as long as you recharge before the credit expires. So don’t worry if you can’t use it all in the credit period, you can save it up for the following month. Bare in mind that these rates/credits are exactly the same as those on Crazy Johns.
The other sets of offers available are the Grl Basic plans. These start at $10 and increase to $100. The call rates are the same as the Caps but the credits and expiry differ. The cheapest plan is Grl Basic $10 and offers $10 talk/txt to anyone plus either $30 Grl Talk or 30 Grl Txt. So again if you have friends on Grl Mobile, you can use the credit. These plans increase with Basic $30, $50 & $100. The $100 offering $100 credit to anyone plus either $100 Grl talk or 200 Grl txt.
All in all, even though the call rates are on the steep side, the credits are large and I think these plans offer great value if you can get a few friends on as well. Then you will save some money or at least make lots of calls for the little you spend.
Grl Mobile is also very active on the social media from with Twitter and Facebook presence. They also sell phones and other things all targeting “Chicks” as they say.
