SOUTH U.S. -- AT&T Phone Plans... SO CONFUSING

No, texting is a total rip-off. Your choices with that 450 minute plan are pay-per-use ($.20 for each incoming/outgoing), $20/month for unlimited messaging or opt-out (free, no messaging). If you have a decent AT&T signal in your area and are not interested in roaming, then one of the prepaid plans may prove to be a much better value. In particular, a $25/month plan will give you 250 minutes and unlimited texting. Additional minutes are $.10/min, so your extra 50 minutes will cost you $5 on top of those $25. Or you can go with unlimited talk, text and non-smartphone data for $50.

 

No, there's no contract with prepaid so you won't get an iPhone from AT&T. Also, AT&T may require you to pay extra for data with a smartphone even on prepaid. So the cheapest monthly rate for iPhone on a contract would be $40/mo for 450 Individual plan + $20/mo for 300MB of data. If you want messaging, that's another $20. You want 3GB of data, that's another $10.

On prepaid you're not required to get a data package if you don't want to use data, or so it seems from what little information AT&T has on their site. So if all you want is text & voice, you're comparing $80/month on contract vs. ~$30/month on prepaid. I've no idea what data packages on prepaid cost for the smartphones.

On a contract you may be able to get something like 3GS for free, while it'll cost you ~$250 to buy on eBay. That's about 5 months it'll take you to break even. For 4/4S you're probably looking at $400 differential, so it'll take about 8 months. If you do want data, then the math is a little different, more in favor of the contract.