A Phone Company You’ve Never Heard of is Doing Something Kind of Insane
Alex Mitchell4 min read·Just now--
Your carrier has been ripping you off so long you forgot there was another option.
THE RACKET YOU’RE ALREADY IN
Let me set the scene. You’re paying $60, $80, maybe $100+ a month to one of three companies that have essentially divided the country into fiefdoms and agreed, silently, never to compete on price in any meaningful way.
You get “unlimited” data that gets throttled the second you actually try to use it, a customer service experience designed to outlast your will to live, and a two-year contract written in the kind of legal language that makes mortgage paperwork look breezy.
This is normal. This is just what phones cost. Right?
WAIT, ISN’T THAT THE CRYPTO THING?
Enter Helium Mobile — and before you tune out because I said the word “Helium,” let me acknowledge that yes, this is the same Helium behind the People’s Network, the crypto-adjacent decentralized wireless project that your one friend who won’t shut up about DePIN has mentioned approximately forty-seven times.
The network started back in 2013, originally built to provide wireless infrastructure for IoT devices — sensors, trackers, that kind of thing. It eventually evolved into something weirder and more interesting: a community-owned network where regular people deploy hotspots and get paid in crypto for providing coverage.
That’s the backstory. Here’s the present: they made a phone carrier.
HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS
Helium Mobile runs on a hybrid model — T-Mobile’s nationwide 5G network as the backbone, with their own community-built Wi-Fi hotspots filling in gaps and handling offload. So you’re not betting your cell service on some guy’s router in a strip mall. You’ve got actual infrastructure behind it. The Helium hotspots are just a bonus layer on top of something that already works.
THE PART THAT WILL MAKE YOU DO A DOUBLE-TAKE
They have a plan that costs effectively nothing. We’re talking 100 minutes, 300 texts, and 3GB of data per month. Taxes and fees apply — we’re talking a few bucks, not a gotcha — but there’s no credit check, no contract, and no catch buried in paragraph fourteen. You just… have phone service. For nearly free.
Is 3GB a lot? No. Between data-hungry apps, background processes, and high-resolution media, you’ll need to be intentional. Wi-Fi offloading is your friend here. But as a secondary line? A travel SIM? A way to stop paying $80/month for a line your kid uses exclusively to text and watch YouTube? It’s kind of perfect.
ABOUT THAT PRIVACY THING
There was a privacy concern worth mentioning. The original free plan required you to share your location data continuously, which, fair enough, made some people uneasy. As of October 2025, that requirement is gone.
Helium dropped the location sharing mandate and shifted to simply requiring any data use at all per month — and they proactively disabled location tracking in the app for existing users without being asked.
That second part is worth pausing on. A company voluntarily improving user privacy without being legally compelled to do so is genuinely rare enough to be notable.
THE BIGGER PICTURE (STAY WITH ME)
The broader Helium ecosystem is legitimately fascinating, even if you couldn’t care less about crypto. Co-founded by Shawn Fanning — yes, the Napster guy — and Amir Haleem, Nova Labs raised $200 million in 2022 from a16z, Tiger Global, Google Ventures, and Deutsche Telekom. Not the investor profile of a fly-by-night operation.
The underlying concept — replacing cell towers with small community-owned hotspots that earn crypto for providing coverage — is a legitimate attempt to rebuild connectivity infrastructure as something owned by people rather than by three companies in a cartel. Whether that utopian premise fully plays out is a separate conversation. But the phone plan works right now, regardless of your feelings about decentralized wireless philosophy.
THE REWARDS THING (BONUS)
There’s also a rewards system — Cloud Points — earned through usage, referrals, and other participation, redeemable for gift cards to Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, and a bunch of other places. It’s not going to pay your rent, but it’s a nice touch from a carrier that seems to understand it’s asking you to trust something new.
SO… SHOULD YOU TRY IT?
I’m not here to tell you to throw your current plan in the garbage. If you need reliable unlimited data and 50 calls a day, the paid tiers at $15 and $30 a month are worth a look, and the free plan has real limits.
But if you’ve got a use case that fits — light usage, second line, backup, cost-cutting experiment — it’s worth ten minutes and zero dollars to find out.
MY REFERRAL CODE: 932OQL4
You get Cloud Points for signing up, I get Cloud Points for referring you. Everybody wins a little.
The carrier wins slightly less than they would have liked. That’s fine.
Drop a comment if you’ve tried it — genuinely curious how it’s performing across different markets.
(This post contains a referral link. I use and pay for this service myself.)
