It’s been less than a year since Verizon introduced a fee for customers who upgrade their smartphones, but that hasn’t deterred them from increasing that $20 fee by ten bucks.
Last week during CES, Verizon quietly increased its upgrade fee from $20 up to $30. This charge is applied whenever a customer either buys a phone outright or splits payments up monthly with Verizon’s device payment plans.
Previously, the carrier would charge customers a $40 fee when activating a new contract and buying a new device. The fee for device payment plans and direct device purchases from the carrier has been $20.
Since Verizon recently did away with its two-year contracts, every customer will now pay the $30 upgrade fee when getting a new smartphone on the service. That $30 fee is separate from the activation fee that Verizon charges whenever a customer sets up a new line of service.
The carrier defends the increased fee, saying the upgrade charge helps to cover “increasing support costs” from customers who switch their devices.
In somewhat related news, Verizon recently confirmed its data usage policy for grandfathered-in unlimited data customers, telling employees that when a customer exceeds an average of 200GB of monthly data usage they will be required to switch to one of the carrier’s tiered data plans. If the customer refuses to do so, their service will be disconnected entirely.
