Mint Mobile is a cheap prepaid carrier that's making a lot of waves right now. High profile ad campaigns, competitive monthly rates, and word of mouth has meant this fairly new company looks poised to corner the cheap cell phone plans market.
At TechRadar, we've ranked it pretty highly in our best prepaid phone plans buyers guide but that doesn't quite cover one burning topic - that being how do Mint Mobile customers really feel about this service?
Mint Mobile is one of the most popular prepaid carriers in the US at the moment. It offers plans as low as $15 a month and operates on the T-Mobile network. You can visit its site here, or see our Mint Mobile plans guide for more info.
For example, how users really rate Mint Mobile customer service, and, to what extent do things like 'deprioritization' and network slowdowns put a damper on all that cheap data allowance?
Like most carriers, there's a large amount of feedback scattered all across the internet, both positive and negative, so we took a deep dive to see what we could find on Mint Mobile to see whether it can really live up to the hype.
Overall - people are pretty happy
Mint Mobile holds a Trustpilot rating of 4.7 stars out of five with 79% of all users rating the service as 'excellent' (top marks) overall. With over six thousand reviews (6,800 in fact), we'd say that's a pretty good gauge of how customers feel about the service as a whole right now. As expected, most customers are particularly happy with the amount of money they're saving versus going with one of the bigger carriers.
Other treasure troves of useful customer feedback can be found over at Amazon and Best Buy - which both sell Mint Mobile SIM card kits. Naturally, large numbers of customers have been leaving reviews of the service itself as opposed to just the SIM card kits - over two thousand in the case of Amazon.
Like over at Trustpilot, generally speaking, customers at these sites are pretty happy with Mint Mobile. Currently, Amazon review scores sit at 4.3 out of 5 and Best Buy scores at 4.5 out of 5, with most people again praising value as the standout feature.
Issues with coverage and speeds
That doesn't mean everything is hunky-dory with Mint Mobile, however. As with any other cellular company, there are still numerous 1-star reviews being left at a wide range of review sites.
From the very beginning I experienced performance problems with Mint's service.
One reviewer on Trustpilot
From reading through feedback, it seems that by far the most complaints surround what we'd categorize as 'coverage' - that being reception, call quality, calls dropping, and overall poor data speeds. One review at Trustpilot compared Mint to Verizon and found it lacking in those very areas, specifically calling out T-Mobile's 'deprioritization' as the culprit. Another user claimed that his 5G compatible phone was only capable of 3G speeds on Mint and suffered multiple outages.
People have also been leaving feedback on the Mint Mobile subreddit too - here's a very recent post complaining again about bad data speeds when compared to Verizon's 5G service.
Mint Mobile customer service
If there's one common feature with all cellular providers - it's that no one likes dealing with customer service. Unsurprisingly, Mint Mobile customer service has also had its fair share of negative (and positive) reviews across a number of sites.
Customer service is really prompt and they help a lot
One reviewer on Trustpilot
We found a couple of users on Trustpilot specifically that both complained about sluggish responses and unhelpful staff members - two things that can really put a downer on any customer experience. While in one case, the user was specifically having connectivity issues, the reviewer singled out the customer service specifically as the issue worth highlighting in the review.
Conversely, however, we did find a couple of users actually praising the Mint Mobile customer service. Both this review and this review are two very recent examples where the users stated the customer service was prompt and effective.
But, how does Mint compare to the competition?
Visible Wireless and Boost Mobile are just some of Mint's competitors. See our guide to the best cell phone plans for a full run-down of the market right now.
Having read the previous negative reviews above you could be fooled into thinking that customers aren't that happy with Mint Mobile in general. Of course, that is until you compare Mint's scores to other carriers - especially the bigger networks.
T-Mobile, the parent network of Mint for example comes in at a measly 1.6 stars out of 5 at Trustpilot. Verizon and AT&T don't fare any better either, with 1.9 stars and a horrible 1.2 stars being afforded respectively on the same site. People, it seems, absolutely hate the bigger carriers - especially when it comes to customer service and price.
And, unfortunately, some of the smaller competitors to Mint Mobile don't fare any better either. Visible Wireless for example only manages 1.7 stars on Trustpilot for example, and Boost Mobile only has 1.8 stars out of five. The only cellular company that we found that came even remotely close to Mint Mobile's score on TrustPilot was Red Pocket with 4.5 stars - but with only 600 reviews, it's a much smaller sample size overall.
Conclusion - doing well, so far
So, it looks like a story of so-far so-good in regards to customer satisfaction over at Mint Mobile - especially when compared to its competitors. A small percentage of complaints around customer and cellular service mar an otherwise fairly spotless score sheet for the prepaid carrier.
It does, however, remain to be seen whether it'll be able to sustain such a high percentage of positive reviews as it grows as a business. Hopefully that'll be the case and we'll see many more 5-star reviews in the future.
