Verizon Didn't Give You Choice. It Gave You a Bill for Things You Used to Get Free.

In the spring of 2022, a Verizon customer on a plan called Play More opened Disney+ on their phone and paid nothing extra for it. The Disney Bundle came baked into the plan. So did other streaming perks - no menu, no checkbox, no incremental line on the bill. A year later, that same Disney Bundle had a price: $10 a month.³ Nothing about the product changed. The streaming was the same streaming. What changed was the architecture of the bill - and Verizon called it choice.

The official story is that myPlan, launched in May 2023, empowered customers: build your own plan, pay only for what you use, stop subsidizing perks you never touch. The real story is quieter and sharper. Verizon took perks that were already included at no incremental cost, unbundled them, and re-priced them at $10 each.³ For anyone who had actually been using those perks, the new freedom of choice cost more money.

The menu that only ever raises the check

Here is the move, worked all the way down. Before myPlan, Verizon sold tiered bundles - 5G Start, Do More, Play More, Get More - where the higher tiers folded in streaming perks at no per-line surcharge.¹ The price of the plan was the price of everything in it. myPlan split that bundle into two pieces: a base plan and an à la carte perks menu. Unlimited Welcome launched at $65 a line; Unlimited Plus at $80; each perk priced at a flat $10, up to eight per line.² On paper, this is unbundling - the thing consumers are supposed to love, the thing that lets you stop paying for what you don't want.

But genuine unbundling lowers the floor for the person who opts out and holds the price steady for the person who opts in. myPlan did the opposite. The base plan didn't get meaningfully cheaper than the value of a comparable old plan stripped of its perks - and the perks that used to ride along free now carried a tariff. So the customer who valued the Disney Bundle and Apple Music, the customer the old Play More tier was built for, now pays the base price plus $20. The menu didn't give that customer a way to save. It gave them a way to itemize a price increase and feel like they chose it. That's the tell of a repricing dressed as empowerment: every realistic path through the menu ends at a higher bill than the bundle it replaced.³⁴

Why the growth came from the bill, not the customers

If myPlan were really about value and savings, you'd expect it to win customers. It didn't - not for a long time. Verizon Consumer lost 263,000 postpaid phone subscribers in Q1 2023, before myPlan even launched, and the bleeding continued well past it. A full year later, in Q1 2024, Consumer was still down 158,000 net phone subscribers, even as Verizon called it its best first-quarter performance since 2018 and credited myPlan with improving gross adds.⁵ Best-since-2018 and still net-negative is a revealing pair of facts to hold in one hand.

What myPlan did move was the other lever entirely. By Q4 2024, Verizon Consumer wireless service revenue rose 3.0% year-over-year to $16.5 billion - and the company was explicit about the cause: growth in average revenue per account 'from pricing actions.' Consumer ARPA hit $139.77, up 4.2% year-over-year.⁶ That is the whole maneuver in one line of an earnings release. With subscriber counts still soft, the way to grow service revenue is to make each remaining account pay more - and a $10 perks menu attached to a base plan is a machine engineered to do exactly that.

There's a second design detail that quietly does the heavy lifting. In Q2 2023, Verizon told analysts that nearly 70% of myPlan customers chose Unlimited Plus, the higher of the two launch tiers - a metric worth treating as management-stated rather than audited.⁷ A menu doesn't just let people add perks. It anchors them upward: a pricier base plan plus an open invitation to keep checking boxes. Verizon followed the same earnings cycle by adding a still-higher tier, Unlimited Ultimate, extending the staircase rather than the discount.⁷

But isn't paying only for what you use genuinely better?

The fair objection is that bundles are paternalistic, and unbundling is pro-consumer. Some customers never watched the Disney+ they were paying for inside Play More; for them, myPlan's bare base plan is a real saving, and that subset is the one Verizon's 'save money' messaging is honestly built for.³ That's true, and worth conceding. A menu that lets a light user shed perks they ignore is a defensible product.

But notice what the architecture optimizes for. If the goal were to help non-users save, you'd cut the base price and let perk-lovers re-bundle at cost. Instead the base price stayed firm and the perks got tariffed, so the heavy user - the most valuable customer, the one most locked into Disney and Apple Music - is the one who pays more. A genuinely customer-first redesign would have lowered the floor without raising the ceiling. myPlan raised the ceiling. And the most telling evidence is the timing of the reassurance: the permanent three-year price-lock guarantee, the move that actually signals 'we won't keep squeezing you,' didn't arrive with the 2023 launch. It came in April 2025, almost two years later, after the ARPA gains were already booked.⁸ The protection followed the price increase. It did not precede it.

Verizon framed myPlan as handing the pen to the customer. What it really handed over was the math homework - the task of assembling, line by line, a bill that lands higher than the one it replaced, and the feeling of authorship that makes a price increase go down easy. The genius wasn't a new perk or a cheaper plan. It was noticing that the same Disney Bundle generates more revenue when the customer has to add it back themselves. The product never changed. Only the architecture of the asking did - and on a soft subscriber base, that was enough to grow the only number that mattered.