Maxis doubles up its worry-free Pay-Per-Use threshold to RM100/month

Making the switch to a postpaid plan can be a difficult decision. Although you gain freedom in usage without having to worry about running out of credits, there is a chance that when your bill arrives at the end of the month, you will be paying more than you’d expect.

In the past, one of the biggest worries when switching to a postpaid plan was bill shock — the possibility of paying for something you thought you’d never use. Some horror stories have users rack up thousands of ringgit because of accidental data usage and roaming on the wrong network.

To combat that, Maxis implemented a Pay-Per-Use format where it charged users who were using data on their smartphone without a data plan. This format charged users RM10 for every block of 50MB data that they would use up to a cap of RM50/month which works out to 250MB/month.

After 250MB, users could continue surfing without any extra charge but at a throttled speed. However, on 14 January 2016, they quietly revised their Pay-Per-Use conditions to increase it to 10 blocks, meaning charges now cap at RM100/month — double the previous threshold.

Maxis says that this is to improve user browsing experience, and that’s true to a certain extent since users get to use up to 500MB of unrestricted speeds, but that also means users would have to pay more per month if their usage exceeds 250MB. If you’d like to find out more about this, you can head on over to their FAQ page, or view your Pay-Per-Use stats via the MyMaxis App (Android/iOS).

That said, it is a little silly to use your smartphone data these days without subscribing to an actual data plan. That means this Pay-Per-Use plan acts more like a safety net for those without a plan who accidentally turn on their data than someone who actually wants to surf. Since this is the case, I’d think that a lower cap would benefit users more since they would ultimately be paying less.

What do you guys think?

Thanks WeiKeong for the tip!