About Stingy
Stingy is about one money move, covered properly: buying a trade-in-eligible phone cheaply from a private seller, and handing that phone to a carrier instead of one worth several times as much.
No affiliate links, no referral codes, no sponsored placements, no carrier rankings. Nothing on this site earns a commission if you act on it.
Why this is a whole site
Because the idea takes one sentence and the execution takes a dozen details, and the details are where people lose money.
The forum version of this advice stops at “buy a cheap eligible phone and trade it in.” It skips the IMEI check, so someone buys a handset that was reported stolen and gets it rejected — or worse, keeps it. It skips activation lock, so someone buys an iPhone the previous owner never signed out of, which is now a paperweight. It skips the twenty-four months of bill credits, so someone leaves the carrier at month eight and discovers the remaining credits evaporate. It skips the plan requirement that added more to the monthly bill than the credit was ever worth.
Each of those turns a good deal into a bad one, and each is avoidable with about ten minutes of checking.
What we think
The promos are public offers, not loopholes. Carriers advertise these deals loudly and want the devices — a trade-in is what justifies putting you on a new plan. Handing over a phone you bought specifically for the purpose is not clever, not sneaky, and not against the terms. What is against the terms is misrepresenting a device, and this site will never tell you to do that.
Bill credits are not money. They are a discount applied monthly, contingent on you staying. Any comparison that treats a credit as cash in hand is measuring the wrong thing, and most of them do.
Verification is the whole job. The sourcing is easy — there are thousands of listings. Knowing which of them is a real, clean, unlocked, fully-owned device is the skill, and it’s a checklist rather than a talent.
Sometimes the answer is don’t. If the plan you’d have to move to costs more over two years than the credit is worth, the deal is negative and no amount of clever sourcing fixes it. Several posts here end with “skip this one.”
On numbers
We don’t publish current promo values as fact. Trade-in offers change monthly, vary by carrier, plan tier, region and device, and any figure written into a blog post is wrong soon after — and unverifiable when it was written.
You get the structure instead: which quantities matter, how they combine, and where the deal turns negative. Worked examples use clearly labelled hypothetical numbers so the arithmetic is followable. Substitute your own and the shape of the answer doesn’t change.
Same discipline everywhere else. No invented resale averages, no made-up rejection rates, no “most people save X.” Where something is widely reported by buyers rather than documented in carrier terms, it’s labelled as such.
Not advice about your contract
Trade-in promotions are contracts. Clawback conditions, early-termination effects, and what happens if a device fails inspection all vary by carrier and change over time. Everything here is general information — read your own carrier’s terms before committing, especially the part about what happens to remaining credits if you leave.