ItsOn’s Zact: A Contract-Free Wireless Carrier With Custom Plans

by Michelle Maisto

The minimum Zact plan costs $4.99 a month. From there, a user can add apps, minutes, texts and data, which can be dialed up or back throughout a month. Based on what Nielsen says an average wireless subscriber uses, the average Zact bill should be $37 a month—versus the average $93 Nielsen says Americans currently spend.

If you realize you need more than you originally selected, you can adjust your plan. If you selected more than you wound up needing, Zact automatically credits your account for the amount you would have saved, had you chosen a more appropriately sized plan.

Any number of users can be added to a single account. The person who signs up for the account is the “administrator” and can decide if others on the account are as well. Only administrators can make changes to the settings on a phone—such as which apps it can access, how many texts it can send, and whether the phone can receive or send texts or calls during certain hours.

A crown beside the user’s name indicates he or she is an administrator.

Whether in the case of a business owner who orders devices for employees or a parent buying phones for her kids, one chooses the amount of data, minutes and texts on the account, and then doles those out to the other devices.

Here’s an example of the restriction controls. One can name a control—After School, say—and then determine what can happen during those hours. Maybe Tommy needs to do homework and can’t text or surf the Web between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m.

There are no overage fees with Zact. If you’re on a call and you’re nearing your minutes limit, an alert pops up, and a light notice—which you can hear but the person on the other end can’t—suggests you add more minutes, without disrupting the call.

To user Zact, one has to buy a phone from the company, which has its special software installed. Zact currently sells two Android phones from LG. By the end of the summer, it expects three more manufacturers to be on board, and to have a total of eight by year’s end, making an iPhone seem probable.

Anyone who has spent an hour on the phone with a customer service rep trying to add an international plan, or another temporary service, will appreciate that with Zact it can be done with a few taps in a few seconds.

Zact is based on ItsOn software, which ItsOn is also selling to other wireless carriers (no deals have been announced yet). Operators wouldn’t need to change their current pricing structures but could use ItsOn to extend convenient services to users. “People love it when you give them what they want,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh told eWEEK.