Google launched Project Fi in April 2015 with the goal of offering a cheap, uncomplicated alternative to incumbent MVNOs like Cricket and MetroPCS. It's simple: $20 per month for talk and text and $10 per month extra for each gigabyte of high-speed 4G LTE data you use, and a partial refund for any fraction of the gigabyte you don't use. In practice, Project Fi was a great plan for folks who use a small amount of data each month, but an expensive proposition for those who used 3GB of data, 4GB, or more in a billing cycle.
At the time that Project Fi was introduced, most wireless carriers were being quite stingy with their data plans — the choices were pretty bleak for data-heavy users. But that changed when T-Mobile and Sprint began offering unlimited data plans, which forced competitors such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T to start offering uncapped plans.
The new economics made Project Fi a lot less attractive — if you used more than a gigabyte or two of data per month, you ended up paying about the same (or more) it'd cost to switch to another carrier with an unlimited plan. Project Fi's advantages are free 4G LTE international roaming in a number of countries and the patchwork of multiple carriers — Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular — Fi uses to deliver great coverage to rural parts of the US, but the costs were tough to justify.
Source: Google
To bring Project Fi's pricing in line with the competition, Google this week introduced Bill Protection, a feature that protects heavy data users from steep data charges. If you use 6GB of data or less per month then you won't notice any difference, but if you ever go over Bill Protection's 6GB of data-a-month threshold, your monthly bill will remain capped at $80 no matter how much data you use.
Project Fi's Bill Protection isn't an "unlimited" plan in the traditional sense, though. You'll continue to get full 4G LTE data speeds up until the 15GB mark, but if you pass that in a single billing cycle, you'll see your connection throttled to 256Kbps. Still, no matter how much data you use during that monthly billing cycle, you'll never pay over $80, which makes Project Fi much more competitive than it used to be.
Source: Google
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