As part of its continuing efforts to increase tariffs and improve ARPUs, Reliance Jio has quietly discontinued its cheapest prepaid plan, worth Rs. 98. Following the development, the cheapest combo plan being offered by the company is the Rs. 129 STV that offers 2GB of data along with unlimited Jio-Jio voice calls, 1000 minutes of non-Jio calling and 100 free SMSes daily for 28 days.
The change will hit marginal users who barely use any data and make only a few occasional calls. It comes just over a week after the company launched its most expensive prepaid plan in terms of cost per-month. Priced at Rs. 999, the so-called ‘Work From Home plan’ comes with 3GB of daily full-speed data, unlimited on-net voice calls and 3,000 minutes of off-net calls alongside 100 SMSes per day for a period of 84 days.
The latest change to Jio’s tariff structure is keeping in line with the series of recent tariff hikes implemented by the company starting late last year. It all started in October 2019 when the company launched 4 new All-in-One “IUC Plans” worth Rs. 222, Rs. 333, Rs. 444 and Rs. 555. That was quickly followed by a second round of tariff hikes in December after steep price hikes from both Airtel and Vodafone Idea.
In February, the company increased the price of its most popular long-term plan while reducing its validity. As part of the plan, the annual pre-paid voucher worth Rs. 2,020 was replaced with an 11-month plan priced at Rs. 2,121. The company also similarly reduced the validity period of another long-term plan that costs Rs. 1,299. As if that wasn’t enough, Jio also recently proposed to gradually increase data prices in the country to Rs. 20 per GB from Rs. 15 per GB currently.
