As many people are fed up with their cell phone providers, a new trend has opened up for tracphones. A tracphone, or TracFone, is a prepaid phone that gives you the accessibility of a contract plan without the commitment. Tracphones have become much more popular in the past few months as more people are finally ending their two year contracts with their cell phone providers and switching to prepaid plans. To properly define how tracphones can help you, this article will analyze the various features that tracphones have to offer.

No Commitment
The main feature of a TracFone is that the service is entirely paid upfront and there are no contracts to deal with. Tracphones remove the unwanted commitment that many cell phone providers force on their customers and do not penalize you for not using your phone. Customers can choose to either purchase a phone with a TracFone plan pre-installed or purchase the phone and plan separately. Either way, the customer knows exactly how much he/she is spending before the purchase is made and the customer has the option to stop using the phone at any time.How Do Tracphones Work

Monitor Your Minutes
Like standard cell phone service providers, tracphones allow the customer to keep track of how many minutes have been used, how many are left, when the account needs to be topped up, how long each phone call was, and other important facts. Many of these things can be monitored directly from the phone while others, such as call records, can be managed from online.

DMFL
DMFL stands for Double Minutes For Life and is a new feature offered exclusively by TracFone. Customers have the option of purchasing a phone that is pre-installed with DMFL or purchasing a DMFL card that is applied to his/her account. When DMFL is applied to a TracFone account, the customer will always receive twice as many minutes as he/she purchases. Ironically, tracphones pre-installed with DMFL cost about the same price as the DMFL cards that are sold separately.

Rollover
On top of DMFL, TracFone customers also get to take advantage of rollover. Rollover allows customers to carry all their unused minutes with them into the next month. The rollover feature is one of the main attributes that distinguishes TracFone from other prepaid cell phone companies as it is usually only provided by standard contract cell phone service providers.

No Hidden Fees
In addition to no contracts, TracFone is reliable in the fact that it does not present any hidden fees like many cell phone service providers do. Companies like Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile pretend that they are different but they all charge fees for early disconnection, reconnection after they cut your service off, and sometimes even for not using *enough* minutes. The only thing that TracFone customers will ever have to pay for is the initial plan.

Downsides
While tracphones are considered much better than standard contract plans, they do have a few setbacks that allow contract services to hold a competitive edge. The following paragraphs will explore these inevitable drawbacks.

No Nights and Weekends
The first downside to tracphones is that they do not have nights and weekends like most contract plans do. Instead, the minutes that you use are deducted from your account just like any other time period. Most people do not seem to mind this but it may make a big difference if the customer uses his/her phone more during night and weekend hours.

Bad Customer Service
Another downside that is generally worse than no nights and weekends is TracFone's bad customer service. Many customers find TrackFone's customer service representatives to be incompetent, unhelpful, or just plain rude. While lack of features can be overlooked, most people find customer service to be a big deal when working with a cell phone provider. Fortunately, tracphones are very easy to use so interaction with customer service can be kept to a minimum.