Boost Infinite Releases 3rd Line Free For A Year Deal, But Is It Actually Good For Their Business?

Boost Infinite has a new offer out. It gives subscribers who buy two lines their third line for free. It is available on the $25/month plan so you can get three lines on that plan for just $50/month with taxes and fees costing extra. The offer is for new customers. The third line free is made available by a $25/month account credit over 12 months. Credits begin in the second month of service. Subscribers must maintain at least 3 lines of service to keep the account credit. If you remove a line to drop to two lines, you'll forfeit any remaining monthly credits that you may have.

If you are interested in this offer, you can get it by heading over to the Boost Infinite website. The deal will automatically be added to your shopping cart when you add three lines or more to it. The promo is available to customers that bring their own phones to the network and customers that purchase a phone from Boost Infinite.

Boost Infinite offers wireless service on the AT&T, T-Mobile, and Boost 5G networks. However, this plan will only work on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks, and Boost Infinite will automatically subscribe you to a particular network at signup. Customers cannot choose their own network.

Boost Infinite's $25/month plan includes unlimited talk, text, and data but only the first 30GB of data each billing cycle is available at up to 5G data speeds. After that, data speeds are reduced to 512Kbps until the next billing cycle begins. The plan does not allow for hotspot usage, but it is available as an add-on. It costs an additional $10/month to enable hotspot on each line. With hotspot enabled, you can use all of your plan's monthly high-speed data allotment on it if you choose to do so. Customers that run out of high-speed data during a billing cycle or want to use more than 30GB per month can add 10GB for $10/month.

Is A 3rd Line Free Offer A Good Business Idea For Boost?

T-Mobile has long offered a 3rd line-free option with its phone plans as a way to attract customers. But T-Mobile's phone plans with the offer are significantly more expensive than Boost Infinite's and start at $60/month. T-Mobile also has the advantage of using its own network to provide service. Boost is paying other networks for their subscribers to use which cuts into potential margins with a 3rd line free offer.

While this is a great offer for consumers, I am a bit concerned about it from a business perspective. DISH, now a part of Echostar, may be better served to primarily focus on retaining customers rather than adding new customers through promos that may not even be profitable.

Quarter after quarter the company has bled subscribers. In Echostar's most recent earnings report, filed on 2/29/24, the company stated it lost an additional 123k subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2023 leaving them with 7.38 million subscribers and revenue of $898.2 million. This was down from $928.1 million in 4q22. Total revenue from its wireless business segment for the year was $3.69 billion, down from $4.14 billion in 2022. Questions have since arisen around the company's ability to remain liquid. As noted from a report by Light Reading, the company stated that it expects to burn through cash in 2024 and that it "raises substantial doubt about [the company's] ability to continue as a going concern."

So can DISH/Echostar/Boost really afford to give away a 3rd line-free offer? I'm not so confident in that.