@crtowns well, either the 30 or 90 day plans are "non-standard". AFAIK, every other provider in Canada uses a monthly model, meaning your cycle is either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days long, depending on the month and year, and your billing date stays the same from month to month. By contrast, Public Mobile uses a 30 or 90 day cycle, meaning every time it's exactly 30 or 90 days, and your billing/renewal date changes from month to month (except following a month with exactly 30 days but that's by coincidence rather than by design).
Back to your original question of 90 vs 30 days. Yes, the 90 day plans are only a little cheaper than 3 x the cost of the equivalent 30 day plans. For example, moving from the 90 day, province-wide talk, global text, 1.5GB plan to the 30 day, province-wide, global text, 500MB plan (the equivalent) would cost you an extra $2 per 30 days, which works out to 6.7c per day, or $24.33 per year extra. This isn't a ton of extra money, so if the 30 day plans give you more comfort or flexibility, then by all means you can choose those instead. For anyone that's confident in their plan choice and doesn't mind getting an extra 6 or so lattes from Starbucks every year rather than giving that money to Telus can go with the 90 day plans.
The other factor in play is that the 90 days plans give you more *flexibility* with how you use the data amount. So if you're comparing a 30 day 500MB plan vs a 90 day 1.5GB plan, the total amount of data over the course of 90 days is the same, 1.5GB, and their is no rollover of plan data on any plan length. However, you can effectivley *simulate* rollover for the approx 3 months of the 90 day plan because you could use a nice even 500MB each of the 30 days, you could use a gig the first week and dole out the remaining 500MB over the course of the remaining 83 days, you could be miserly up front and use it sparingly and have a bunch to use up in your last couple of weeks (use it or lose it!), and so on.
You can probably see that this is a double-edged sword. If you are the type to keep aware, regularly check your usage and what remains in your cycle, and appreciates that flexibility, the 90 day plans will likely appeal to you. However, the other edge is that if you're not somewhat careful/aware, you could easily burn through a bunch (or even all) of your 90 day's worth of data within the first 30 days (or 46 days, or 12 days, or 71 days, etc etc), leaving you short for the rest of the 90 days. If you fall into that latter category, you would be better off using a 30 day plan to keep that window as small as possible.
One last possible benefit to the longer cycles if if you don't use AutoPay and need to either remember to make a manual payment or even more so if you need to go to a store to buy a voucher for the payment. With a 90 day plan, you're only going need to make about 4 payments per calendar year instead of 12. Those payments will be larger payments, but less frequent, so you don't have to worry about them as often. Again on the flip side of that is that if you have a harder time bugetting for the renewal that's further away and a larger lump sum, then stick with the 30 day plans for a more regular schedule.
Hopefully that all made sense? I may not have explained it well.
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