T-Mobile's quiet '20% off for life' promo set to end next week

T-Mobile is quietly offering 20% off its unlimited plans for the life of accounts of users who port their numbers from other carriers. But the deal is slated to end next week.

The campaign, dubbed “20% off for life,” requires new customers to obtain a code from a T-Mobile employee and enter it on a page on the carrier’s website. The deal can be applied to as many as 12 lines, but the offer is scheduled to end March 31.

The promotion was initially reported by Jeffrey Moore of Wave7 Research, who said sales representatives offered the codes to him at stores in multiple states. Employees told Moore they had a limited number of codes they could share with prospective customers.

The discounts apply to the T-Mobile One plan, which was introduced in August just as Sprint announced its own unlimited plan. Earlier this year T-Mobile sweetened its plan, killing taxes and fees and giving $10 credits to subscribers who use 2 GB of data or less per month per line. The operator also scrapped its longtime Simple Choice plans, going all-in on the unlimited offering.

Last month T-Mobile stepped up its efforts in the battle over unlimited data, introducing an offer of two lines of T-Mobile One for $100 a month, which marked a $20 drop from the previous price.

The 20% off promotion is T-Mobile’s latest effort to continue to grow its market share in an extremely competitive U.S. wireless market. The carrier will post 750,000 net postpaid handset additions in the first quarter, UBS estimated earlier this week, while both Verizon and AT&T are expected to report net postpaid phone losses.

“We expect T-Mobile to have another solid quarter adding the majority of the industry’s net subs while growing revenues and EBITDA double-digits,” UBS Analyst John Hodulik wrote in a research note to subscribers. “We largely maintained our long-term estimates, including $4.5 billion of free cash flow in 2019.”