Zero percent interest device financing is the latest trend in the Canadian wireless world. Telus has Easy Payment (24 months), Rogers has Edge Financing (24 or 36 months) and now Bell SmartPay is here (24 months).
Bell SmartPay launched earlier this week on Thursday, offering 0% annual percentage rate (APR) device financing for 24 months on smartphones, such as Apple’s iPhone XS.
With Bell SmartPay, customers have four plans to choose from. The first two are no overage plans with non-shareable data. After data caps are exceeded data is throttled at 512 Kbps:
If you want shareable data, the following two plans are available with $10/100MB data overages for the first 500MB, then $0.12/MB after (or $12/100MB):
There is also a promo plan available at $70/5GB with non-shareable data and $10/100MB for the first 500MB and $0.12/MB afterwards.
With Bell SmartPay, like similar device financing options from Rogers and Telus, customers will pay taxes up front.
Bell provides the example of an iPhone XS 64GB (valued at $1419.99) on SmartPay. You’ll pay $0 down, 0% APR and $59.17 per month, plus your required monthly plan. So that could be $59.17 + $85 = $144.17 per month.
It’s worth noting Bell has increased prices of data overages on its shareable data plans after 500MB of overages, now billed at $12/100MB. Bell is also charging $10 more for the 10GB no overage plan at $85 with SmartPay, whereas Telus and Rogers are not at $75/10GB.
