I haven't taken a look at plans in the past year, but a year ago I looked at all of the plans available to find the cheapest possible service for someone that doesn't have many needs. I ended up with TMobile pay as you go plan. They had a unique feature that if you put $100 on your account, the money would stay in your account for 1 year. $100 a year for a cell phone service is hard to beat. This obviously won't work for someone that uses their phone quite a bit, but it is perfect for someone that can mostly use land lines and wireless internet. It's also perfect for a child whom you want to give a phone, but make them responsible for their own account balance.

We run a small IT services firm. Small enough that "management" does a fair portion of the work. What we came up with is that every employee can choose whether or not they want to be on-call (with absolutely no pressure to be in our out of the schedule). We then scheduled the people to be on call without pay. If a call happened to come in during off hours, we would charge double our normal rates for the service, and the technician performing the labor would keep half. If you want to have the chance of making extra money, they you get participate. If your life is too busy to be on call: opt out. So far so good, but then we don't get a lot of calls during holidays.