Things were fine for over a decade, or so I thought. There is a renewal process that you have to do each year to remain eligible for the Life Line free phone service. I had been getting the renewal notices each year and things went fine for over a decade. Suddenly in the past year or so they were not sending me renewal notices and I would only get a warning that the phone service would be turned off on such and such a date. I would call customer service and they would say they'd fix the problem and then send me renewal notices by text and email. Still I never got any renewal notices. It also seemed that they were now expecting me to renew eligibility several times a year randomly. There was no way for me to predict when I was supposed to renew. This happened 3 times this past 6 months or so and the final time I got zero notices at all and they turned off my service and locked my phone. The only way to contact customer service is if you have an active phone number so the only way to fix the problem would be to "top up" and pay $10 to turn my phone on just so I could talk to customer service. That was the last straw. I switched to Tello at $7 a month and had to buy a new phone because the old one was locked and there was no way to contact customer service. Seems like a scam to me. I think Assurance Wireless makes money each time someone pays $10 to unlock their phone. Add to that, I have just discovered, after using my new phone and new carrier for just a few days, that many of my texts were not going through using Assurance Wireless. I also was not receiving all texts that were sent to me. There were several times that texts took days to arrive at my phone. One time a text was sent to me on a Sunday and didn't arrive until Thursday. I am left to only wonder how many people I texted and they never got my texts. And vice versa...how many texts did I never receive from other people. Since switching to my new phone and carrier I am getting texts from people who I've never gotten texts from before. One neighbor who I'd been texting for years and never got a response said these are the first texts she's ever gotten from me. Using her exact same phone number, just a different phone and using Tello instead of Assurance Wireless. Shaking my head.