UPDATED 19:21 EDT / MARCH 07 2016

NEWS

Google’s Project Fi phone service drops the invite requirement, offers Nexus 5X for $199

Google has announced that its Project Fi phone service will be ditching its invitation requirement less than two months before the program’s one-year anniversary.

Project Fi, which first launched in April 2015, is a phone and data plan that operates using Sprint and T-Mobile towers. The plan allows users to pay only for the data they use down to the megabyte.

Project Fi members pay for a set amount of data in advance for the coming month, but if they do not use the full amount during that month, then Google refunds the difference. If a member uses more than what they had already paid for, then Google simply adds the cost of the additional data to their next bill without any penalty fees.

The program is designed for people who frequently use public or private Wi-Fi, with many services, including phone calls, utilizing Wi-Fi when it is available rather than cell data.

According to Google, roughly half of Project Fi users connect to a public Wi-Fi hotspot on a weekly basis, and members use an average of 1.6 gigabytes of data per month. At Project Fi’s current rates, that 1.6 gigabytes would cost $16 for that month.

Initially the program was invite-only, so people who wanted to use Project Fi had to wait weeks or months after signing up to receive their invitation, but now Google has decided to lift that requirement and allow anyone to start using Project Fi.

“We launched Project Fi as an invitation-only Early Access program to make sure we could deliver the best quality of service to our first customers,” Simon Arscott, Product Manager at Project Fi, wrote in a blog post.

“Today, we’re excited to be exiting our invitation-only mode and opening up Project Fi so that people across the U.S. can now sign up for service without having to wait in-line for an invite.”

In honor of Project Fi dropping its invite requirement, Google will be offering the Nexus 5X for $199 to new Project Fi users.

Photo by Dain Binder 

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