You’ve been with your cell phone company for eight years.
You pay on time. You don’t call support for fun. You’ve been a model citizen.
Then your neighbour signs up.
Same company. Same towers. Similar plan.
Twenty bucks cheaper.
Apparently loyalty has benefits. They’re just reserved for people who haven’t earned them yet.
Welcome to the Canadian wireless tradition known as the Loyal Customer Tax™.
1. New customers are expensive (and companies are thirsty)
Phone companies really want new people.
They wave discounts, bonus data, credits, and enough free stuff that you start considering a fake identity just to qualify.
New customer? Confetti and deals.
Existing customer? “Oh hey… still here? Cool.”
2. They already have you
Getting a customer is hard.
Keeping one who isn’t shopping around is easy.
Your SIM is in. Your card is on file. Switching feels like homework.
So every month the bill just… gets paid.
You’re the perfect customer: quiet, reliable, and slightly too tired to leave.
3. The best deal often appears only when you threaten to leave
You call. “Nothing we can do.”
You mention you might switch.
Suddenly a portal opens.
Plans appear. Credits materialize. A price that didn’t exist six minutes ago is now on the screen.
You’ve performed the ancient Canadian ritual:
gently threatening to cancel.
4. Sometimes switching is just the grown-up move
There is no prize for staying forever.
No gold watch. No cake. No “thanks for the eight years of quiet overpaying.”
If another provider gives you better value for the same service, switching can be the rational choice. Just compare the whole deal, not just the shiny first-month price.
5. Why not just give existing customers the better price?
If the same service is available for less… why should loyalty block you from getting it?
Why do you have to discover it, negotiate for it, or threaten to leave for it?
It feels backwards.
We’re trying something different
Treat the people who stay as well as the people who arrive.
Human Mobile is being built on a simple idea:
Treat the people who stay as well as the people who arrive.
If we can offer existing customers a meaningfully better price for the same service, we want to give it to them - without the theatre.
Maybe that’s naïve.
Maybe there’s a complicated reason nobody does this.
We’re still early. We don’t have everything figured out.
But treating your best customers like people you actually want to keep doesn’t feel revolutionary.
It just feels… right.
If that sounds like the kind of phone company you’d like to see in Canada, join the founding waitlist at HumanMobile.ca.
No gold watch.
We’re still working on the cake.