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How to Reduce Your Mobile Data Costs

Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, make use of the modern internet with content-rich services like high-resolution pictures and streaming video, video calling, and online gaming. As such, they can quickly go through large amounts of mobile data. Being able to effectively manage this mobile data use is essential to not end up with high bills at the end of the month.

Let’s take a look at some strategies to reduce your mobile data costs.

Mobile Plan Considerations

Most mobile phone plans are designed in a way that prioritises a specific use. This means if you’re someone that uses your mobile phone mostly for calls, you’ll want to choose a plan that is call time heavy. If you use mostly data, you’ll want to prioritise this. Make sure to check your provider’s mobile data specific plans.

Use Your Phone Settings

The first thing to consider in the way you run your phone is to use mobile sites instead of installing apps. Installed apps, like the Facebook or Instagram app, can use data in the background, quickly increasing the amount of data your mobile phone consumes. If you really want to use the app, you should explore your phone options to limit or restrict background app data use. This is one of the most effective ways to reduce mobile data, and if you do one thing, this should be it.

You can also, on both iOS and Android, turn app data use on and off per app, to ensure complete control over what apps are allowed to use mobile data. Mobile phones also often have the ability to set data limits for specific apps or an overall daily or monthly data limit, to stop you from exceeding what you can afford.

Be sure to fully explore your mobile phone’s data options to make the most of the features provided within your phone’s operating system.

Apps That Can Help You

Here are some quick examples of how using the apps’ features can help you save data!
If you use Chrome as your mobile browser, consider enabling data compression. The app has a built-in feature to compress data before it is sent to your phone and can be easily enabled. The mode is called Data Saver and can be enabled in the app options.

Make sure you do all your app updates and downloads of music, podcasts and similar on Wi-Fi and not while connected to mobile data. Many apps have options to not allow downloads on mobile data, so be sure to enable this. Music, in particular, should be saved on your device and almost all subscription music services allow this. Avoid streaming your music or videos where possible, so download your favourite playlists and albums to your phone and don’t stream them, consuming unnecessary data.

If you use Google Maps or similar mapping software and use GPS a lot, use the app’s map-cache feature to download maps of your most used areas, so your phone doesn’t need to use mobile data for navigation.

There are many examples of features in apps like this that can assist you with saving data.

Monitoring Your Usage

Many apps are available on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store that can be used to accurately monitor the mobile data being used by your mobile phone. Some can break this down by app or website, so you can get useful data that can help you change your habits. Some of these apps are also able to limit specific apps or the time of day that the apps are allowed to use mobile data, so intensive apps can be stopped from using mobile data while you are away from Wi-Fi or sleeping, for example.

Be very careful not to have mobile data switched on if you travel abroad. Stick to Wi-fi for email and social media use or invest in a local SIM card.

If you’re not careful, mobile data costs can stack up quickly, particularly if you’re a power user. Making sure you have the right mobile plan is essential to maximising the value to receive from your mobile provider. Using the right plan and configuring your mobile phone to use your mobile data properly are the essential steps to reducing mobile data costs.