New Koodo plans cost $5 more unless you sign up for autopay

Telus-owned Koodo is the latest Canadian wireless provider to raise plan prices under the guise of offering a "discount" to customers who opt to use automatic payments.

Earlier this week, Koodo updated its plans with new pricing. Nearly across the board, Koodo increased prices by $5/mo and then tacked on a $5/mo discount if customers use automatic payment options, effectively forcing new customers to use autopay or pay more for their plan. This further builds on a previous round of price hikes Koodo rolled out.

According to details on Koodo's website, the autopay discount is only available on eligible plans. Existing Koodo customers shouldn't be impacted by the autopay change. Customers on those plans need to set up pre-authorized payments via their bank or add a debit or credit card to their account for automatic payments. Once that's set up, the $5 discount will appear on the next bill.

Additionally, Koodo got rid of its $49/60GB plan for bring your own phone (BYOP) customers, leaving them with the following options:

• $35/mo talk and text ($30 with autopay)
  $44/20GB 4G ($39 with autopay)
• $49/50GB 4G ($44 with autopay) - previously $44/40GB

Notably, Koodo's 'Starter' plans aren't impacted by the autopay changes, though the value of these plans remains negligible.

Ultimately, it's a bummer to see Koodo go down this route. The change effectively forces customers to use autopay, but there are various reasons why people can't or don't want to use autopay. For example, I dislike using autopay because I find it discourages me from reading my monthly bill, which means I miss when carriers try to sneak in price hikes (something that happens very often in Canada).

It also just sucks to see Koodo raise prices and then offer a "discount" that negates the price increase. It's hardly fair to call it an autopay discount when it doesn't actually reduce the price. To truly make it a discount, Koodo should have kept prices the same, and then autopay could have taken another $5/mo off on top of that (although it'd still hardly count as a discount considering Koodo just raised plan prices by $5/mo before doing this).

With Rogers' Fido doing the autopay bait-and-switch last year, Bell's Virgin is the last of the Big Three flanker brands that doesn't have an autopay discount. I'm curious how long that will last.