Subscriptions are nothing new in the smartphone space. Wireless carriers and phone makers have long offered customers a chance to pay for phones in a series of monthly installments rather than putting down a bunch of cash up front. And many plans also include cheap or free upgrades to newer phones every few years.

Fairphone’s new subscription plan is different. It still lets you pay a small amount every month for a phone rather than paying full price up front. But the goal of the subscription isn’t to provide you with new phones every few years… it’s to get you to keep using the same phone for many years.

Fairphone Easy

Update: Fairphone suspended the Fairphone Easy plan in 2024, less than two years  after launching a pilot. The original article continues below. 

The Fairphone Easy subscription is launching first in the Netherlands, where customers can rent a Fairphone 4 with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for anywhere from 3 months to 60 months (five years).

Price start at €21 per month in the first year (with an initial deposit of €90). But if you keep the phone for a year, the price drops to €19. After another year it goes down to €17. And in the fourth year of your subscription will drop to €13 per month.

The price includes a phone, case, and screen protector but no SIM card: you’ll need to supply your own for the carrier of your choice. It also includes a lifetime warranty that covers repairs and replacement parts. And if your phone breaks down entirely, the company will ship you a new model within 48 hours and collect your broken device for refurbishment or recycling.

Theoretically folks who can afford to pay full price up front and plan to keep the phone for 4 or more years may be able to save money in the long term. Fairphone charges €650 for a Fairphone 4 with similar specs, and that phone comes with a 2-year warranty (and support for up to a 5-year extended warranty). But if you were to rent a phone with the Fairphone Easy plan, you’d end up spending €930 by the end of year four.

If there are advantages to the subscription model, they’re that you don’t need to have a lot of money up front, you get extended warranty for the duration of your subscription, and if and when you stop paying, Fairphone is committed to responsibly refurbishing or recycling the phone to cut down on electronic waste.

That’s in keeping with Fairphone’s entire business model, which is to provide sustainable devices made from ethically-sourced materials. The company notes that the vast majority of CO2 emissions associated with smartphones come from manufacturing process, so the best way to cut down on emissions from phones is to get people to hold onto their phones for longer.

With that in mind, the company already focuses on repairability, long-term support, (and occasionally upgradeability) in its devices. And while the Fairphone Easy subscription plan might not be the cheapest way to get a Fairphone, it’s certainly designed to convince customers to hold onto their phones for 3+ years.

At this point there’s no word on if or when the subscription will be available outside of the Netherlands though.

via Fairphone

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7 replies on “Fairphone Easy is a different kind of smartphone subscription (pay to keep your phone longer rather than for upgrades)”

  1. For me its an excellent business model.
    Couple of years ago after dropping my Samsung Galaxy Core and smashing the screen I pulled out my old Nokia Asha 300 because the new phones were becoming too big and too heavy.
    Just need a phone to take calls and texts.
    Android 5 on the Samsung was ok but Android 10/11 on the newer phones are a pain even with Nova.
    For a basic smart phone with screen 5″/125mm weight 60g
    I would pay something like the Fairphone subscription just to keep it
    5 or more years.
    Unfortunately when 3G is turned off here (2024?) the Asha is ewaste.

  2. “Fairphone charges €650 for a Fairphone 4 with similar specs, and that phone comes with a 2-year warranty (and support for up to a 5-year extended warranty). But if you were to rent a phone with the Fairphone Easy plan, you’d end up spending €840 by the end of year four.”

    Yeah, I also don’t get how these incentives are supposed to motivate me to keep the phone longer.

    The tapering cost over time seems like an interesting idea. But the way the sums add up does not make sense to me as a buyer – though presumably it was the only way the sums added up for them (what with insurance, expected rates of defaults, etc.).

  3. This sounds similar to leasing a car where people who more frequently get a new car tend to do over buying which sounds like the opposite of what Fairphone is trying to accomplish.

  4. …And what if I just pay for one month, or whatever it takes to get them to send me the phone, and quit paying, and I just run off with it? What if I install another operating system so they can’t even remotely brick it? Getting it back might be impossible if you’re far enough from the EU. And maybe they can remotely brick it anyway if they locked the bootloader on these units.

    Honestly I don’t even get how this is supposed to make people keep their phones longer. If anything, I guess it’ll lead to more pre-mortem returns resulting in a lot of salvaged spare parts to be used by people who DID pay up front, which the design allows at least.

    1. This is a credit product. You will not get the credit if you live outside of a jurisdiction where Fairphone can catch up with you. This will be enforced in the same way that bank and credit card credit is enforced.

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