Any way to get the $1000 iPhone 15 Pro upgrade deal without sacrificing remaining bill credits?

Is there any bill credits associated to the offers. If so and you pay off early you will lose the bill credits and your payoff will be more.

Thank you both, I appreciate the info, although it’s the same conflicting info I’ve now gotten from T-Mobile reps.

The rep on the phone said I’d have to pay off my balance and give up the credits, but the chat rep I talked to a few minutes ago said the opposite, that the bill credits persist after I’ve paid off the balance. The latter sure seems to make more sense, but I wish the messaging was more consistent.

Just to update, I called in again, and the phone rep was very clear that if I paid off my phone early, I would sacrifice the bill credits, so it looks like you’re correct, gramps28, and the chat rep was straight-up lying to me. Bummer, but oh well.  I’m not so impatient I’m going to waste $130 to upgrade ahead of time (also kind of weird, since it seems like T-Mo would come out slightly ahead by me paying in advance instead of spread out over six months).

Not a great look for T-Mobile, and it’d have been even worse if I’d just gone ahead without double-checking.

The (wrong) answer I got, in writing, after explaining exactly what I wanted to do:

I turns out there was a trick, which I only discovered poking around my account info after vaguely remembering one of the benefits from two years ago that was very poorly explained.

Perhaps this will be useful to someone else in the same situation:

When I switched to a Magenta Max plan and bought my current phone on a 30-month payment+bill credit plan, it came with a Forever Upgrade benefit, which is no longer offered but is supposed to let you trade in your phone after 2 years and get remaining payments forgiven entirely, plus guarantee “up to $800” of trade-in value (which is really vague).

It took a while to get the rep on the phone to understand that I already had that benefit rather than wanted to sign up for it, but once they did they figured out that by combining that and then switching to a Go5G Plus plan, I could get the remaining payments on the old device waived (which is actually better than and get the full $1000 trade-in value on it for a new one.  That’s actually a better deal than even paying off the phone and continuing to get the bill credits for it would have been.

So, on the chance that you’re in the same situation I was, check to see if you have the Forever Upgrade benefit, and if so you may be in luck.

Note that I did need to make one advance payment on the phone to get the required 24 payments to use the Forever Upgrade, I guess because we’re still in the period of the 24th month so the payment hadn’t processed yet.

Bills are always a bit janky for a couple months after an upgrade, but it seems to have worked out fine for me.  I got the remaining 6 payments written off on the 30-month phone, $1000 worth of total trade-in value for it, and a new phone with nothing but tax and a small service fee of some sort ($20 I think) up front. I got a 256GB 15 Pro, and the extra $100 will also be spread out over two years of payments.

Monthly payments on Go5G are $10 higher than Magenta Max and all I really get for it other than this trade-in deal (and maybe future ones, although I assume we’ll get yet another pointless plan change next yer) is an extra 10GB of tethered data, but still come out well ahead.

This is the same as all past Tmo trade-in deals, but it’s of course weird the way you get the credit for the trade in:  About $350 “up front” for the phone, plus the remaining about $650 spread out over the next 24 months as bill credits. So instead of your 24-month device payments being $0, you are still paying maybe $15 a month because you got a chunk upfront.

What’s different from the past is how that $350 was handled:  Before, I’m pretty sure that showed up directly as a bill credit, so actual bills for the first few months were “free” before going back to normal. This time, that part of the trade-in value was applied to the remaining balance on my other half-paid-off phone, so instead of having 11 payments left I now only have 4. It’s still showing 11 bill credits left, so it doesn’t appear I got ripped off on anything, and (unless it’s lying) starting in 4 months my bill will go down quite a bit for a while because one of two phones will be paid off but the old trade-in credit will still be applied for a while.