I’m starting my fourth month with Fizz, a newish provider of cellular services, owned by Quebecor/Videotron. I previously talked about my experience with US roaming (TL/DR: it was positive¹) but this week, I found another way to save money, if you’re a Fizz user in Ontario or Quebec.

That is thanks to the Fizz Wallet.

In essence, the wallet allows you to pay as you go for services you don’t use a lot. For me, that could be SMS messaging. With the rise of data-based messaging apps (iMessage, Messenger, WhatsApp to name a few) the need for sending² SMSes³ in my world is diminishing on a daily basis.

Right now I’m paying $20/month for unlimited Canada wide voice/text and 3GB of data. Right now I could choose to change my plan, eliminate texts and save $4/month, but 3GB monthly data is no longer an option — it’s either 1GB (which I’m not sure is sufficient) or 7GB (which is way more than I’d ever need, and $1 higher⁴ than what I’m paying now).

Fizz isn’t perfect: no 5G, no caller ID and I still haven’t quite figured out the limitations regarding roaming and voicemail, but it certainly is inexpensive: the current low-price offer is $19/month for unlimited Canada-wide calling, SMS, voicemail and 1G of data. Crank that up to 7G and it’s still just $25/month.

My dear wife became a client yesterday to take advantage of the $35 referral bonus; with Fizz eSIM support, the migration to Fizz took about 30 minutes from start to finish. And since I had a bunch of data piling up, I sent her 500M to get started.

If you want to give Fizz a try, my referral code is INSWI — it’s worth $35 to you (and me :-)).

1. One aspect that I failed to mention is that buying a travel add-on for roaming on Fizz is valid for the current AND NEXT billing cycle, which, on average, means your travel add-on will be valid for 45 days. In my case, my add-on was valid for two trips taken 3 weeks apart, so that was an even bigger savings since I only had to buy the 2G add-on once instead of twice. ↩︎
2. Receiving SMS is always possible. ↩︎
3. iPhone users: that’s “green bubble” texts ↩︎
4. The first rule of subscription services: never willingly pay more a month than what you’re currently paying. Like the proverbial frog in the pot, small increases to monthly costs are easy to ignore until your budget is cooked. ↩︎