android

Setting alerts and caps on Ting

Mitch Surprenant • August 11, 2017

At Ting, we actively encourage you to pay us as little as possible. We try to give you the flexibility to control how many minutes, texts and megabytes you use. We regularly blog about how to make free phone calls, and we have a whole blog category called data saving. But for some Ting customers, that’s not enough. Having a firm grasp on your cell phone bill requires a lot of micromanaging your Ting dashboard and the Ting app to monitor usage.

Well, not exactly. With the alerts and caps feature on your Ting dashboard, it’s actually really easy to let us do all the hard work for you. Inside your Ting dashboard and in the Ting app, you can set usage alerts and caps for any level and any service. If you set a cap to notify you via the Ting app, you can re-enable it right from the app. No need to call us to log in to your desktop!

Before we dive too deep, we should first define cap and alert. A cap is exactly what it sounds like. We put a hard stop on the feature on the network side. You can choose to have the feature re-enabled at the end of the billing cycle or you can have it turned off until you go into your dashboard or the Ting app to turn it back on. You can set caps for minutes, messages and megabytes independently.

Alerts are more informative than active. They tell you when a phone has reached a given threshold that you set but don’t intervene. Alerts can be emailed, sent via text message or sent via notification in the Ting app on Android or iOS.

Standard Ting messaging rates apply when you use the text message function, so keep that in mind when picking the text option. Rest assured that your in-account level alerts and caps will reflect all devices and their shared usage across all three LTE networks.

Using the Ting mobile app

Let’s go ahead and set an alert on the Android and iOS Ting apps. To add an alert on Android, tap the + button in the bottom right. To add an alert on iOS, tap Add in the top left.

Then, just select what the alert will monitor (In this example you can choose from My Account, Dad, Daughter, Mom and Son).

Pick the number and action you want to trigger the alert (we’ve picked 100 minutes), and how you want to be notified. In this example, the phone labeled Mom is going to get a text message when the phone named Daughter has exceeded 100 minutes. You can go a step further and set additional notifications before saving, or set a cap in addition to the alert.

Using a desktop browser

The alerts and caps that you set can be as simple or as complicated as you’d like. This time, let’s set a cap on a desktop browser using the Ting control panel. Log in to your Ting account, navigate to the Usage Alerts section and click Add an alert. In this example, the phone labeled Daughter will have its data disabled when it reaches 450 megabytes of usage. This cap will automatically be removed at the beginning of the next billing cycle when the monthly data usage resets.

When you set a cap, you’ll want to leave some wiggle room for reporting from our network partners. Typically 5-10% is recommended. For example, a cap set for 200 megabytes should probably be set at 190 megabytes. This ensures you’re staying under the hard caps.

It’s important to know that we won’t cut you off in the middle of a phone call. It’s not the Ting way of doing things to cut you off in the middle of an important call. For example, if you set a hard cap on minutes at 100, and at minute 98 you start a 20-minute phone call, we’re going to let that phone call finish before we set the cap in place, at 118 minutes.

Caps and alerts are probably the most important thing at Ting, because we understand sometimes life gets in the way of staying on top of your cell phone bill. Using caps and alerts lets us do the hard work, while you get to reap the benefit.