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Fern,

I got mine as a present but I think my brother-in-law got it at Walmart.

You buy minutes as you need them but there is kind of minimum and if you don't recharge by a certain date, they'll cut you off.

Like I said, it comes to around $11/month. I like to just buy the minutes for a year (even more cheaper) and then you don't have to worry about recharging every month or 3 months. When I get a text message, that's free - I imagine if I sent one (I don't - I don't know how), that would cost units.

I have hardly had any "outage" problems - one area I travel, I can't get service for about 5 miles - other than that, works like a charm.