Budget telco Vaya wants to sell you your next smartphone. But rather than offering phones on a traditional telco style contract where the phone and plan are bundled into one monthly price, Vaya is keeping its telco business and phone business separate. In fact, you don't even need to be a Vaya customer to buy a phone through them (but I'm sure they'd prefer you take up one of their plans to go with your new device).
Vaya's actually running its phone sales business in partnership with a peer-to-peer lender called RateSetter. This means that if you choose to leave Vaya at any point, you can just keep paying your phone off on a monthly basis without the need to pay a termination fee.
If you want to buy a phone through Vaya, you can pay the full amount upfront, or pay it off over 12 or 24 months. For example, a 32GB iPhone 7 is $999 upfront. If you pay it off over 12 months, you're looking at $120 upfront, and $89 a per month. This ends up coming to $1,188. And if want to pay the iPhone off over 24 months, it's $120 upfront, and $48 per month. This totals $1,272.
At time of writing, Vaya is offering the iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, Samsung Galaxy S7, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, HTC 10, and Sony Xperia Z5 Premium.
It's worth noting that Vaya imports the devices it sells from other regions. This is more of an issue with Android smartphones, where updates are often deployed on a region-by-region basis. As such, you might end up waiting longer for software updates, depending on where the phone is sourced from.
Alex Choros
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