Cheap prepaid data plans are widely assumed to be flexible. The terms are narrower than that assumption, and the restrictions are not buried in a separate document: they sit in the same Critical Information Summary as the price.
The three clauses that do the work
- Personal use only. The Boost summary states the prepaid mobile service is for personal use only.
- Australia only. The same summary states the plan is only for use in Australia.
- FairPlay. All customers must follow the FairPlay policy, and breaching it may lead to the service being stopped or cancelled.
Those three lines exclude, in practice: reselling the SIM or the service, sharing a tethering connection among unrelated users, running a commercial device or point-of-sale terminal, sustained high-volume downloads, and any use of the service outside Australia. The Optus prepaid data plan makes the same kind of exclusion structural, since it does not include voice calls, SMS/MMS or international roaming data at all.
What the consequence looks like
Breaching the fair use policy may lead to the service being stopped or cancelled. That is a discretionary wording, which means the safest reading is that the provider may act rather than that it must. Prepaid makes this sharper than postpaid: there is no contract to appeal to, so the recovery path is the complaint and ombudsman route, not a termination notice with a contract attached.
The exception to check
Device compatibility is a separate restriction worth knowing: an incompatible device may be blocked and may not have access to voice or data, or be able to call emergency services including triple zero. That is not a use restriction, it is a hardware one, and it can affect legitimate personal use on an older phone.
What we could not verify. Where a provider has not published a figure we mark it unknown rather than estimate it. Re-read the provider page linked below on the day you decide.