A prepaid plan has no monthly bill, so there is no monthly price to read off the page. There is a price for a block of credit, and the block has a term attached. Converting one into the other is the calculation that decides whether a plan is cheap.
The arithmetic, stated once
Divide the recharge amount by the number of days in the term, then multiply by 30. That gives a comparable monthly figure. A $74 recharge over 28 days works out to roughly $79 a month on that basis; a $130 recharge over 365 days works out to roughly $11 a month. Both are prepaid, and the gap is entirely the term you committed to.
Why the per-month figure misleads
- It assumes you use every day of the term, which most customers do not.
- It hides the fact that a long term is a large single payment made up front.
- It says nothing about what you pay at renewal, which is a fresh decision at a fresh price.
So a long-expiry plan can show a monthly figure far below anything a short plan reaches, and still be wrong for you. If you leave Australia in four months, a 365 day recharge has bought you nine months of nothing and locked the remaining balance to an account you will not use.
What to do with the number
Treat the per-month figure as a way to compare plans of similar length, never as a description of your own bill. For your own bill, multiply the price by the number of recharges you will genuinely make before you leave. Use the comparison tool on this site to do that on real published prices rather than on a spreadsheet.
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.