for one you have to use tracphone and they suck 2 is buyer beware. Tracphone runs all types of legal scams. Just to quickly demonstrate what Im talking about, let’s look at the 400-minute card. It costs $100, and it can be doubled to be 800 minutes for $100. But when you look down and see the 200-minute card, you wonder how Tracfone gets away with it. For $40, you can get 200 minutes, or 400 if you double it. That means you pay $80 for 400 or 800 minutes. Uh, last time we checked, $80 was less than $100.

no catch that I am aware of. I know some of their "newer" phones actually have this feature built into them so there is no additional card to purchase or anything like that. I got one of these for my tween and there does not appear to be any sort of catch - buy a 90 minute card and get 180 minutes automatically. If you have a phone that did not come with this feature, you can purchase a double minutes card (just like an airtime minutes one) - I would assume this works the same way.

no catch, but you have to get the 200-400 minute card I think.

For the life of either 1) the phoneset you bought with the feature preconfigured or 2) the phoneset you bought a "double minutes" card for and added it (the card costs $50). You get the phone for as little as $10 - if you shop around you can find it on sale for $8 and with double minutes pre added instead of purchasing the add on. After that, a 60 minute card every three months costs $20, so for about $7 a month you get 40 minutes a month for casual usage. Alternatively a 120 minute card lasts 3 months and gives 240 minutes of usage, for 80 minutes at $10 a month. The question is how will you use it. There isn't unlimited texting, messages cost .3 minutes, and they don't offer data services if you are looking for a smart phone. But if you don't need a lot of minutes and just want to keep a phone in the car or an emergency phone for a kid, it's probably the cheapest way to go. Adding just an extra phone with no extra minutes to a family plan is at least $10 a month. Reliability hasn't been an issue, at least as compared to other carriers. We have two Tracfones in addition to our "real" cell phones, and there have been remote places where the only phone with service has been the $8 Tracfone.