The Israeli Globes published an article today comparing the price of a new, carrier-“subsidized” phone with the price of the same phone bought at a typical cell phone store. The results are shocking! By buying the phone through your carrier, you may pay almost 2,000 shekel more for the same device than you would pay if you buy it separately! (See the comparison tables at the bottom of that article.)
The flip side is that most carriers allow you to pay a (small) fraction of their cost, each month, over the course of 36 months, so that you avoid the initial “shock” of buying a phone out-right. Still, with a savings of several thousand shekel over the course of three years, it might be worth biting the bullet and paying upfront. I’m not very well versed in the tashlumim concept of Israeli credit cards, but that is another option to explore when buying a phone privately, if you are both looking to save money and spread out the cost.
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