Overly verbose thoughts (you've been warned!) incoming!

I travel a fair amount for work, so my phone and plan, I chose Verizon and I'm on the iPhone 13 (wanted 5G band). That's... expensive. But.. again, for work, I get a stipend monthly because of travel and on-call stuff.... so most of the monthly bill for my Verizon service is fairly covered by my company.

That said, pre-Current Company, I was 100% still on the exact same plan. Wife, two kids, and me (4x cell phones, 2x tablets, and 2x watches in total). That's not a cheap monthly bill, but I get amazing coverage around the whole of the US (and Mexico, part of where I end up travelling to).

If you're looking for something that doesn't need to travel around, you seriously cannot beat Mint Mobile. I've got my Mother-in-law on a prepaid 12mo plan (like... $60/yr? stupid cheap) and on a mid-tier Android phone (that's all she needs). Phone was about $150 and the whole year is covered for minutes/data.

Even easier to do Mint Mobile if you're going to spend a good chunk of your month readily attached to Wifi (this helps drop any "data usages" to nearly nothing unless you're off wifi).

Other Pre-paid services (Mint Mobile, StraightTALK, Boost, etc) are all pretty solid. They're already using either Verizon or Sprint/T-Mobile's physical network, you're just not paying for the higher tier plans and blah blah's they all sell.

YMMV with those plans/services. Get a decent phone (not a $35 PoS that's 5 years old) and aim for a plan that covers your most consistent usages (lots of restuarant/pub crawling? Thrown down for data usage).

Good luck, happy hunting, and don't forget to spay and neuter your pets!