Cell phones,
simplified—since 2019.
We compare cell-phone plans, carriers, and devices so you can switch with confidence. Independently owned. Plain English. No spam, no gimmicks.
UpPhone is published by Payette Forward, Inc., a small, founder-owned company based in upstate New York. We are not owned by a wireless carrier, an insurance group, or a private-equity rollup. Payette Forward has operated continuously since 2013, and UpPhone has been its independent brand since 2019.
One question, asked over and over.
In my years as an Apple Genius, the same question kept landing in front of me: which carrier should I be on, and which phone should I buy? No two answers were the same, because no two people had the same usage, the same coverage map, or the same budget. The carrier websites weren’t built to help—they were built to upsell.
I left the Apple Store to start Payette Forward, Inc. in 2013—writing one comparison post a week, naming the cheapest plan that actually worked for the person asking, and disclosing when an affiliate link paid the bills. By 2019, the scope had grown enough to need its own brand: that’s when UpPhone launched. It still works that way.
Today, four editors and a small operations team keep the catalog current. We track 112 plans across 22+ carriers and 323 phones. We add categories slowly—privacy-focused phones is the most recent. We retire pages when carriers shut down, but we keep the archive live as reference. Payette Forward has been at this since 2013, and UpPhone since 2019—the question is still the same. The answer is still it depends—and we still take it seriously.
How we got here.
The story starts with Payette Forward in 2013 and UpPhone in 2019.
Three things, done thoroughly.
Compare phones & plans.
A live catalog of every carrier and device sold in the US, updated weekly. Filter by what you actually need—coverage, lines, hotspot, budget—not by what carriers want to upsell.
Plain-English buyer’s guides.
Reviews are written after at least two weeks of daily use. Buyer’s guides are updated every month with current prices. We do not run sponsored content.
Step-by-step repair guides.
Photographed walkthroughs for the things carriers won’t help with: water damage, screen repairs, account lockouts, transferring data, recovering deleted messages.
Affiliate links. That’s it.
When you click a “See deal” link and switch to a plan or buy a phone, the carrier or retailer pays UpPhone a referral fee. The price you pay is the same either way. We don’t sell ads. We don’t take payment to rank a plan higher. We don’t run sponsored reviews. If a carrier’s plan is the cheapest, it gets ranked first—whether they pay us or not.
Editorial decisions are made by the editorial team. The business side has no input on rankings or reviews. If we get this wrong, please write us at contact@upphone.com.
Read the full disclosureFound a mistake? Tell us.
We get pricing and policy wrong sometimes. We’d rather hear about it from you than from someone who switched to the wrong plan because of us.
UpPhone is a registered trademark of Payette Forward, Inc., used continuously in commerce in the United States since 2019.