Which internet price locks actually hold?
A promotional rate, a price guarantee and a flat price are three different promises, and only one of them is a commitment. Here's what each provider is really offering.
Mint's five-year No Bill Creep Guarantee is the longest explicit commitment on the market, and Verizon Fios and Frontier both offer multi-year guarantees worth having. But the strongest protection isn't a lock at all — it's a plan that never had a promotional rate to expire, like prepaid or flat-price plans where the advertised number is the standing number.
What each provider commits to
Three promises that sound identical
A promotional rate is the opposite of a price lock: it's a discount with an expiry date, and the step-up is the plan working as designed. A price guarantee is a real commitment for a stated term — two, three, sometimes five years — after which the rate moves to standard pricing. Flat pricing makes no time-bound promise at all but has no promo to expire, so nothing is scheduled to change.
Those distinctions decide what you should compare. Against a promo, compare month 13. Against a guarantee, compare the standard rate you'll land on. Against flat pricing, compare today's number and know it can still be raised — just not on a timetable already written into your contract.
What every lock excludes
Why Mint's is the strongest wording
Five years is unusually long, but the reason we rate it highest is specificity: the commitment names what it protects — talk, text and 5G data on Mint's network — and states plainly what it doesn't, which is taxes and fees. Most guarantees are vaguer than that, and vagueness is where increases live. It applies to eligible plan bundles, so confirm your exact plan qualifies before you count on it.
The catch is that Mint asks for the term up front, so a five-year promise sits alongside a habit of paying twelve months at a time. That's still a good trade for anyone who can float it. More on how prepaid pricing works.
How to hold a provider to it
The bottom line
Rank these by what they protect you from, not by the length of the number. A five-year guarantee on the wireless portion of a prepaid plan and a plan that simply never had a promo are both better than a two-year guarantee that lands you on an unspecified standard rate. And any lock that excludes equipment fees and taxes — which is all of them — can still let your bill climb while the provider keeps its word.
Maya has reviewed home internet plans for a decade and tests every service on the same connected household to compare real-world performance — no provider pays for placement.