Canklecat - you sound a whole lot like me. The whole story is ...

I currently have a Samsung S5 on the free FreedomPop plan with no upgrades (so not a real cell phone, no voicemail, 500MB per month, etc). I had been using this almost exclusively as 'a tracker' and still used my AT/T flip-phone/Gophone plan (grandfathered in) at $0.10 per minute with rollover (purchased in $100, 1 year lumps) for phone calls. I ended up with a Gophone balance of around $400 (after years of rollovers) which I figured I would never use as the $100 per year I was spending bought me way more cell phone time than I needed.

Then I realized that I could use this balance and upgrade to a 'free' Gophone data plan (free until the $ ran out). So I bought a Moto G6 unlocked (GSM and CDMA) and upgraded my no data Gophone plan to an 8Gig plan and I've got 6 to 8 'free months' with kind of unrestricted data access to see what I really want here. Then I will probably pick and choose among the various MVNO's.

dave