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I was recently reminded of my family's mobile phone plan ten years ago, when my sister and I were still on it. My parents received services from AT&T and had recently added cellular data to the plan. We had four iPhones and shared 2000 MB of cellular data per month between all of them.
In the last five years or so, I've been fortunate to not be encumbered with metered connections. We have unlimited monthly transfers through our home ISP, and our current phone plan is provided by T-Mobile, who offers unlimited cellular data. T-Mobile throttles bandwidth after a certain amount per month, but it's never made completely inaccessible.
Ironically, I find myself much more attracted to open and lightweight Internet services these days than I was back then. In 2012 I used Facebook and Twitter daily, played mobile games, and even used BitTorrent frequently. Heavy Javascript, large images, lots of CSS and web fonts, and megabytes of advertisements were the norm for me. Now my time is mostly devoted to Gemini, a community in which capsule pages rarely exceed several kilobytes in size.
By far the biggest drain on my cellular data these days is YouTube. Even though I use lightweight frontends like NewPipe and SMTube to do it, there are certain channels I watch quite regularly. But if I were to settle with watching fewer videos or at a lower quality, I'd certainly be able to live with a daily or monthly data cap again.
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[Last updated: 2023-06-11]