One user once told me that he received an SMS on his phone with a message stating that the subscription fee for a daily package had been charged instead of a monthly one, although there was money in the account to charge the monthly one.
To resolve the issue, the user contacted Kyivstar’s support chat, reporting that 30 UAH had been withdrawn in one day, instead of 220 UAH over four weeks, leaving 190 UAH remaining on the account. The operator applied for a four-week service package, which was successfully activated, and the remaining 190 UAH were withdrawn from the account. To prevent this from happening again, the operator recommended paying 20 UAH more than the plan, but the user was not satisfied with this, as the iPhone often sends paid SMS messages abroad to activate iMessage and Facetime.
The operator also recommended activating the service out of turn, but in this case, the previous service package is cancelled, meaning the plan is now valid for less than four weeks. This means that if you activate the service one day in advance, the remaining package for that day will be lost. If you activate the service out of turn twice, the subscription fee will be charged twice, but you’ll only have one service package.
Four weeks later, the situation repeated itself. The account balance was 221 UAH, the plan was 220 UAH, and the accrual was not for four weeks, but for one day – 30 UAH. The user contacted the operator again, and the operator helped accrue the plan for four weeks, but not immediately. Instead, they recommended going to a Kyivstar store to resolve the issue and repeatedly ended the conversation. It was impossible to choose a different operator; the chat always started with this.
Let’s imagine that if the user had 219 UAH (the 220 UAH plan), then 219 UAH / 30 UAH = 7 days, meaning this amount would be enough for seven days of Kyivstar service.
If you change to a new plan, the payment for the previous plan is lost again, and there are no compensations. Therefore, it’s best to change your plan the day before the old plan is charged, as there will be no compensation for that day.
A user also had a plan charged, and five days later, they changed to a new plan, but naturally, there was no compensation for the old plan. The support chat stated that compensation was only available if they contacted us within three days. This meant the user ended up paying for the plan twice in a month, once for the old plan and once for the new one!
The situation repeated itself the third time. The account balance was 221 UAH, the plan was 220 UAH, and the charge was for one day, not for four weeks – 30 UAH. The previous time, the operator recommended disabling LTE (4G) internet, stating that a mobile data reservation had occurred during the scheduled charge period. This is natural, since an iPhone in standby mode disconnects from WiFi after a while and often uses mobile data. The user switched to 3G only, and that didn’t help, but the previous operator recommended switching to 2G. And so on every month! I’ll definitely check with the user to see if the charge will be correct for four weeks next time with mobile data switched to 2G and report back.
The third operator was very polite, immediately applying for a four-week plan, and also stated:
Reservations are a feature of the prepaid billing system. It is not available on the contract tariff.
I recommend disabling data transfer on your phone in the evening and selecting 2G/3G network mode (3G didn’t work for this user) or topping up your account with an extra 21 UAH in case of a possible reservation.
UPD: In the 4th month, the user paid 31 UAH more than the tariff cost and in the morning saw that the tariff was calculated correctly and 31 UAH remained in the account.