My cell phones were subsidized by my employers for more than a decade. That covered the period of transition from the flip phone to the first Treos to BlackBerries to iPhones, and they became an important part of my working life. But I never had to worry about contracts or dealing with providers.

That changed when I left the loving arms of Big Media, and I was shocked when I went shopping for phone plans. I thought the good phones were ridiculously expensive if you bought them, and I was repulsed by the idea of signing a contract for the honor and privilege of phone service.

The feds apparently agreed, and they’ve been going about the process of making it far, far more easier to move your service around. And the competition has caught on; contract buyout offers and all sorts of hardware deals await you if you are just willing to sign a new two-year deal. But that’s still a contract, and I’m not living with one of those.

As a result, for the last 18 months, I’ve used an HTC One that worked on Virgin Mobile, a Sprint bundler. But the phone was limited in power and storage, and it was starting to have significant issues. I also through the service was rather slow, something backed up by various reports.

So I looked around and found that — finally — unlocked phones have become available at non-crazy prices, opening the door for me to swap providers left and right if I was unhappy without having to buy new hardware. Thus, I decided to make a change.

Sprint and any of its bundlers were out, as was Verizon because it also uses CDMA technology, which limits network choices and makes it harder to switch between providers even if you use the few CDMA competitors. That meant I needed to use a GSM phone, and I went about looking for a phone and a provider.

For the phone, I settled on the LG G2 D800, which set me back only $180 even though it is stunningly powerful. Although the design is closing in on two years old, the phone remains near the top for processing muscle, has a ton of built-in memory and has excellent battery life. The screen quality is below the very top of today’s offerings, but it is still beautiful and will work for everything I use. The still and video cameras are excellent. It is a huge step up from the HTC — it’s easily twice the phone.

And for the service, I settled on Cricket Wireless. This is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T, and if you sign up for their no-contract automatic payment plan, they’ll give you unlimited calls and text, along with 5 (!) gigs of 4G data, for a mere $45 a month. They cap their 4G speeds at 8Mbps — 4G is actually capable of 10 times that speed in bursts, although it’s rare to see anything near that in real-world conditions —  but that is a ton of data for someone like me at a terrific price.

It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever notice that speed cap (especially in the wake of Virgin Mobile’s crawling speeds), but if I did, d’ya know what I’d do? Pop out the SIM chip and replace it for one from AT&T’s no-contract service, or Straight Talk (which also uses AT&T towers, but without the throttling), or T-mobile or any of T-mobile’s rebundlers.

And porting your phone number is an easy process now; with Cricket, I did it all online with a couple of minutes of typing. The Cricket SIM chip showed up two days after I ordered it and I was in business within a few minutes of throwing it into the phone. I could have made this even faster by walking into a Cricket store (there’s one a few miles from my house), but then I’d probably have to pay a small fee.

We’re in a new era of phone service now, and I think that anyone who can spring for a phone up-front should definitely not be signing any more contracts. Now that changing providers means you’ll live without your phone for, say, an hour, you can save hundreds of dollars a year by just doing a little shopping. You’ll be glad you did.