How to Buy Only Texts for your Tracfone Smartphone

How Texting Works with Tracfone and How to Add More

How to Buy Texts for Tracfone

For many of us, texting is our biggest drain of minutes on our Tracfone smartphone. And up until now, the only way to add more texts was by getting a card for more calling and data as well.

With Tracfone smartphones, each text you send or receive deducts from your total amount of texts. When you buy prepaid airtime cards, they allow you to make calls, send texts and surf the web on data. Tracfone sells a variety of prepaid cards (for both regular devices and smartphones), and each card adds more texts, data and calling minutes at the same time in different amounts.

With airtime split for smartphones into Talk, Text and Data buckets,, you can run out of data or texts and have to buy more calling minutes to refill your data and texts, even if you don't want any more calling minutes.

But Tracfone now offers a prepaid card you can purchase to add 1000 extra texts for $5. It is also possible to buy extra Data for your Tracfone as well and you can follow the link to learn more.

It is very convenient to be able to just buy additional texts, especially as Tracfone offers more and more smartphones. And remember that these data and text specific cards only work with smartphones.

Let's break down how the text card works, and where to get it.

What is the Text Only Card and What do you Get?

There are three kinds of prepaid cards you can buy from Tracfone to use with your smartphone:

• Regular Airtime Cards - available for all phones
• Smartphone Only Airtime Cards - only available with smartphones
• Add-on Cards - only available with smartphones

The regular airtime cards (with varying amounts from 60 minutes to 450 minutes) are generally not the best deal, especially for heavy data or text users as they don't give you as many texts/data for the price. However, some phones with triple minutes help make these cards a more reasonable deal.

Text Refill Card available at Target

Smartphone Only cards have specific amounts of talk/text/data and generally give more text/data than talk time because most users tend to use more texts and data. The smartphone only cards range in price from $15 to $125.

Finally, Tracfone also offers add on cards which, unlike the other two kinds of cards, only add one type of airtime (either talk, text, data or service days).

Here are the current Tracfone Add On Cards:

• Talk - 500 Talk Minutes for $10
• Text - 1000 Texts for $5
• Data - ! GB Data for $10
• Service Days - 1 Year of Service for $50 (Currently unavailable, Tracfone may have removed this)

At first glance, 1000 texts for $5 looks like a good deal, but is it? Let's break it down.

Comparing the Cost Per Text for Airtime and Text Cards

Is it cheaper to buy an Airtime card or a Text card to refill your Texts?

If you buy the 60 Minute Airtime card, you will get 60 texts, which is tripled to 180 on some smartphones (you also get 180 calling minutes, and 180 mb of data, plus 90 days of service) for $20. This works out to just over 1.4 cents per text after factoring out the value of the talk, data and service days you also get.

If you get the $25 Smartphone Only Card you get 500 minutes, 1000 texts, 500 mb data and 60 service days. This works out to 0.6 cents per text, which is a little better than the 60 minute card.

And what does the 1000 texts for $5 come to per text? 0.5  cents per text, which is the best deal.

Tracfone Text Card 1000

As you can clearly see, if you only need text messages for your phone, the special text card is the best deal. But if you need additional calling, data or service days, some of the smartphone only cards are also a good deal.

We recently created a Full Comparison of Tracfone Airtime Cards which looks at which airtime card is the best deal, and includes information on text and data only cards.

So what should you do if you need just a few calling and data minutes, plus service days, but go through texts quickly? Try buying some of the lower cost airtime cards that include plenty of service days, like the 60 minute card which as 90 service days, and then buy additional text add on cards as needed.

Where to Buy the 1000 Texts Card

The 1000 Texts Card is available as an add-on from the Tracfone website. The cards can also be found in many retail stores including Target and Walmart, and also online from many sources such as Amazon.

Get Bonus Texts when adding the Text Only Card! Don't forget that there are often promo codes for extra texts (500 to 1000) when adding the 100 text card! Visit our Tracfone Promo Code page to see the codes!

We hope this analysis is help for you if you're comparing airtime cards. Drop us a comment below if you have questions, or additional insight to share.

If you are new to Tracfone, start with our Beginners Guide!

Be sure to take a look at our Tracfone BYOP page, which has information about using unlocked phones with Tracfone, such as the new Moto G7 which we reviewed recently.

Find the lowest prices on new phones with our Tracfone Deals and Sales List which includes both Tracfone devices and unlocked phones.

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