Anytime minutes are minutes on a cell phone that are used during a specific time period each day, and are essentially the minutes you pay for each month. They usually refer to minutes that are used on your cell phone between the hours of 7AM to 9PM in some plans, or a slight variation on these hours. In many cell phone plans where you are allotted a certain amount of minutes, using your cell phone during the anytime minutes will eat up the minutes of your plan. Many cell phone companies now offer free nights and weekends, which means if you call outside the anytime minutes hours, your phone use won’t affect the number of minutes you have on the phone.

Anytime minutes may also not apply when you have shared calling plans, special numbers you can call for free, or a variety of other arrangements. For example some companies offer free calls between family members. This means that even if you call a specified family member during the anytime minutes stretch of time, your access to anytime minutes does not diminish, and if you restrict your calls, you have less chance of being charged extra for more minutes than your plan allows.

The standard structure of early cell phone plans virtually always included anytime minutes, in amounts you could pre-order. Depending on how much you used your cell phone during the day on weekdays, you’d try to hazard a guess at how many anytime minutes you might need in a given month. Exceeding that limit was often very costly, with extensive charges for going over your limits. Since phone bills that exceeded anytime limits shocked people, many cell phone plans now offer more modest charges for exceeding anytime minutes.

Other plans have skirted the issue of anytime minutes entirely. Some companies now offer flat fee wireless or cellular service. These range in price from about 40-70 US dollars (USD) per month. Another way of avoiding anytime minutes is to purchase prepaid cell phones. This keeps track of exactly how much you are using your cell phone, and simply stops providing you with service if you don’t purchase more minutes. For example, it costs about 30 USD for about 120 minutes of time on many pay as you go cells. If you only use your phone for emergencies, that might translate to about 10 USD per month, instead of about 20 USD for the cheapest cell phone plans.

Anytime minutes can also be called whenever minutes, or sometimes service minutes. It’s a clever marketing strategy to refer to the minutes as anytime, since really, these are the minutes you pay for. Naturally you can use them anytime in the specified period, but it’s still usually a better deal to use your phone during evening and weekend hours.