Dante D’Orazio of The Verge compares the Jump, Next, and Edge plans across the United States’ three biggest carriers. The costs of these plans are broken down into tidy charts that explain what’s happening when you opt into these plans.

T-Mobile’s made a lot of news lately thanks to their outspoken CEO and marketing campaigns around becoming the “un-carrier.” T-Mobile’s greatest strength is that they have the most transparent plans in the industry and flexible options for those who bring their own phones to the carrier. Last week T-Mobile announced Jump, a plan that’s supposed to help people upgrade to a new phone earlier. AT&T and Verizon followed with Next and Edge, but their plans aren’t really that good of a deal. Dante has a couple breakdowns for those who want to upgrade every year and every six months. T-Mobile has the most affordable plans, but in the end none of them are that great.

Ultimately, most everyone is better served by sticking with their traditional cell phone plan and buying a phone at full cost when you can’t take that old smartphone any longer. It’s best, then, to think of these “upgrade plans” as extended payment plans that take advantage of customers who want the newest phones and want to pay little up-front by charging them massive fees as the months roll by. No deal.

I don’t think these plans are necessarily geniune attempts to help customers who want to upgrade early, but they do at least ease the pain of upgrading. Maybe people might find it easier to break up the cost of their next phone into chunks rather than paying for an expensive phone outright. Personally I’d rather just budget and buy the phone if I really wanted to do this, selling the old one afterwards, even though it’d be a bit of a hassle.

And these plans definitely make more sense for those who want the latest Android phones, since iPhones are (so far) on an iterative update cycle with major updates occurring every two years. For the iPhone it’s not the next phone that’s substantially better than the one you have now, it’s the one after that. If you have the iPhone 5 you’ll want next year’s. If you have the 4S you’ll want this year’s. Etc. etc. Things could change, but I think in the United States, the two year contract cycle is the way to go for most people. Today’s phones are powerful enough that the latest can stay relevant for a long time. You couldn’t say that in 2010, but you can say that now if you’re buying a flagship phone.