Virgin Mobile Custom gives you extremely customizable mobile service plans, but forgets Rule Number One in the world of prepaid: Try to make it inexpensive. Custom only works on a small selection of phones and doesn't undercut its competition, so it's hard to recommend to most prepaid customers, unless they're seeking its excellent parental controls.

Network and Pricing
Like all Virgin products, Virgin Mobile Custom runs on the Sprint network. That gives it access to Sprint's slow CDMA and LTE networks, but it lacks two key elements critical to good Sprint customer experience: the faster Spark LTE system, and the ability to roam freely on Verizon when you're out of Sprint coverage.

The Custom system comes from Zact, which we reviewed last year. It's also similar to Ting, another virtual carrier running on Sprint. The idea is that instead of a small number of price buckets, you can perfectly tune your service plan to what you use. Nothing's wasted. If you go over your service plan, your plan gets adjusted up to match your use; you can adjust it back down the next month if you want.

Unfortunately, when we compared Virgin Mobile Custom with other prepaid services, it was typically more expensive for a single line. Duplicating every one of Virgin and Boost's plans, we found that the plan was more expensive when you constructed it with the Virgin Mobile Custom system. The same exercise worked with Consumer Cellular, Net10, and Simple Mobile plans; Virgin Mobile Custom was more expensive than those, as well.

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