Every carrier offers group plans that allow you to share your wireless plan with multiple friends, family members or, if you are so inclined, random strangers. That means you’re only getting a single bill for all of these people, though, which means you have to find a way to repay the main account holder every month. For a service like Google’s Project Fi, where every user may incur very different fees, that can quickly become a hassle, so starting today, Project Fi can automatically handle this for you with the launch of its new “group repay” option.
If you’re sharing your Fi account with multiple people, you can now have them either pay you back their individual totals, a fixed monthly amount, or only the cost of the data you used on top of the basic Fi fee. Members can set up monthly repayments and reminders.
Unsurprisingly, all of this is deeply integrated with Google Wallet for sending and receiving payments. Using this, plan members can make their payments right from the Fi notification on their Android homescreen. And the Project Fi app will, of course, keep track of all the payments.
According to Google’s own survey, about 50 percent of people aged 18 to 34 who have a group plan currently share their plans with their parents and half of them pay at least some share of the bill. Another 42 percent share their plans with their spouse or significant other and five percent share it with their friend or roommates. I guess that leaves three percent of people who do indeed share their plans with random strangers they met on a street corner in a far-flung city during their gap year.