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AOL users: Save your money!

I just left a client’s home who pays for both a DSL connection AND AOL. They were paying $30+ per month for AOL and not using a dial-up connection or their support. In fact, take a look at the image at the bottom of this tip and note that although they were signed up for the AARP discount account of $23.01, they were actually being billed $30.01!

If you use AOL and have a high speed connection, there is no need to pay AOL a dime unless you call their support for help regularly…and even then, don’t pay more than $10 per month.

To check and/or change your billing information with AOL, follow these steps:

  1. Login to your AOL main account using the AOL icon
  2. Click Keyword from the menus
  3. Type:  billing
  4. Press Enter on your keyboard
  5. You will be asked to login using your secret question, proceed through the prompts
  6. Once into the account, click View Billing information
  7. Note what your plan is, and what is actually being billed
  8. You can click the Change My Plan options if you want to lower your monthly rate

A little quick math demonstrates that if just 10,000 of the millions of AOL customers are paying full price for the service or even the bogus AARP discount  shown here, AOL rakes in an extra $3,000,000 per year. And the worst part? If you use AOL, you could have converted to a free or reduced account starting 5+ years ago!

Again, my recommendation is to change to the Free AOL account option, uninstall all AOL software and access your AOL email via AOL.com

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3 thoughts on “AOL users: Save your money!”

  1. Thanks for this info–but even after getting aol tech help I still do not have a clear idea if I will or will not have access to my favs-or bookmarks as others except aol call it. The tech said yes but why would aol let a free rider have their old stuff? I know that I can go to aol.com & sign in & get my mail & they said the other screen names will be able to also–but have my doubts. Verizon has its own set of confusing issues for a newbie & only recordings for help. All of the big isp s forget one thing–they work for us–we pay them–they are absentee for help–its co-dependency.
    This article is so true–aol will not inform you of the lower fee plan–but everyone I ask does not know how uninstalling aol software affects what you can get with free aol(btw I have heard one can never remove aol software totally). My favs are very important to me–and I have transfered some of them thru email–but those links may not connect once I get w/Verizon. I may lose all my stuff–but seriously it should not be so hard to get info. I know about epreserve but they assume I know where I should send my favs. I have alot of them & no one can tell me if explorer has a Bookmark limit. I guess once folks stop paying AOL they just never look back to post info for those of us in aol quicksand. Thanks again–this info is helpful but limited for me.

    1. Because AOL favorites are in proprietary format, it is not easy to transfer them to another browser. You can try using: http://linkagogo.net/ IF you want to keep your AOL software, you can, and use it just as before. The reason they want to keep you, even for free, is advertising dollars. The greater their numbers, the greater their advertising revenue.

  2. Rick,

    I’m so glad that you touched on this issue. I used to use AOHell years ago. The very reason why I stopped using them was that they take over your computer completely. They want to be the default for everything. Back then I had Windows XP and it was new then. The software found a way to alter the IE browser that came with the Operating system. Everything was defaulted to the AOL IE browser and I couldn’t access the same websites on the IE browser that is original to the OS. All in all I wonder how is AOL able to stay in business proving that they are such a horrible option out there. Not to mention you are just paying for advertising and fluff!

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