Costco Just Showed Retail What a Members-Only Phone Plan Is For

Written By Jules Pearson

Earlier this month, Costco started offering a mobile plan to its members in Mexico. Most of the coverage treated it as a telecom story, one more virtual operator lining up against Walmart's Bait.

I read it differently. It's a membership story. And it's the clearest public example yet of the idea we started Reach on.

What the launch actually tells us

Strip away the plan details and three things stand out.

First, the plan is members-only. You can't buy it unless you already pay Costco for a membership, and the price is tied to your tier.

Second, Costco didn't build a phone company. A partner runs the network, the billing and the eSIM. Costco owns no towers and no spectrum.

Third, the one thing Costco did bring was the thing that mattered most: a base of members who already trust it.

Put those together, and the phone plan is really a retention tool. Every member on it has one more reason to renew, and one more monthly bill with Costco's name on it.

Your customer relationship is the asset

For years, brands have spent real money earning a customer's trust, then handed that customer to a carrier for one of the most frequent bills in their life. The carrier keeps the relationship, the data and the recurring revenue.

That never made sense to us. It's why we built Reach.

If you already have loyal customers or members, mobile shouldn't be someone else's business. It should be a service under your brand that keeps people coming back every month.

What it takes, and what Reach handles

Most brands assume launching mobile means becoming a telco. It doesn't, and that's the whole point of our platform.

Reach takes care of the parts that sit behind the brand. That means the carrier relationships, billing, SIM and eSIM provisioning, and the customer portal. It also covers an app, branded invoices and messages, and the subscriber data you need to see how the program performs.

You decide the things that make it yours: the name, the plans, the pricing and who gets access. If you want to do what Costco did and reserve the plan for members, or price it by membership tier, that's a setting, not a project.

There are two ways to launch. Go turnkey, and we run the whole service under your name, from the app to customer support. Or use our APIs to build mobile into your own app and systems, and keep full control of the experience.

Either way, the brand on the plan and the customer relationship stay yours.

This isn't just for warehouse clubs

Costco is a big, visible example, but the model works anywhere there's a loyal base and a reason to stay.

We see it with retailers looking for loyalty that goes beyond the checkout. We see it with credit unions competing to be a member's primary institution, and with membership and fan communities. And we've seen it with more than 30 independent ISPs that have launched branded mobile with us.

In every case, the logic is the same as Costco's. The plan earns its keep by making the core relationship stickier.

The question worth asking

If you run a brand with a loyal base, the question isn't "Should we sell phone plans?"

It's "What would it be worth if every loyal customer had one more reason to stay, every single month?"

Costco has placed its bet on that answer. The tools to make the same move under your own brand already exist, and that's exactly what we built Reach to do.

If you'd like to see what a members-only plan could look like for your brand, book a demo with our team.

Sources

Jules Pearson
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