By Harold Phillips | March 2026
It started with a coworker asking me to explain what I meant.
I'd mentioned, offhand, something about "referral maxxing," the idea that you can stack free months of phone and internet just by recommending services you already use to people who'd actually benefit from them. I said it the way you say anything you've been thinking about for a while: like it was obvious, like everyone was already doing it.
She looked at me like I'd started speaking French.
So I explained it. Properly, sitting across from each other near the kitchen coffee machine, me talking and her occasionally saying "wait, really?" By the end of it she'd signed up for three services on her phone before finishing her coffee. I walked back to my desk feeling mildly vindicated.
That conversation happened maybe eighteen months ago. I've had some version of it roughly forty times since.
The Spreadsheet Nobody Asked For
Here's the thing. I didn't start out trying to optimize anything. I just liked Fizz. I'd switched from one of the big three because my bill had crept up to something embarrassing, and a coworker (a different coworker, for what it's worth) mentioned she was paying $29 a month for a plan that covered everything I actually needed. So I switched. I told people about it. Some of them switched too.
That was the whole strategy.
At some point in late 2023, I was poking around my Fizz account and noticed the referral total. I'd accumulated over 125 referrals. Not because I was running ads or doing anything I'd describe as a strategy, just because I liked the service and I'm apparently the kind of person who talks about phone plans at parties. (My partner has strong opinions about this tendency. Mostly that I have too many of them.)
My first reaction was just: huh.
My second reaction was to check my Oxio account. Over 200. I had years of free phone and internet stacked up, accumulated without any real effort, just from being someone who recommends things when they work.
That last part felt important.
The thing about finding out you've been good at something without trying is that it makes you wonder what would happen if you actually tried. I didn't do anything with that thought for a while. Kept recommending things, kept sending the same message ("here, use my referral code when you sign up") in response to the same questions.
And then I did the math.
I'm a project manager, so spreadsheets are basically a hobby at this point. One evening I tallied up roughly what I'd earned in referral rewards across the services I use: Fizz, Oxio, Wealthsimple, a couple others. The number wasn't nothing. Several hundred dollars in credits and cash, spread across a few years, just from talking. Not a fortune. Not passive income that was going to change my life. But also not nothing, which is what I'd been treating it as.
I'd been doing this casually for years without a single intentional decision. It made me curious what a few intentional decisions would look like.
The "Content Creator" Problem
I genuinely hate the phrase "content creator." It flattens what's interesting about people writing things on the internet: the accumulated opinions, the specific voice, the actual personality built up over years of paying attention to things. It turns all of that into a grey category of content to be produced and consumed. The whole framing makes me tired.
So when the idea of a blog surfaced, I spent a while convincing myself I wasn't doing that.
What I was actually doing was writing down things I was already explaining over text message. Friends who'd just escaped a Rogers contract and wanted to know what to switch to. Coworkers who'd seen a Wealthsimple ad and needed someone they trusted to say whether it was actually worth the hassle. Family members who'd heard about Fizz secondhand and wanted a real opinion before committing to anything new.
The blog is a long text message I can send as a link (and stop retyping from memory every time someone asks).
That framing made it feel okay. I'm not producing content — I'm writing down what I'd say if you called and asked. The fact that strangers might find it useful is genuinely a bonus, not the point. I'd probably still be writing this if no one read it, because it would still save me from writing the same paragraph in iMessage for the forty-first time.
Honestly, I'm not sure this works out the way I'm imagining. I don't know how many people are actually searching "is Fizz worth it in Toronto" and landing here, versus how many read one post and disappear forever. I don't know if the referral income ever adds up to more than a rounding error, or whether I'll still be writing this in two years. These are real uncertainties, and I'd be lying if I said they didn't occasionally cross my mind while I'm sitting here at my desk writing about phone plans on a Tuesday evening.
What I do know is that the recommendations are real. I've watched people save money using them, not in theory, but in actual text message conversations afterward. "Oh wow, my bill actually dropped." "I can't believe I waited this long."
That's enough to keep writing.
What You'll Actually Find Here
Most posts are recommendations for services I personally use: MVNOs like Fizz and Oxio, banking alternatives like Wealthsimple and Simplii, and a few other things where I've done enough research to have a perspective worth something.
When I recommend something, there's often a referral link. When you sign up through it, I might get a small credit, and I'm not going to be coy about that. The referral income is part of what makes this worth running. But it only works if I'm actually honest. The second I start softening a review because a service has a referral program attached, the whole thing falls apart. So I don't. If something has real problems, I'll say so. If a competitor without a referral deal is genuinely the better choice for your situation, I'll say that instead. Credibility is the whole point.
Beans knocked my water glass onto my keyboard while I was writing this last paragraph. The keyboard survived. Beans was completely unrepentant.
That's the blog. I'm a 34-year-old IT project manager in Toronto (at a company that makes project management software, yes, I've heard the joke) who talks too much about phone plans and finally wrote it down somewhere. If something here saves you money, I'd genuinely like to hear about it.
Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link — you'll always see a note about it.