Glossary — Brazilian plan categories
Product names are kept in Portuguese throughout: they are brand names, and translating them would make the figures impossible to check against the carriers' own pages.
Pré (prepaid)Top-up based. The recharge amount also sets the validity window,
so R$15 buys 15 days and R$30 buys 30. Only the 30-day tier is comparable to a monthly fee.
ControleHybrid: a fixed monthly fee with a hard data cap and no overage billing.
Sits between prepaid and postpaid, and is where most of the price competition happens.
Controle FitTIM's entry sub-family inside Controle, sold on a 12-month card
commitment. It is what pulled TIM's entry price down to R$20.
Flex / LiteDigital-only, no-contract plans (Claro Flex, Vivo Lite), bought and
managed in-app. Commercially they compete with prepaid, not with Controle.
Pós (postpaid)Conventional monthly billing with overage. Top of the range.
MVNOHere, NuCel — Nubank's operator riding Claro's network under a
revenue-share contract with an exclusivity clause approved by Anatel in Aug 2025.
The contested band between prepaid and Controle
Effective monthly price of every plan competing below R$120 — Controle Fit, Vivo Lite, Claro Flex, 30-day prepaid and the MVNO. Sorted cheapest to most expensive. The two grey bars are benchmarks, not plans: the R$30 that all three carriers charge for 30-day prepaid, and the R$60 level of traditional Controle.
Four things change how this chart reads.
(1) The grey bars are rulers. They mark the two anchors of the band. Anything below
the first undercuts prepaid; anything between them is priced as a prepaid alternative;
anything above the second is already in full Controle territory.
(2) NuCel is in Claro's colour on purpose — it is not a fourth competitor. It is an
MVNO on Claro's network under a revenue-share contract with exclusivity (approved by
Anatel in Aug 2025): NuCel's revenue is Claro's revenue. In practice Claro covers this band
twice — with Flex under its own brand and with NuCel under Nubank's — and collects either
way. Hollow bars because it is reference data, not scraped: the three tiers
(25GB R$45 · 30GB R$60 · 40GB R$70) come from Nubank's official blog, page updated
28 Aug 2026.
(3) Prepaid is only comparable at the 30-day tier. A R$15/15-day top-up is not a
"R$15 entry price": normalised, it is the same R$30 per month. That is why only the 30-day
tier appears here.
(4) Same price is not the same offer. At R$30 the allowance ranges from 16GB to 35GB,
and Controle Fit requires a 12-month card commitment while prepaid requires nothing.
Price vs. data allowance — full mobile portfolio, today
Each point is a mobile plan in the 18 Sep 2026 collection. Allowance on X, price on Y: the further down and to the right, the better the value. The dashed line is R$2.00/GB — everything below it delivers more GB per real.
Total allowance includes promotional bonuses. That inflates some Claro plans:
the "Bônus Pais" (Father's Day bonus) has been running since before 9 Aug and accounts
for 10–15GB across the three cheapest Flex tiers. If it lapses, those points drop without any
price changing. Plans with no published allowance (TIM Black Express and Família) are
excluded from this chart.
Controle entry price — a line, not a plan
Lowest effective price among each carrier's Controle plans, collection by collection. TIM's dashed line includes Controle Fit; the solid one is traditional Controle only.
The gap between TIM's two lines is the whole point of this chart.
When Fit launched on 26 Jul, the "entry price" fell from R$58.99 to R$30 — and later to R$20 —
without a single plan being repriced: a cheaper tier simply came into existence. Reading the
dashed line as a 66% price cut would be wrong.
And the solid line misleads too if read without history: today's R$49.99 already appeared on 4 Aug, went back to R$58.99, and has now dropped again. This is the second cycle of the same step — promotional cycling, not a structural cut.
The axis starts at zero deliberately. The gap here is genuinely large — Fit at R$20 against R$54.90 and R$59.00 is a third of the price — and precisely because it is real it should be measured against zero rather than an arbitrary floor.
And the solid line misleads too if read without history: today's R$49.99 already appeared on 4 Aug, went back to R$58.99, and has now dropped again. This is the second cycle of the same step — promotional cycling, not a structural cut.
The axis starts at zero deliberately. The gap here is genuinely large — Fit at R$20 against R$54.90 and R$59.00 is a third of the price — and precisely because it is real it should be measured against zero rather than an arbitrary floor.
Prepaid — 30-day tier
The 30-day tier is the only one comparable to a monthly fee. Price on the left, the tier's data allowance in the legend.
All three charge exactly R$30 and differ only in allowance:
Vivo 25GB, Claro 21GB, TIM 16GB. Claro only appears from 29 Jul because that is when Prezão
entered our coverage — the product has existed since Oct 2024. A line starting there
means entry into our coverage, not a launch.
Postpaid entry price
Lowest effective price among each carrier's individual postpaid plans.
Flat across the entire series: TIM R$119.99, Claro R$124.90 and
Vivo R$150.00, without a single move in 11 collections. The contrast with how volatile
Controle has been is the finding here — price competition is happening at the entry band,
not at the top.
Fixed broadband entry price
Lowest effective fibre price per carrier (includes Vivo Fibra Lite).
With the axis starting at zero, the chart shows what actually matters:
fibre entry pricing is nearly identical across all three. Today that is R$89.90 at Claro,
R$90.00 at Vivo (Fibra Lite) and R$99.99 at TIM — 11% separates cheapest from dearest, in a
segment whose top end exceeds R$2,000. On an axis cropped to the data range those three lines
would sit far apart and imply a price war that is not happening at this end.
Claro's 15 Aug cut (1 Giga from R$199.90 to R$179.90) does not show up here because it did not touch the entry price — it happened mid-ladder. Entry moves and portfolio moves are different things.
Claro's 15 Aug cut (1 Giga from R$199.90 to R$179.90) does not show up here because it did not touch the entry price — it happened mid-ladder. Entry moves and portfolio moves are different things.
Price per GB, mobile
Median and best case per carrier, across the 69 mobile plans with a published allowance in today's collection.
A good metric for ranking, a poor one for concluding on its own: it ignores
contract lock-in, bundled apps, and the difference between permanent allowance and temporary
bonus. TIM leads on R$/GB because of Fit, which requires a 12-month card commitment —
while TIM's own prepaid, with no commitment at all, is the worst R$/GB of the three.
Entry band — table
The same data as the first chart, with R$/GB calculated. Benchmark rows are shaded and have no allowance by design — they are price rulers, not products.
| Plan | Carrier | Category | Price | GB | R$/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TIM Controle Fit Mensal 1.0 | TIM | Controle Fit | R$ 20.00 | 20 | 1.00 |
| Benchmark · prepaid 30-day price ruler | Benchmark | Benchmark | R$ 30.00 | — | — |
| Vivo Pré 25GB | Vivo | Prepaid 30d | R$ 30.00 | 25 | 1.20 |
| Vivo Lite 30GB | Vivo | Lite | R$ 30.00 | 30 | 1.00 |
| TIM Pré XIP 16GB | TIM | Prepaid 30d | R$ 30.00 | 16 | 1.88 |
| TIM Controle Fit Anual 2.0 | TIM | Controle Fit | R$ 30.00 | 35 | 0.86 |
| Claro Prezão 21GB | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 30.00 | 21 | 1.43 |
| Claro Prezão TikTok | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 34.99 | 17 | 2.06 |
| Claro Prezão Free Fire | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 34.99 | 17 | 2.06 |
| Vivo Lite 20GB | Vivo | Lite | R$ 35.00 | 20 | 1.75 |
| Claro Prezão Shopee | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 35.00 | 17 | 2.06 |
| Claro Prezão Kwai | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 35.00 | 17 | 2.06 |
| Claro Prezão Uber | Claro | Prepaid 30d | R$ 35.00 | 17 | 2.06 |
| Vivo Lite 40GB | Vivo | Lite | R$ 40.00 | 40 | 1.00 |
| Claro Flex 35GB | Claro | Flex | R$ 44.90 | 35 | 1.28 |
| TIM Controle Fit Mensal 2.0 | TIM | Controle Fit | R$ 45.00 | 35 | 1.29 |
| NuCel 25GB (entry) reference | NuCel (MVNO) | MVNO | R$ 45.00 | 25 | 1.80 |
| Claro Flex 40GB | Claro | Flex | R$ 59.90 | 40 | 1.50 |
| Benchmark · traditional Controle price ruler | Benchmark | Benchmark | R$ 60.00 | — | — |
| NuCel 30GB (mid) reference | NuCel (MVNO) | MVNO | R$ 60.00 | 30 | 2.00 |
| Claro Flex 45GB | Claro | Flex | R$ 69.90 | 45 | 1.55 |
| NuCel 40GB (top) reference | NuCel (MVNO) | MVNO | R$ 70.00 | 40 | 1.75 |
| Claro Flex 50GB | Claro | Flex | R$ 119.90 | 50 | 2.40 |