Now an app that lets you keep tab on mobile usage

Planhound app helps users track their mobile usage based on data plan, voice calls, sms and roaming usage.

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Planhound is an app that helps users keep tab of their mobile usage (Source: Nandagopal Rajan)

Keeping tab of your mobile phone usage is one of the biggest pain points of our time. While service providers offer their own apps to keep tab on usage and recharge accounts when needed, multi-service apps of this kind are rare. This is where the updated Planhound 2 app wants to make difference.

“We built a recommendation engine to help people discover the right plan based on their usage, but soon figured that a majority of the mobile users did not know their usage because they were mobile prepaid users who did not get a mobile bill. That is when the app idea was born — something that sits on your phone and can measure all this automatically,” explains Jigar Doshi, co-founder of Cheeni Labs, creators of the new app. He says that with usage being accurate, the recommendations are better and the savings a lot more real.

The app automatically recognises your service provider, the kind of network you are on and how much balance you have. On a post-paid connection, it shows usage, but not the unbilled amount. It shows data usage, call minutes and SMS number as well as roaming usage.

planhound

Doshi accepts that while the app works for both post and prepaid connection, those on the latter will find more value. “Our target audience is every smartphone user primarily between 18 to 34.”

One of the features is the ability of the app to tell you the balance on DTH accounts connected to the number. “On the supply side, we have direct partnerships with all DTH operators (TataSky, Videocon D2h, DishTV, Airtel DTH & SunDirect) because we sell new DTH connections,” says Doshi, for whom new DTH connections is still the primary business model. “To fulfil recharge, we are connected with a bunch of aggregators. On the Payments side, we are partnered with PayU, PayUMoney, OLA Money, TPSL and Bill desk. To allow cash-pickups, we have partnered with Delhivery.”

Doshi says his eventual goal is to use the data and intelligence to help people discover the right service-provider + plan and help them switch or buy the new connection – be it on Mobile, Internet (wired and wireless) and DTH. “We have proved this and scaled reasonably on DTH. We want to do the same with Internet and Mobile,” he says, underlining that they have sold more than 20,000 DTH connections across India.