A common battle cry in the carrier war heard in recent years has been "yeah, but those plans all suck compared to Sprint SERO." A little too common, in fact -- a significant fraction of subscribers signed up for the incredibly lucrative employee referral packages didn't actually know any Sprint employees -- but at $30 for several hundred voice minutes plus unlimited data and texting, that whole referral thing was an ordeal worth enduring. Well, you can kiss that sweet little deal goodbye, because SERO has been replaced with the more slickly-named "Everything Plus" package which packs basically the same features for $59.99, a healthy bump in price of 100 percent. What's more, would-be buyers now need to know a Sprint staffer's employee ID to sign up, closing a longstanding loophole that required no more than an email address, which is usually a pretty easy bit of information to score. All told, the plans are still decent deals, but still, grandfathered SERO customers have got to be chuckling to themselves right about now.

[Via phoneArena]