MinuteWatcher has announced they are going out of business. The free minute monitoring service most recently was blocked by T-Mobile completely. Today, they issued the following statement in-part to users:
Two factors led to this decision:
* Operating the system was very maintenance intensive. There is no standard interface to get the information from the carriers, just web scraping. Every change at the carrier site meant changes to the MinuteWatcher software.
* Resistance from the carriers themselves – Two carriers have cut us off. We could have come up with technical work-arounds, but they would have taken us places regarding security and privacy where we didn’t want to go. This was turning into a no-win situation…”
While all carriers offer up-to-date minute usage viewing, MinuteWatcher allowed for free, weekly email updates of this data to users inboxes. This competed directly with premium fee-based minute monitoring services that select carriers (such as Sprint) offer to customers.
