I know this is going to sound like an ad. Visible has unlimited 5G, and 5Mbps* hotspot, for $25/mo. It's owned by Verizon.

I think companies call that "innovation" these days.

Get Google fi if it's available. Very consumer friendly. Actually let me rephrase that. More consumer friendly than most other cell providers. But it's still Google.

At least all the pricing and features are straight forward and they don't lock any features (like Hotspot) behind paywalls.

Thank you for putting this into words. Verizon does the same thing to me, I've been on the same plan for four or five years, and I haven't been able to articulate it the way you did. Thank you for explaining what's happening.

Around about 2009 or so I had a mobile plan with Virgin that did that same trick (I think this was plugging your phone in to a computer as a modem as opposed to wireless hotspot but same thing anyway) and it was limited to 5 MEGABYTES after which they wanted 15pence per KILOBYTE I couldn't believe what I was reading. I never ran afoul of it because I checked this out first when buying the plan and made sure never to use that function but it just seemed literally unreal. I've been shocked at how much things cost before but that seemed more like a mistake or something, I just can't imagine they ever actually made anyone pay for that, the negative press would be too bad. It was not unheard of at the time for people to have excess charges on limited plans waived because it was a shock and they were unaware or unprepared for those charges accruing so the idea that someone might have checked emails, read a news article, checked Facebook and possibly a web video having not read the fine print and ended up with tens if not over a hundred GBP of charges just doesn't seem feasible. Really fucking crazy.

Oops

Get a custom ROM and a VPN.

Try plugging your phone on via the USB instead of a WiFi hotspot. It may not detect it as a hotspot.

Basically they don't want you to turn your phone into a mobile router.

Get EasyTether for your phone ($10) and you can USB tether to any PC that has the companion app installed (free).

Even a Raspberry Pi works. I have a Pi configured to broadcast as a WiFi AP, so I just plug in my phone via USB and I have instant WiFi for all of my devices. Takes a fair amount of configuration to do that, but there are tutorials online. Much easier just plugging your phone into a laptop for internet on just that laptop.

Or maybe a laptop can act as a WiFi AP, too. I do know Windows can share internet out a free Ethernet port very easily.

I use a VPN so my wireless provider doesn't see Windows update or Stream downloads, etc.

Visible has an unlimited hotspot

I remember when I had the original iPhone with jailbreak I was able to use it as a hotspot without the carrier restrictions. Guessing it’s the same way now that it is handled in the OS and phone makers have carrier agreements to separate the traffic so people don’t use as much of their service as they pay for.

TTLMaster was what I used to fix this a few years ago

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but I kind of get this one. Unlimited data on your phone is constrained a bit because it's your phone. If you make your phone a hotspot and the whole family is using it to watch videos and stuff (and not paying for their own data plan), that's a pretty big difference to the infrastructure needs.