Sorry if this is slightly OT. I have a 4S and would absolutely love a 5S, but I've decided to prioritize paying down some debt over getting a new phone.
I am eligible for an upgrade though, and would like to take advantage of it by buying a subsidized 5S for $200 and selling it for whatever the market will bear.
As a Verizon user, does anyone know the best way of going through the mechanics on this? Once the 5S's are back in stock, do I just go in and say "I want to upgrade but don't want to activate it right now."? Will they let me do this?
Also, once I have it, what's the best way to sell it? I'd like to avoid Craigslist and ebay if I can, but if they're the best channels I guess I could go that way.
No, they'll almost certainly have to activate it in store. They can, however, activate it back.
I guess you're trying to make some kind of profit off of it, but the market isn't really that great for it. Your baseline cost if $650. That's how much a brand new one from Apple costs. While the supply is still short, it's not drastically short. Apple stores are getting them in stock all the time during the day so you're not going to get more than $650.
And I don't think you're going to get CLOSE to $650 either. Looking at recently sold on Swappa, it looks like they're trending about $50-100 less than retail, unless you get a gold one.
So you're looking at, let's say $600, minus your initial $275 (which would be $199 + $30 upgrade fee + tax), you'll come out with around $300-$325, if you can find someone to buy it locally and not have to worry about paypal fees or shipping.
Also, if you're interested in a 5S for yourself, you could always trade in your 4S for it, and knock the price of the 5S down to about $100 or less. Just food for thought. Selling your 4S yourself would cancel the cost out, or really close to it.
I googled it, and couldn't find anything. The 2GB is just for that phone (out of 6GB) so Verizon won't send them anything since it's a shared plan. Maybe there is a 3rd party app.
A third party app on iOS won't have hooks in to that low-level of information on the device. It could possibly be solved by a jailbreak hack, but you're probably going to be waiting a while on that one.
But you may just want to check out the usage controls Verizon provides you:
https://insidersguide.vzw.com/article/my-verizon-usage-controls/
They will let you set a data limit per line on the account and send that line (or the account admin as well) a text when they reach certain percentages of that usage. You can set the line to have a 2GB limit, give them a text at 50, 75 and 100% of that usage, and then have the data connection disabled once they hit it. Seems to be what you'd want.
EDIT: I just noticed this feature seems to be $5/mo extra, which sucks. But, if it helps you solve a problem that may be costing you more than $5/mo, then it should at least be worth it.