Starlink for $349? Some areas of the US see lowest kit price yet

Back in April, I wrote about a refurbished kit promotion that Starlink was running in the United States. In that offer, you could buy refurbished hardware for $399, about 30% off the normal new price of $599. This month, Starlink has introduced an even better offer for some areas of the US. You can now buy a brand new kit for just $349 with the Residential service plan.

A sign of slowing demand?

On one hand, I’m glad the US is finally getting some nice discounts. We’ve seen similar promotions around the world throughout Starlink’s history. Typically, in places with lower demand for services, Starlink will try to compete with existing ISP’s by reducing the price of the service and/or hardware. But they’ve never had to do that in the US where demand has been consistently high.

On the other hand, could this be a signal that growth is slowing down? If Starlink’s largest market is in need of incentives to push sales, it could be a sign that most people who need Starlink are already signed up.

Starlink recently tweeted that they have over 3 million subscribers worldwide, with the US being their largest market. That’s up from just over 2 million back in December 2023. That may seem like impressive growth, but according to a SpaceX presentation from 2015, Starlink expected to have a lot more users by now. As Arstechnica.com reported, SpaceX projected to have 20 million subscribers by this point.

To be clear, I’m not saying Starlink is in trouble. I’m simply speculating on why Starlink might be choosing to offer discounts in their hottest market. It could also be that Starlink simply has too many of their Gen 3 Standard kits in inventory. Gen 3, released late last year in the US, has been rolling out slowly worldwide. Perhaps current owners aren’t as willing to upgrade as Starlink predicted, or maybe the newest hardware iteration isn’t as popular as previous models.

How to get the discount anywhere in the US

I mentioned earlier that this $349 hardware offer was only available in certain areas of the US. If you are looking to buy Starlink and you don’t see the discounted kit price when you checkout, don’t worry. You can actually get this offer anywhere in the US, you don’t need to live in an eligible area.

First you need to find an address that is eligible for the promotional price. If you head to Starlink.com and start typing in the service address box, an address search will start populating. Click where it says, “Set location on map”. Now you can drag your location anywhere on the map, instead of trying to type in addresses manually. Drag the dot around the US, zooming in on an area until the Order Now button becomes active. When it does, click it to see if that location is eligible for the $349 hardware offer. If not, continue to another state and try again.

Within a few minutes, I found that Arizona and Virginia were eligible. It could change by the time you read this. I assume there are only a certain number of orders that Starlink will apply this promotion to before it ends in a state.

Once you’ve found an eligible address to order from, you need to complete the checkout process. The trick here is to specify a different shipping address so that you can have your kit delivered to your actual location, rather than the random service address you searched for. If you aren’t in the US, sorry, you won’t be able to ship outside of the country to get this offer.

When you have the correct shipping address and payment information filled out, hit Place Order. The kit will ship to the shipping address you specified, but service will only be active at the service address you found on the map. To fix this problem, you will need to update your service address in your Starlink account dashboard when you receive your kit. Once you’ve updated the service address to match your physical location, you will be able to connect and get online with your new kit.

That’s it! It’s a pretty simple workaround to be able to get the discounted hardware price anywhere in the US on the Residential service plan.

How to apply the discount to Roam/Mobile

I’ve showed you how to get the $349 promotional offer at any location in the US, but you can only get it with a Residential plan order. What if you want a discounted kit to use with the Roam/Mobile plan? I’ve got you covered.

Place a Residential order based on the instructions in the previous section. Go through the whole process, updating your service address when you receive the kit. Power everything on and make sure it connects to the internet.

You’ll be stuck on Residential for your first billing cycle, about 30 days. But after that, you can change your service plan to Roam/Mobile. To do this, log in to your account dashboard, click Manage on your service plan, and then click Change Service Plan. If you don’t see that button on your dashboard, you will have to wait until your second billing cycle before it appears. Still don’t see it? You can always just cancel your subscription, wait until the billing cycle ends, and then hit Activate and select to activate on Roam instead of Residential.

By the way, you might not even need to switch to Roam. Did you know you can travel around with Residential, as long as you update your service address each time you move? Residential is cheaper and has higher network priority, so it might be worth considering. Check out our YouTube video on this topic for more information.