Like all the different cell phone categories this is a very competitive category. To get your cost per month (not including buying the phone) you will need to buy a three month or yearly phone card.
There are several ways to have cell phone access for $10 per month or less.
Tracfone, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, and At&t all have prepaid plans that can cost you ten dollars a month or less.
With Tracfone you can purchase a $20 or $30 or $100 phone card and add it to your phone and use your phone for less than ten dollars a month. Most of their phone cards will give you 90 days of service along with a certain number of minutes. The larger denomination the Tracfone card, the more minutes per dollar you get. Tracfone has a DMFL program that doubles all the phone cards you add to your phone for the life of the phone. I would not add minutes to a Tracfone if it did not have DMFL. You can purchase Tracfone minutes for as little as 6.6 cents to as high as 33 cents each.
Until I looked into it I would never have guessed that Verizon Wireless offers a phone with access for as little as $10 per month. With a Prepaid Verizon phone if you add a $100 phone card your phone will have access for twelve months as long as you do not use up all of your cash balance. Verizon Prepaid Minute will cost you 25 cents each in the basic plan. You can sign up for the 99 cents per day prepaid plan and you will get unlimited calling to other Verizon phones for the calendar day.
T-Mobile has been an active supplier of prepaid phones since they started in the United States. If you add $100 to your Prepaid T-Mobile account you will get a year of service. The basic T-Mobile service will charge you ten cents a minute if you have added the $100 card to your phone.
The At&t Go phone plan will allow you to pay $100 and have a full years service. With their plan you will be charged 10 cents a minute.
Texting is very poplular for several reasons. You can text a lot for $10 per month with a couple of different plans.
Both Verizon Prepaid and At&t have Ten dollar a month texting plans. Check out Verizon Prepaid Texting. Also you can check out the $10 option with AT&t Text Messaging.