Most of my circle seems to like that crap. You can opt out, all of the carriers have prepaid offerings with much lower rates and a lot less financing. Maybe you get less data priority, almost certainly you get a lower tier of customer service, but those are ok tradeoffs for me. If you want to save more money, you can go to former MVNOs now owned by the carrier they run on or actually independent MVNOs. https://prepaidcompare.net/ seems like a good place to compare plans. They also have deals listings if you want to have fun with subsidy locked phones.