Google opens its cheap cellphone service to everyone

Google is officially opening its cellphone carrier service to anyone who wants to try it.

The service, dubbed "Project Fi," has until now required an invite to sign up since Google launched it 10 months ago, but the wait list is officially gone.

There are a few things that make Fi unique, like its pricing and how its data works.

The service's connectivity relies on a combination of T-Mobile's and Sprint's networks as well as available Wi-Fi, automatically switching between all three to give you the strongest signal and fastest data speeds.

Users pay $20 for unlimited talk and texting and $10 per gigabyte of data, but Google charges only for the exact amount of data you use. So, if you paid $30 for 3GB of data but used only 1.4GB, you'd get $16 back.

Google says that its early users pay for an average of 1.6GB of data per month.

But even if that pricing scheme sounds good to you, then you won't want to sign up for Fi if you're an iPhone lover. The service works only with Google Nexus 6X, 5X, and 6 smartphones.

To convince more people to make the switch, Google's lopping $100 off the Nexus 5X, pricing it at $199 for the next month when users buy and activate it through Project Fi.

The company shared some other facts in its blog post on the news, too, like that 15% of its customers have used the service abroad - it's supported in 120 different countries with the same rates - and that 95% of customer-service calls connect users to a real person in 20 seconds or less.