The Indihome Loyalty Tax: Why Staying Quiet Costs You More Than Switching

The Setup

I’ve been an Indihome customer since 2019, and looking back at seven years of bills tells a story I didn’t expect to write: how a fiber connection went from a years-long wait to a routine phone call, and how much a provider will let you overpay if you never ask for anything better.

Here’s the full timeline, plan by plan.

2019: Waiting for a Pole and an ODP Slot

Before I could even subscribe, I had to wait. Indihome needed a pole near my house, and even after that showed up, the local ODP (the fiber distribution box that splits the connection to nearby homes) was full. No free ports meant no new subscribers until Telkom either added capacity or someone else canceled. It took years of checking back before a slot opened.

When it finally did: 10 Mbps Dual Play, Rp278k/month, 300GB FUP.

2020: A Phone Call That Doubled My Speed

A year later Telkom customer service called me, offering an upsell: pay an extra 20k a month and get double the speed. 20 Mbps Dual Play, Rp299k/month, 800GB FUP. Twice the speed for about 7% more money.

2022: Another Step Up

30 Mbps Dual Play, Rp335k/month, FUP somewhere around 1000GB. At this point I’d been on Dual Play (internet + TV) for three years without really watching the TV part.

January 2023: Realizing I Was Paying for TV I Never Watched

This was the real turning point. I found out Indihome has internet-only plans, and they’re cheaper than the Dual Play bundle I’d been on for years. I canceled the TV line entirely. In hindsight this should have been obvious from day one, but the Dual Play package is the default option pushed at signup, and I never questioned it until I went looking.

2023: Two Upgrades in One Year, One of Them a Surprise

40 Mbps, Internet Only, Rp366k/month. Then, just days after that upgrade, a Valentine’s Day promo showed up out of nowhere: 50 Mbps, Internet Only, Rp327k/month, ~1500GB FUP. Faster and cheaper than the plan I’d just switched to days earlier. I didn’t request this one, it just appeared as a limited-time seasonal offer. That’s the moment I realized these price drops aren’t tied to any predictable schedule, they show up whenever Telkom decides to run a promo, and if you’re not paying attention you miss the window entirely.

2025: Requesting a Migration, Getting Told No, Then Going to the Store

I asked for a migration to a faster plan through the usual channels and got the standard answer: that offer was for new customers only, not existing subscribers. Instead of leaving it there, I went to a Grapari (Telkom’s physical store) in person. There, I got the upgrade: 150 Mbps, Internet Only, Rp366k/month, ~2000GB FUP, along with a premium ONT swap needed to push that speed reliably. The same request that got rejected online worked in person. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern that shows up again a year later.

2026: A Fresh Install, Then Chasing Down an Add-On Nobody Offered Me

Moving meant starting over: a brand new installation at 50 Mbps, Rp271k/month. A few months in, I noticed other people getting WhatsApp offers for speed add-ons, some for +300 Mbps at around Rp40k, others for +500 Mbps at around Rp60k. The pricing wasn’t the same for everyone, it looked like the amount charged was scaled to what each customer already pays, sort of a personalized rate rather than a fixed menu. I never received a WhatsApp offer myself, likely because my line was still under 4 months old at the time. I asked customer service through social media and pushed the request, and they came back with a +300 Mbps add-on for Rp40k. Before agreeing, I asked if there was anything cheaper. Turns out there was: +200 Mbps for just Rp10k (excluding tax), bringing my plan to 200 Mbps for Rp282k/month total.

Worth clarifying since this trips people up: the add-on isn’t additive. My base plan was still 50 Mbps, and the +200 Mbps add-on doesn’t stack on top of it, it brings the actual speed to 200 Mbps total, not 250 Mbps. The app still lists the add-on as its own line item, it just replaces the base speed rather than adding to it.

Two separate upgrades, two initial rejections, two “no” answers that turned into “yes” only because I didn’t accept the first response, and in the second case, asking one more question saved me even more.

2026 (cont’d): Downgrading to a Retention Plan, Losing the Add-On, Then Getting It Back

A friend told me something I hadn’t considered: downgrade the base plan to something cheap, 10 to 20 Mbps, and the speed add-on stays active on top of it. Same 200 Mbps total speed, much smaller bill, because the add-on price barely moves while the base plan drops a lot. I decided to try it.

First problem: Indihome’s 188 customer service line only accepts calls from Telkom-family numbers, Simpati, byU, and similar, not other carriers. So I bought a new Simpati SIM (Rp20k) plus Rp10k of pulsa just to be able to call in. A call to 188 costs around Rp300, so the pulsa was more than enough.

I called and asked to downgrade to the cheapest available plan, what I’m pretty sure was a retention offer, and confirmed multiple times during the call that the 200 Mbps add-on would stay active after the change. Two days later the downgrade to 10 Mbps went through, but the add-on was gone. I called CS again, and they confirmed it, the add-on had indeed been dropped, despite my repeated confirmation during the original call. I asked them to pull the call recording to verify what I’d been told, and they actually did, but only after a long hold. The outcome was still just a promise that someone would call me back, which didn’t happen because the agent was off duty.

So from morning until evening I was stuck on plain 10 Mbps. It held up better than I expected, YouTube and Gmail still worked fine, the only real difference was a noticeably slower initial load on anything, pages and apps would hang for a bit before responding, but once loaded things ran normally. Not great, but not the disaster I was bracing for.

In the evening I called 188 again, got a different agent, and the 200 Mbps add-on was reactivated within a few minutes, no drama this time.

End result: 10 Mbps base plan + 200 Mbps add-on, Rp160k/month before tax, about Rp182.6k/month with 11% tax and roughly Rp5k in other fees, down from Rp282k/month for the same 200 Mbps. Total cost of getting there: Rp20k for the SIM card, roughly Rp2k of pulsa actually used, plus a chunk of a day spent on hold. Call it Rp22k and some patience to cut the monthly bill by around a third.

The Pattern

Laid out end to end, the pricing doesn’t move in a straight line with speed, and it doesn’t move on its own either. Nobody at Telkom calls existing customers to say “hey, there’s a cheaper or faster plan available now.” Worse, when you ask directly, the default answer is often no. Both of my last two upgrades, the 150 Mbps migration in 2025 and the 200 Mbps add-on in 2026, were initially rejected by customer service before I got them anyway, one by walking into a physical store, one by simply not accepting the first “not available” over social media. If I had just let my subscription auto-renew silently since 2019, or taken the first “no” at face value, I would still be paying Rp278k for 10 Mbps today.

The clearest proof is the last line of the timeline. In 2026, a brand new customer can sign up for 50 Mbps at Rp271k, cheaper than the 10 Mbps plan I paid for in 2019. Same company, same base tier, five times the speed, less money, just because that customer is signing up today instead of seven years ago. There’s sometimes a “loyalty speed boost” for long-time customers, but it’s inconsistent, seasonal, and easy to get told doesn’t exist unless you push back.

Here’s the same story in price per Mbps, which makes the trend impossible to miss:

Year	Plan	Price/month	Price per Mbps
2019	10 Mbps	Rp278k	Rp27,800
2020	20 Mbps	Rp299k	Rp14,950
2022	30 Mbps	Rp335k	Rp11,167
2023	40 Mbps	Rp366k	Rp9,150
2023 (Valentine promo)	50 Mbps	Rp327k	Rp6,540
2025 (migration, in-store)	150 Mbps	Rp366k	Rp2,440
2026 (new install)	50 Mbps	Rp271k	Rp5,420
2026 (add-on, pushed for it)	200 Mbps	Rp282k	Rp1,410
2026 (retention downgrade, add-on kept)	200 Mbps	Rp182.6k	Rp913

Price per Mbps dropped by roughly 95% over seven years, but almost none of that drop came from Telkom automatically passing savings to me, and a good chunk of it came from refusing to accept “no” the first time, and then asking one more question after that. The lesson isn’t really about Indihome specifically. It’s that ISP pricing in Indonesia is opt-in, not opt-out, and sometimes not even opt-in through the normal channel. Providers keep long-time customers on old pricing by default, let new promos sit quietly behind a phone call or a seasonal campaign, personalize add-on pricing per customer, and train customer service to say no by default until someone pushes back or walks into a store. If you don’t go looking, and don’t push when you’re told no, you pay a quiet tax for staying loyal.

This timeline reflects my plan history up to mid-2026. If you’re reading this later, prices and promos have probably shifted again, that’s kind of the whole point.