What do you get when you combine friends and family? You get a new Sprint marketing slogan known as "Framily." The Now Network is launching the new Framily Plans on January 10th and encouraging people – related or not – to get together on a single account. The mechanics of the Framily Plans are more than a little different than traditional family plans, though.

The cost of each line changes based on how many people are on the account. For example, you can be a Framily all by yourself for $55 per month. For 2 lines, each one costs $50 per month. Three lines are $45 each, and so on until you hit 7. It is only 7-10 lines that get you the $25 per line per month deal. These prices only include 1GB of data with unlimited talk and text, which is a big departure for Sprint, the land of unlimited bytes. You can bump the data on any line up to 3GB for an additional $10 per month. An extra $20 gets you unlimited data and an annual phone upgrade through Sprint. Each line gets its own billing statement with Framily Plans, so you can join up with people who you would prefer didn't see your call logs.

Sprint seems interested in moving people off of unlimited plans as its data network is slowly beefed up. Previously, it was hard for most customers to suck down very many bits, but that's changing as LTE spreads. If you're already on Sprint and are not eligible for an upgrade, you can still get a Framily plan by paying an extra $15 per month until you are upgrade-eligible again. You could do the $20 per month early upgrade program for a year, whichever is cheaper. The $15 monthly fee is being temporarily waved if you want to give up your unlimited data and move over, though.

Framily Plans will also focus on Sprint's new Easy Pay program, which is basically a device installment plan like T-Mobile recently implemented. So you can finance a phone and do a Framily Plan, presumably without contract, instead of a regular subsidized plan. If you're not doing the $20 per month upgrade plan with your Framily Plan, it sounds like you're going to be doing Easy Pay for upgrades (or pay full price). There are still some unknowns here, but hopefully Sprint will clear things up soon. Easy Pay is only available in select areas right now, but Framily Plans will be live in all stores January 10th.

[Sprint, PR]