GoKawiilFor a cabin, the occasional road trip or a household that barely dents its monthly data allowance, Roam 100GB or 300GB could be perfectly workable. The equation changes once the Mini becomes the connection handling everything at home.
Use up your high-speed allowance, and Starlink drops your service to unlimited low-speed data for the rest of the billing period. That leaves a Roam 100GB customer paying the same $55 starting price as Residential 100 Mbps while getting a limited high-speed data pool. And anybody wanting to sidestep the cap entirely has to spend $175 on Roam Unlimited, $45 more than Residential Max.
Apart from all that, there is another wrinkle. Starlink gives Residential Max customers its highest Residential network priority, while it warns that Roam speeds can slow during congestion. So someone using a Mini permanently at home can wind up paying more for unlimited data while receiving service that was designed around portability rather than sitting beside the same porch every day.
That's not a particularly glamorous trade. Roam does earn its name, at least. The plans support travel and can be paused, which makes considerably more sense for a Mini being tossed into an RV than one gathering dust beside your house. Starlink opened the Mini to standalone Roam customers in the US in 2024, removing the original requirement for an existing Residential subscription.