Hardly, you could do a one time payment of 500$ in a new iPhone 16e or 730$ for a iPhone 16 with AT&T’s prepaid annual 20$/month plan.
https://www.att.com/buy/prepaid-phones/browse/apple/There’s no free lunch here, cheap plans are noticeably worse in various ways, but like cable companies carriers don’t want to give you a good plan without bundling phone upgrades.
Visible’s $25/month plan mentions unlimited Hotspot for example, but good luck finding they always cap you at 5 Mbits on their website. Suddenly it makes more sense why someone might bump up to their $45/month plan for 3x the Hotspot speed. Even then 15Mbps isn’t that bad, but it’s a long way from 5G could provide.