Wow, we have had Dish pay as you go for at least the last four years, you are required to pay for a full month in advance, but don’t need to use the whole month once you start! We used for weekends many times, called to activate once we had located all three satellites, then at the end of the weekend we would call and cancel service. This way we only paid for the two or three days we used not a whole month. We do own both the TailGator and vip211 receiver.
The next time we went out, to get it activated we just had to pay for the two or three days we last used, and that could have been six months ago.