I don't understand this. Their new "plans" require that I subscribe to a full plan, for example, to call India? Does anybody have any good alternative?
https://www.callcentric.com/find/rate/
For North American use they were 0.0198 a minute .
Versus telnyx at 0.005 per minute but wants business registration.
Skype was 2.3 cents a minute and it was never great.
For anyone who had Skype because they didn’t have a voip phone , or know how to set up software: the free “Lin phone” client for Linux Mac windows and mobile can be configured with a SIP provider.
You just type in sip.callcentric.net and your login is the 1777xxxxxx account number. Password is set separately under the extensions tab.
That’s all you need and you can prepay a credit balance like you did with Skype
I am utilizing them for$1.99 a month inbound and pay per minute inbound too, though they have unlimited in and out I just don’t use it as much as the monthly fee. Love them.
Frankly better rates on twilio and telnyx for high volume and business use which also allow pay as you go but both now require corporate/business registration, EIN, blah blah both of which I’ve done for business use but were a headache.
There are others like voip.ms which fell in the middle rate wise but also demanded so much documentation or hassle I just said no thank you
I use my Skype credit when abroad and making local calls so this is quite painful
I wanted to remain in contact with a friend that had moved overseas, so local texting/calling was no longer an option. They use iMessage and WhatsApp, and I don't have an iPhone.
I can't add them as a contact, I can't get messages from them, I can't send messages to them - nothing, unless I hand over all of my contacts.
For me, it stopped doing what it always did for me, when MS bought it.
It used to be dead simple, make calls on shitty airport wifi. Chat messaging that worked reliably.
I used it for dead simple group messaging at work and personal use - desktop, laptop, phone. Send a message and it'd arrive.
Then in something like 2015 that all started to break. I'd send a message from one computer, and it'd only deliver to one of the recipient's devices. Then the replies from that device would only go to one of mine.
Neither had complete message history. Sometimes they would sync up, but then other times not.
It resulted in an argument with someone who thought I was slacking off and ignoring them. It took comparing message history in person to find out that half the messages I sent them were not on their device and vice versa. Even signing out/in again didn't show the missing messages.
Calls started doing similar things where I'd call someone, it'd time out. I'd message them asking to call me back when they were ready, only to find out that they hadn't seen the call come through at all and were waiting for me to be ready.
Eventually we gave up on it for work - moved over to Slack for messaging and something else for voice when we needed it (This was before Slack had voice functions).
The few friends I still spoke to on Skype went over to something else, too.
So, if someone suggested connecting using Skype I wouldn't laugh at them, but I also would suggest just about anything else.
The credit is useful when she's not on skype and I can use a few cents (if that) to dial her landline from the other side of the world and say "Hey, turn your computer on!". It's true this is no longer that special - I get a few hours international calls for free with my mobile plan these days so I don't need-need skype for it.
I imagine the reason they want to move to a subscription model is that there are too many people like me - $10 credit lasts a few years and probably represents a liability on their books as well as a customer they aren't getting any more money from for some time.
A much bigger number of people that had never heard or used Skype by 2018 were VC jockeys in 2020. The critical mass moved on, network effect did the rest.
Moving from "legacy" account to microsoft accounts was a huge PITA, a lot of related other changes also degraded the experience (they basically migrated the whole platform). It became overnight a true enterprise software that would only be used if someone told you to do so.
I still use it as a backup because apps like whatsapp or line are also a PITA to use on desktop, but I get why people flew from it.
Coming to Skype, no matter what happened to them, they always did and still have the highest quality and lowest latency for calling phones and landlines all over the world. I've tried many, many services, including Google Voice, and nothing even came close. Skype was so easy to set up and use, but after Microsoft bought them, they brought in some complications and a little bit of confusing UX. But overall, I am sad to see the decline of this great product.
If I truly need to call a US phone number, Google Voice will do it for free.
Not sure whether that's bad or good. At least I am not tempted to sell myself to Google.
I miss that.
Pulling out the distributed backend and replacing it with the horrors of Microsoft Lync did not help either.
If they only go by phone number I'd guess this could have happened with any phone. Companies regularily reuse phone numbers.
As an aside, Skype has a terrible iPad app for accessibility. My grandmother can’t see very well anymore and needs the font to be increased a lot. The iPad Skype app doesn’t do well at large font levels. The interface spills out all over itself and it’s unusable. Microsoft badly needs usability testing.
Anyway, that's how I use Skype when I still have to use it. Which is about once a month.
The drawback is that unless you can in a newer version, you must choose between using your free linphone video messenger account OR your external sip account that can do landlines.
Having mentioned both in this thread: my small business is using grandstream phones that receive calls on twilio [because it’s the only one that will ring up to 10 extensions on a single login], and then competitively make outbound on all the others I mentioned based on dialing patterns.
And then we use linphone for internal video, since we’re a Linux shop and teams is out. [it’s wonderful but just exasperating that I can’t configure a second account and use it for everything.]
Linphone otoh will call a proper SIP address for free, eg ourtelephonenumber@twilio or oursipusername@sip.telnyx.com so I can conference in Cisco tandbergs, or I can conference in someone on one of the grandstreams that way. [when linphone is configured as a linphone rather than a SIP phone]
Back in the day my entire extended family used it to connect with each other across the globe. But today? I don't know a single person, old or young, that still uses it!
If it still existed now it would have been called copilot video or something :)
