Great. So now the only useful feature and why I keep Skype around is removed? I need this every 1-2 months where I need to make an international phone call. I am on different country every 2-3 months and my call can go to Europe, US or Japan. Skype credit was just amazing because I'd charge a 100 bucks and consume as I needed. Sometimes I need 30 seconds and sometimes it can be a lengthy 20 minutes.
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?
Basically, this. I use Skype to make international phone calls to deal with things like banking, tax etc in a country where I have citizenship but do not live. Exactly the same situation as you - I don't know up-front when the bank is going to randomly put a block on my credit card or when I am going to need spend 2 hours on hold with the tax office, so maintaining a monthly subscription is not appropriate. In the ideal world I would never need to make a call to a traditional phone line at all, but the occasional time that I do, I have Skype. It's very annoying that this is going to go away.
I’ve found Callcentric to be pretty great for making (international) landline calls. Their Pay Per Call rate is reasonable, though I’m not sure how it compares to Skype’s prior offering.
Only downside is that there’s no official client I believe. But there’s plenty of VoiP clients out there. I’m personally using the Groundwire app on my iPhone to place international calls to distant extended family every once in a while.
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
Callcentric is still available for $0.00 a month and pay per minute on outbound. Any destination.
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
Unfortunately, WhatsApp will not let you use it without handing them all of your contacts.
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.
WhatsApp is not an alternative phone. It's a popular messaging app. I don't spend a couple hundreds a year on Skype because I need a chat app but because I have a specific need to call a traditional phone number.
Has any popular service disappeared overnight quite like Skype? It was common to set up Skype calls with friends/relatives as late as 2018-2019. Starting 2020 people would laugh at you if you even suggested it. What happened?
I remember Skype being used by everyone for everything up until 2016-2017. Even when meeting people online it wasn't uncommon to exchange Skype handles so that we could voice chat. Then it really just... disappeared.
Combination FaceTime, discord, zoom, Google meets even, probably more, all taking off. Used to not have many choices if you wanted to video/voice call people. Now it seems every social app has it baked in.
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.
It's what my mum's learned to use, so it still has a place in my life.
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.
My take is the pandemic forced a lot of people who did not use much Skype into Teams, Zooms, etc. Then WhatsApp joined in too.
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.
It was definitely this. Skype was already on the decline, and then COVID hit and everyone had to work from home. Meetings apps took over (Zoom, Webex, eventually Teams (Microsoft antitrust violation)), and in that business battle most had free tiers. It was easy for people to use their work account or the free version of something they already knew how to use. There was no reason to sign up for Skype for anyone not already on it. Then the social network effects took care of the rest.
They integrated with Live accounts. It was around 2017 I think, so with a slight delay and migration period we're looking at the same timeline.
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.
During the pandemic I took my old Xbox over to my parents with the Kinect and used Skype on Xbox so they could see their grandkids on their TV and it was like room to room chatting.
I used it extensively until Microsoft did that absolutely atrocious “redesign” that tried turning it from a messenger into a flashy social app, making it an unusable ugly mess. Telegram was just starting to grow but I had to switch.
I was once called in and questioned by the police in Munich because of Skype’s phone service. When I moved to Germany, lots of places required a local phone number, including the bank to set up an account. But you needed a bank account most places to get a phone number. I will not follow that thread down all the you-can’t-get-there-from-heres. Anyway, to solve a problem, I got this fixed SkypeOut phone number. It turns out that O2/Telefonica provided the German numbers to Skype, and whoever had the number before me was committing some kind of fraud with it involving shipping containers. The police asked them who owned it and they said me. So the police called me in for questioning. I had no idea why. I don’t speak German and they didn’t provide translators. I luckily had a good, ex-punk friend who volunteered to translate for me. We spent a couple hours in the 1930s era police station. It all worked out in the end thanks to my friend and my retention of the sign up emails from Skype. But what a mess. Thanks Skype. Has made me leery of other similar phone number services.
I guess the phone company is more likely to see if they reassigned it, but Skype might not need to notify them/might have stopped doing that at some point.
My elderly grandmother who lives in the Bay Area uses Skype daily to talk to her sister in Hungary. I bought her an iPad a few years ago and loaded $50 of credits on it. I check her balance when I visit and occasionally top it off. Now I need to set up a monthly subscription??
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.
This is happening due to Microsoft buying Skype so they could create/market Microsoft Teams. In their continuing push of Teams, Microsoft has eliminated the Skype Credit process entirely. I am canceling my Skype account and going with my cellphone provider's WIFI Calling feature. What we all knew and loved about Skype has passed away.......
I hope they refund people or still allow people to use their existing credit... I use Skype to get a virtual number so I can call places in England from the U.S. before I visit there and so I can continue to use the same number while I'm in England :)
Exactly. I still have to call foreign phones, but not regularly enough to really wanting a subscription. It can be 500 minutes one month and then close to zero for several. Pay as I go seems the right choice. But there seems to be no competition in that market. My cell operator charges something like 20-30 cents per minute and Internet-based services close down one after the other.
The company I work for (full time contract) uses Skype as their communications platform. Besides notifications sometimes being wonky and getting false missed call notifications (this only happens like once a month), it works well. I also have like $4 in credit left, I sometimes use it to call foreign numbers. It's a shame, really, since it works well and I in no way need a subscription because I use maybe $1/year in credit.
Similar situation here. My company uses Skype for all in-house video calls, in large part because none of our clients uses it. So far, I haven't had any problems with it. The same cannot be said for Teams.
Linphone works good for internal use and is free to other linphone users.
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]
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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.
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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]