When was the last time your had a business with a toll-free number? Was it back in the mid-1990s, when the “new” area codes 888, 866 and 877 started showing up?
My step-daughter recently asked me “what the deal was with the 877 area code?” She grew up in an era when long distance was always free on her cell phone. It got me thinking about how things have changed with Ma Bell (even saying that will date me, I am sure).
I had an 800 number back in the day when I thought it was important for people to easily call me. This was when I had 128 kbps ISDN “broadband” Internet, and had to pay something like two cents a minute for each call to my ISP (that cut down on my surfing time, to be sure). Most of the time I got wrong numbers, which I paid I think regular long-distance charges for. I think my business phone bill was around $300 a month, including the ISDN access.
Fast forward to today, where my personal phone bill is around $200 a month and the thought of having a “dial-up ISP” and ISDN puts you back in the cretaceous period. Of course that includes several cellular lines, DSL, and unlimited wireline long distance. But there are still some situations where you might want to have a toll-free number for your business, or even personal needs. So what do you do?
The easiest and cheapest way to get a toll-free number is if you already are a Vonage VOIP customer (there are still a few of us diehards around). It costs an extra $5 a month with a $10 activation fee, and you have your choice of 877 and 866 numbers with 100 minute in-bound calls. The number is tied to your existing Vonage line, of course, and it takes seconds to sign up via their Web site. Clearly, these guys get how to do self-service features.
If you aren’t a Vonage customer and don’t expect a lot of calls, you can get a toll-free number from Ureach.com for $10 a month that includes 30 minutes of inbound calls on one of their messaging plans. After that, the price is 7 cents per minute, which can add up. A better deal is a plan from OfficeDepot.com, where the same $10 a month gets you 200 minutes, and then 4.9 cents per minute after that.
And PhonePeople.com is just one of a number of Web sites that allow you to type in your name or some catchy seven-letter phrase and see if you can match it to a particular toll-free number. They offer all the various toll-free prefixes too — for vanity numbers it’s $35, for true 800 numbers it’s $29, and for transfers to their service it’s $5. Random toll-free numbers have no fee at all.
There are a number of differentiating features on all of these plans: some will send your voice mail calls to email-based notifications and voice attachments, some will allow you to have multiple “extensions” on your line for different users, some can forward to different numbers or have a “follow-me” type of service, and some will have toll-free fax tied into the voice line too.
Speaking of Ma Bell, I tried to get information from AT&T’s various Web sites about toll-free numbers, but wasn’t able to find anything even after I entered my login information as one of their customers. That is shameful, and just goes to show you how far we have with toll-free calling.
On reader suggests PowerNet Global, which has a $1/month fee and a flat rate for all calls.
You can’t just go to PowerNet Global and get a toll-free number and a $1/month fee for toll-free service. If you do it that way, it costs $4./month. I just phoned them and they said this is the only rate, unless you get an “agent” and go through this agent.
Be careful. PhonePeople.com is one of the websites we warn people about. If you use their lookup tool and find a number available they automatically reserve it so you have to get it from them. They also deceive people about their real price. They make it sound cheap at 3 cents per minute or something along those lines, but what the customer doesn’t realize unless they read the very fine print is that they count every minute as two minutes when you’re talking to the caller live. That’s why they’re one of the companies that we recommend against, as well as the length of time it takes them to process transfers.
The only 800 number lookups that are always safe and don’t reserve numbers you find to lock you into their service are the AT&T lookup and ours at TollFreeNumbers.com. I’m obviously a little biased but we think ours is better because it shows the status and phone company information and finds numbers in Disconnect that are coming soon, which no other lookup tool anywhere shows. It also makes suggestions for other related numbers that are available or going to be avaiable too.
Comment 1 mentions PNG which is a good company, but it’s not a flat rate for unlimited calls as you might assume the wording of that comment, and the good plans are $2.50 per month if you use less than $15 worth of usage and only $1 per month if you use more than 15. BTW, PNG is the service we usually recommend if you’re pointing a TFN to a cell phone or a voip service like Vonage which you mention.
Vonage is very hard to work with in terms of toll free service. All voip companies are though so I don’t mean to single them out. You just get very different answers from them about toll free depending on who you talk to.
On of the ones that we like is the Airespring service at http://www.800numbers.com which is only 2.85 cents per minute with NO monthly fee.
I’ve worked with almost every company over the past 12 years in the toll free busines. There are a lot of benefits to having a toll free number, aside from the lack of a charge to the customer. You get control over where it rings, so you can move or change that on the fly when (not if) necessary. You get a list of all the callers so you can tell whether that campaign is working or not and it makes you seem more successful and more available, especially if you get a good number that includes your company name, product, url or selling points. I could go on, but this is already a long comment and you wouldn’t have any reason to go to our website TollFreeNumbers.com. 😉
Bill Quimby
1-800 MARKETER
TollFreeNumbers.com
PhonePeople.com has horrible service. Rip off and their website is difficult to use. Very old fashion. Be careful
As the Marketing Manager for PhonePeople.com I’d like to respond to Bill’s inaccurate comments above.
At Phone People, we do NOT reserve numbers when you perform a search. As a customer, once you choose to add a number to the shopping cart, then the number is held by SMS (the software used by phone companies to reserve toll free numbers) for a few minutes to allow for processing of your order. If the order is not completed, the toll free number is released. The toll free number is only reserved by PhonePeople.com upon completion of an order. With regard to transfers, under normal circumstances transfers are completed within 24 hours of receiving the required paperwork.
We keep our pricing competitive by only billing you for the minutes that you actually use. When a caller calls your toll free number, that is using one phone line, and the minutes start accruing one minute at a time. If the caller is listening to your greeting, pre recorded messages, or leaving a message for you, it is still billed one minute at a time. When we connect a caller to you we need to make an outbound call to your telephone, and this uses a second phone line. When this happens, the inbound call and the outbound call are billed simultaneously, and the minutes are counted as 2 minutes of usage for every 1 minute of talk time. Although some other toll free service providers like to draw attention to the fact that they do not “double bill,” what they do not tell you is that many do not have the same amount of included minutes at the same pricing levels, and they also inflate their per minute cost & some even make you purchase minutes in large blocks. Any direct comparison between our service and a competitor is nearly always in our favor. When you consider the overall value & enhanced services available, we are sure you will find PhonePeople.com the better choice.
Another thing to remember about vanity phone number providers is that many of them will provide extra services such as call tracking. I got mine from Primary Wave, pricing is reasonable and I can sign up for extra services any time.
Interesting read. There is currently quite a lot of information around this subject around and about on the net and some are most defintely better than others. You have caught the detail here just right which makes for a refreshing change – thanks.
Judging from what other people have said about them I wouldnt trust them myself…