Skype to charge $29.95 per month for phone service

Posts: 94 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Jun 17, 2006 Posts: 94

Finally Skype gave up on free phone service. I guess Ebay must have put pressure on them to start to turn a profit.

They are still far behind Vonage in the U.S. I wonder if we'll start to see Skype ads on TV.

Posts: 7 · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 9:20 am Post subject:

The title of this post should be "Skype to charge $29.95 per YEAR for phone service".
Also that price is only after January 31,2007. If you sign up before then the charge is $14.95.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 10:06 am Post subject:

Skype isn't giving up on free phone service. They are simply changing SkypeOUT (the ability to call from your Skype line) from a per-minute service to a subscription model.

And, as has already been pointed out, the $30 is for a YEAR of unlimited calling, and they are running a promo until the end of January that makes it $15/year. I may sign up for an account for the $15 just for the heck of it. Wink

Posts: 7 · Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 6:38 pm Post subject:

Before you go spending $15 (or $30 after January) per year on a service that I have found to be more of a toy than real telephone service I suggest you estimate how many SkypeOUT minutes that you would use in a year. Skype charges $.021 per minute for USA SkypeOUT calling, so if you pay the $14.95 for a year of unlimited calling you will have to use 712 SkypeOUT minutes per year (11.86hrs) to break even or if you wait until February the break even point comes out to 1,428 minutes or 23.8 hours per year.

Posts: 20 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 31, 2006 Posts: 20

Why do you find Skype to be a toy? I work for a 40-person company with offices in Paris, Tokyo, San Mateo CA, Cary NC, and Boston MA. We all use Skype for voice and IM and a bit of SkypeOut all day every day. Seems fine, and our copper-line phone company is surely bummed.