A few months back I mentioned that Skype was allowing free outgoing calls to US & Canada for free for the rest of the year. Well the year is almost up and it looks like they’re going to charge $30 a year for unlimited outgoing calls. Please note that it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, it’ll be free outgoing calls to the US and Canada from anywhere.
Here’s the important part: It’s only $15 for the first year if you sign up before January 31. 2007. Plus it looks like they give you $1.25 in international calls and $50 in coupons towards other Skype equipment.
Now you can still buy blocks of calls from Skype to the US for 2.1 cents a minute, so if you’re not going to use it that much (I probably won’t) then it’s probably not a deal, but if you do, it’s certainly a deal for the first year, they second year you’ll need to make 1400 minutes to break even.
If you lived out of the country it might be a deal, but there might be better ways for international calling if I needed it all the time, I just don’t use it that much. I think I’m still using the original block of $20 worth of minutes I purchased (about $8 of that left since April 2005).
It’d be great for your kid in college if they had high-speed internet in their room!
The question is for my trip to Costa Rica, will I have good enough internet connectivity for me to save $15 in calls? I did use Skype to place my hotel reservation for the first few days in Costa Rica it was easy to use and I think pretty cheap a minute to use it.
Was just downloading this morning and wondering how good it really is.
If you are using this, can you tell me how to find out about incoming calls? what would my number be…
and btw…happy blog-versary
I used it from Egypt and it had some delays (like in older overseas calls) but a few times it sounded like I was in the next room.
You get to choose your number from a huge list. Unlimited incoming calls, like if you wanted an actual number for people to dial into requires that you buy SkypeIn (which includes voicemail).
http://www.skype.com/products/skypein/
I think it converts to about $20 for 3 months and $60 for a year.
You can have additional SkypeIn numbers for the same price so if you’ve got relatives overseas you could by a number that’s local to them so that’s kinda nifty.
It’s still free to call to the US for two more weeks so try it out!
The thing to remember is from computer to computer it’s always free (and seems to have the least amount of lag, IMHO). I haven’t tried calling anyone from computer to computer from long-long-distance yet.