Slashing Costs

Slashing Costs was Originally Posted on August 26, 2013 by lavarock

I got my Sister a toll-free number a while back for her business. She doesn’t get many calls on it, but I think toll-free numbers are a good marketing tool. They tell your customers that you are in it for the long haul, that you are professional and perhaps a larger company than you are. This “INWATS” (inbound wide area telephone service) was set up to free operators from having to spend time collecting and documenting charges.

The secret is that they no longer cost what they once did. Originally, you paid dearly for the ability for people to call you and have the charges paid by you. You could also get an outbound WATS line that allowed you to make calls all over the place and priced varied based upon which band you had. The bands were distance groupings from your location.

So over the years these services became cheaper and now you can get a toll-free number and have it ring any phone number you want, or you can hook up some hardware and have the calls terminate on a telephone you own. Out bound service is noting more than a very cheap calling plan. That outbound calling service must have a telephone number, so you tell the equipment to use your inbound number if you want, or just have a local number. It depends upon whether you want people to see your toll-free number in their caller-ID or if they do a return call command.

So I got my Sister a number a couple years ago. I could have paid a fee of perhaps $10 to be able to choose a number that spelled something, however we found a nice number with a couple zeros on the end and only paid a fraction of that to acquire the number.

If she gets no inbound calls a month, her cost was $2 a month! Calls would be billed at a cheap rate of a couple cents per minute. Still, by today’s standards, that is too darn much!

The company I use for service has currently a free porting of numbers, so it will cost nothing to have the telephone service pulled from the old company to the new one. Her cost per month will PLUMMET to $1 a month for the service and about 2.5 cents a minute. So her call rate is about the same (not that anybody much calls), but I slashed her monthly charges in half! (“In Half” sounds better than saying I dropped her cost by a dollar a month).

So for those who want a new toll-free number or just a cheap telephone number, it will cost 50 cents to get a number, then $1 a month to keep it. Calls will be billed at a penny a minute (or cheaper if you call the United Kingdom). A new Toll-free number is free to get, a dollar a month and 2.5 cents per minute.

I don’t think you can get much cheaper than that, but I keep looking.

With these numbers you can forward to another phone number, send to voicemail, have recordings played, filter telemarketers, do time of day routing, all sorts of things.

If you want to buy a telephone adapter (or IP phone) you can have a physical phone, or use a softphone on your PC or cellphone data service.

I’d be happy to help explain this stuff as it is just so cool.