Ok, what the hell happened?
These two (and probably more) internet phone services used to be completely free for making pc-to-telephone calls.
[li]Net2Phone[/li][li]PhoneFree[/li]
This used to be great if I needed to make a call and didn’t want to get offline. Now I can’t do it anymore. PhoneFree no longer offers the pc-to-phone call feature at all.
greedy bastards :mad:
So these companies are greedy bastards because they don’t want to give you free stuff? Are you sure it’s not the other way around?
These services were entirely free, offering unlimited usage, as recently as a year ago. If they wanted to offer their services at a cost, for profit, they should have done so to begin with. If they offered their service entirely free before, why can’t they do it now?
Nice idea, but free offers have always been used as enticements to paid services. Demand money for an unproven service and a little known company up-front and there’s no reason for people to believe they’ll be getting a useful service (or any at all, if it’s an unknown company). Brand-building and establishing a customer base you can turn a profit from isn’t exactly unusual business practice.
How about this: they wanted to introduce as many people as possible to this service and rightly assumed that the best way of doing this was to make it free. I doubt they can offer this service for free, so now they expect the users to pay for it.
Reasonable? Then pay for it.
Unreasonable? Don’t use it.
Two words for you (or maybe it’s one):
Unlimited (as of a couple weeks ago) pc-to-phone calls. You don’t have to download any program - you just have to register with them and be logged into their website. There’s an applet window that opens when you go to make a call. There’s even a nifty little phone book.
The only caveat is that you can’t do any browsing or multi-tasking while using this service. It gets cranky if you don’t have the applet (which I think runs banner-type adds) as your main window and will disconnect you. It doesn’t like call-waiting either. If you’re talking to someone who puts you on hold to answer another call, you will be disconnected. Personally, I can live with these two “problems”.
Crusoe and Andy have answered this. But I’ll add that the internet was a revolutionary concept, and no one knew where it was heading. (The dust hasn’t settled yet). Many companies were selling or servicing at a loss based on the hope that eventually a way to make a profit would be found. Eventually it was discovered that this was more difficult than had been anticipated. In particular, internet advertising did not turn out to be as profitable as had been thought.
I’m sure both the companies that you name have been losing money since their inception (Net2phone shown here). There’s no such thing as a free lunch. The free calls you made until now came out of the pockets of venture capitalists, i.e. stockholders, who put up - and lost - the capital.
Be happy that you had it good until now.