My Neverending Cheapness

Anyone know of any VOIP plans that offer unlimited incoming minutes? I don't care about outbound as I can GV to proxy the outbounds.

A couple years ago, I was paying around $50 a month for a landline I was never using. I was never home (travel-based jobs do that). I was just gonna straight-up ditch the line, but Donna didn't feel comfortable relying just on our cell phones. So, I went the next-best route to ditching: I changed to VOIP.

At the time (mid 2008), I opted to go for Vonage. They were giving away a free VOIP router and a set of wireless phones. I could get unlimited calling - including international calls - and a bunch of pointless bells and whistles that VZ was charging $6/feature for. Mostly, it was the international calling that was of interest, as I was starting to travel overseas for work and Donna would need a way to get ahold of me without bankrupting me.

At any rate, I got the Vonage unlimited plan. It was like $25/mo. plus fees. Those Fees brought it to just under $40/mo. While not quite the savings I was hoping for, that was still better than $100/yr I wasn't paying on a phone line I wasn't using (plus, if I wanted them, I could use the extras).

I've been looking over my calling patterns, since then, and even the Vonage plan I had didn't make sense. I've been averaging well less than 50 minutes of outbound calling a month. The work overseas never fully panned out, and, even when I was working over there, we ended up using Skype because of its video features. So, it was time to re-evaluate things.

Today, I submitted a ticket asking if there were any other options. Now, I'd read around, and seen that Vonage (at least at one time) offered a number maintenance plan. It would have cut my $25/mo. (plus fees) to like $5/mo (plus fees). When the CSR called me, she offered a $10/mo. (plus fees) plan. When I asked about the number maintenance plan, it was indicated that said plan had been discontinued. I'm guessing they were getting soaked on the GV-proxy gambit (I'll describe in a bit more detail, below), and decided it was no longer worth having in their catalog.

So, while I'm not saving $20/mo versus my prior plan, I am saving at least $15/mo. Yeah, not much in the monthly scheme of things, but that's still, like, $180/yr.

Oh... the GV-proxy gambit: it's kind of nice. Many calling plans are based on outbound minutes. A call-redirection service, like Google Voice, allows all of  your calls to be processed by your voice carrier as inbound calls. You just go to your Google voice page, punch in the number you want to call, select which of your "real" voice lines you want to talk on, and then Google calls your line, first, and then the number of the person you want to call. If you're on a outbound-only billed voice plan, all of your calls become free, since using the GV-initiation method gets handled as an inound call. So, you can initiate thousands of minutes a month worth of calls but have them all processed under your inbound billing rates.

If you're on a "friends and family" or other kind of "calling circle" plan, leveraging GV becomes even sweeter. Since such plans typically makes all such calls free (not billed against your monthly minutes), you can just include the GV proxy phone number in your calling circle. Then all calls funneled through the GV proxy are processed as part of that free network. So, you eliminate using plan minutes.