Launching Dialpad Free

I’m just about to head out to go on Cheddar TV in about an hour where I’m going to talk about an exciting moment in Dialpad history. Today we launched “Dialpad Free”, the first no cost, for life, small business phone system. When we say FREE, no cost and for life we mean it. It really is a full featured phone service designed for the small business, and there are no strings attached.

If this feels a little deja vu to some, you’re not alone. When Vincent Paquet (who is now Dialpad’s Chief Product Officer) and I started GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google and became Google Voice, we had a similar approach to an individual needing a free phone number for life. Now, almost 12 years later, many millions of people have, use and rely on Google Voice as their primary phone number.

But Google Voice is really designed for individuals, not for the small business. And because we know from our time with Google that many small businesses are using it, we decided to do something about it. That’s why, over the past few months our product team figured out how to give small businesses something better, and what we created is Dialpad Free.

With Dialpad Free the small business gets all the features and benefits that they either don’t have with their phone service today or get to save what we estimate is anywhere from $240 to almost $2400 a year in charges. They also get up to five extensions, five UberConference accounts for conference calling and collaboration, and a whole lot more. Some of the features are listed below:

• Auto-Attendant and IVR
• Unlimited Voicemail
• Transfer, Add, Hold, Mute
• Video Calling
• Screen Sharing
• Call Recording

I’m very excited to get this out to people asap as every startup was once a small business and small businesses are the backbone of the economy. There are a couple of great stories on Dialpad Free already (see Beth Schultz’s No Jitter story and another by Silicon Angle’s Paul Gillin) and these both capture what we’re setting out to do, which is to Kill the Phone Bill. This launch of Dialpad Free gives me the same kind of feelings I had when we took a leap of faith with GrandCentral to offer a free product for all.

So check out Cheddar TV in a short while, and more importantly, if you’re a Bay Area small business that wants to be like a big business, check out Dialpad Free (btw, we’ll be expanding beyond the Bay Area and Google G Suite users soon). Think of it as an early Christmas present from Dialpad, but the kind of gift that keeps on giving.