Why AirCall was not the right choice for us.
Are you the kind of small business that enjoys picking up the phone and talking to your clients? But what if your clients were all over the world and these calls were international?
For years I have been following an email-only policy with our clients (i.e no phone calls unless you’ve booked me through Clarity). After we signed a few recent partnerships we decided to offer a partner-exclusive phone-support service on a few of our projects. We were looking for a professional voice-call SAAS that allowed us to call internationally and record our calls automatically for quality assurance. Here’s a blog post about my experience.
TL;DR I’ve reviewed AirCall.io, RingCentral & MightyCall. Unfortunately, they are inadequate or expensive or both.
AirCall.io
Nice interface but that’s about it. The trial experience is enticing enough to get you to sign up but you soon realize that they charge for every extra “feature”, phone number and user until the entire package becomes outright expensive for a small business.
(i) While they advertise the cost per user as “starting at $40/user/month” they actually force you to sign up for 3 users when you upgrade(meaning that the minimum you pay them is $120/month). That’s just clickbait pricing..
(ii) During the trial phase we created 1 toll-free number and 1 local-US number. When we upgraded the trial account, we weren’t just charged the $120 (for minimum 3 users) but also an additional $6 for the “extra” number. Turns out you can only have 1 number for the $120/month price — every additional number is $6 more. We dropped the local number and kept the toll-free but the extra $6 wasn’t refunded — it was issued as credit.
(iii) During the trial phase they give you ~40 minutes free to use however the trial calls drop after 6 minutes making this experience annoying. So we upgraded (by paying the awkwardly up-sold $120/month for 3 users even though we only had 2 users assigned to the account ) to call a client in Madrid for ~45m and then a contractor in the Ukraine for ~30m. Total cost $24 for ~75m.
(iv) What’s worse is that even after paying this much, we don’t get access to something so basic as analytics (which by now, is what people expect when they use a “digital” VOIP SAAS service)
(v) When I emailed support to ask about their price list (i.e. how much will it cost us to call a number in France vs a number in Australia; and if it changes depending on whether its a cell or landline number) they asked me to send them a list of countries that we would like to call so that they can respond with rates. For a company providing a “phone service” you would think these rates would be publicly available. I still haven’t heard back from them (it’s been 2 days)
(vi) Lastly, there’s no way for me to “pause” the service or to cancel the subscription (or move back to the trial version). The only option that I see is to DEACTIVATE my account. Which I am probably going to do after I publish this blog.
MightyCall
At first, they seemed promising. The interface wasn’t as clean as AirMail but the pricing was straightforward. You can select 1 user. I quickly upgraded the account to the $50/m plan which includes up to 5 numbers. Unfortunately, when we tried to use it to make international calls we couldn’t and we were asked to submit a series of documents via email. Which, given the daily news-dose of data theft online, I am just not comfortable doing — especially if your email looks like this.
Fortunately they do have an easily-accessibly customer chat service. They quickly allowed us to cancel our subscription while letting us use the remaining benefits till the end of the month.
RingCentral
Based on the fact that they were founded in 1999, I’d say these guys were probably the first providers in this category. Look below to see what their website looks like today.
The plan for a single user (with automatic call recording) is $55/m so I might just go ahead and try out their service despite the fact that I do not like the website. If I do, I will update here about my experience.
If you’ve read so far, do you have any recommendations for phone-services (with affordable international calling and call-recording services) that I have not mentioned? If so could you please mention them in the comments below and I will test them out and add my review here.
