WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Editor’s Note: We had to cancel our SkypePro subscription because they couldn’t offer a Canadian SkypeIn phone number. But the best part of Skype was how painless the refund was. We initially gave SkypePro a try because they offered a money-back guarantee. And when things didn’t work out for us, they gave us a no-hassle refund. (Skype if you ever read this, we’ll switch back to you the moment you service Canada. We’re anxiously waiting!)

It’s scary what you can get through the internet these days. In a previous post, we talked about how we’re experimenting with making money through content-based websites by spending $10 per website. We’ve also shown you how we received $100 in free credit from Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords. Today, we’re going to show you how to set up an online home telephone number for $2.26 per month.

We were looking for a cheap and reliable way to get a VOIP telephone number where people could reach us with inquiries. Although there are several telecommunication companies offering home lines for around $20 per month, we wanted to find a VOIP solution that provided a personal online phone number for significantly less. Eventually we found a phone number for under $3 per month.

SkypePro Review

If you’re American, you have a few more options than if you’re Canadian in the quest to find a cheap telephone number. We love Skype - we found it to be the best way to call home while traveling on the road. Skype currently offers SkypePro – a subscription to some of their best products in one easy package: “Customers can call phones for free (minimal connection fee applies) and make cheap international calls from their cellphone. They also receive 50% off SkypeIn, free voicemail and a free Skype To Go number as well as discounts on hardware purchases.”

By getting SkypePro at $3 per month, we could have had unlimited North American calling, plus saved significantly on a SkypeIn telephone number where people could call us. (SkypeIn customers receive an online personal phone number which other people can call from any phone worldwide. It’s $18 for 3 months or $60 for a full year, but you get a significant discount if you sign up for SkypePro.)

Our SkypePro review would have been glowing… Except, we signed up for SkypePro and then couldn’t figure out why you can’t get a SkypeIn telephone number in Canada. Despite a significant number of requests on their forums, Skype hasn’t moved towards providing Canadian VOIP telephone numbers. You can, however, get SkypeIn telephone numbers from 20 countries around the world - just not Canada.

If you’re lucky enough to be in a country that Skype services, then SkypePro is the ideal solution. But since we wanted a Canadian phone number, we cancelled our Skype subscription and began looking for alternatives.

Gizmo Project Review

In Canada, we explored two alternatives to Skype. The Gizmo Project was a neat little application that we installed and then quickly uninstalled. Don’t get us wrong. You can get your own local number (in over 170 countries) and let people call you at local rates. You can also call out to landlines and mobiles using credits (just like Skype.) It’s very similar to Skype. We just didn’t like it because when we tried calling their echo test number, we found the phone quality to be horrible. Mind you, it could have been a fluke, but it scared us off from buying any credits and trying to phone a real phone number. (Maybe their software would have kicked in on a real number to clean up the phone quality.)

VBuzzer Review

We ended up starting an account with vbuzzer which has a horrible name, but a pretty picture with a bee on the software. The website and application isn’t as user friendly as Skype. In fact, you have to put $10 on your account just to start. Sure you can call other vbuzzer users for free (just like every other messenger service), but quite frankly we were in the market to get a cheap telephone number where other people could call us.

Unlike Skype, VBuzzer didn’t provide any free credits to test out their services. And unlike Skype and Gizmo, it didn’t provide a test number (echo service) to call and hear the quality of their product. VBuzzer Customer service suggested I call a 1-800 number for free to hear the quality of the product. I just took the risk and ended up spending $10 to call my own answering machine. The first few seconds of the first call were echo-y and digital, and then something kicked in and the phone quality has been fine ever since.

So with a $10 leap of faith, we signed up with VBuzzer and found the sound quality to be acceptable (at least on par with Skype). But, we’ve since discovered a few aspects where VBuzzer is better than Skype: 1. There’s no connection charge for outgoing calls. 2. Calling Canada and the US is 1.5 cents per minute (which is cheaper than Skype), 3. Getting a BuzzMe online phone number (which is equivalent to Skype’s SkypeIn service) was considerably cheaper with VBuzzer. VBuzzer charged $2.26 per month. Skype charged around $6 per month. Plus, with VBuzzer, you could use credits that you’ve already purchased. In other words, I had to pay $10 to start my VBuzzer account, but could put $2.26 towards our phone number.

There are a few downsides with VBuzzer. First of all, the area codes that they can provide an online personal phone number for are quite limited:

Canada : 204 250 403 416 418 514 613 780 819

USA : 202 212 248 303 305 310 312 321 347 404 407 408 415 425 617 646 650 678 786 858 863 949

Second, their website and user forum is a little bit confusing and basic. Having said that, I’ve placed in a few emails to customer service and the turn-around response has been nearly immediate.

Bottom Line: VBuzzer provides us with an alternative to Skype and other VOIP solutions that gets us our own online phone number and voice mail in Canada for less than $3 per day. In order to try out VBuzzer, you’ll need to download their messenger application and create an account. You’ll also have to supply a valid email address that they will confirm by sending you a link. Once you’ve downloaded VBuzzer, try calling a 1-800 number to check out the call quality. We’re using VBuzzer with a few of our website experiments and we’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Question: Who do you use for your Voice-Over-Internet (VOIP) phone calls?

(3 votes, Rating: 4.33 out of 5)

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