Skype Credit is no longer available | Hacker News Reader

Skype Credit is no longer available

skype.com

28 pointstlyleung71 comments

Great. So now the only useful feature and why I keep Skype around is removed? I need this every 1-2 months where I need to make an international phone call. I am on different country every 2-3 months and my call can go to Europe, US or Japan. Skype credit was just amazing because I'd charge a 100 bucks and consume as I needed. Sometimes I need 30 seconds and sometimes it can be a lengthy 20 minutes.

I don't understand this. Their new "plans" require that I subscribe to a full plan, for example, to call India? Does anybody have any good alternative?

WhatsApp. Completely free, and every person or business in large chunks of the world (minus a few notable exceptions like the USA) is on it.

Unfortunately, WhatsApp will not let you use it without handing them all of your contacts.

I wanted to remain in contact with a friend that had moved overseas, so local texting/calling was no longer an option. They use iMessage and WhatsApp, and I don't have an iPhone.

I can't add them as a contact, I can't get messages from them, I can't send messages to them - nothing, unless I hand over all of my contacts.

On Android I just rejected access to contacts.

Then to add a contact enter their phone number specifically and it works for me.

I reinstalled the app just now to re-check.

Click the green 'Add chat' icon.

It prompts: "To help you connect with friends and family, allow WhatsApp access to your contacts" with options for Not now, and Continue.

Not Now closes the dialogue, and returns you to the main chat list.

Continue launches the Android prompt for "Allow WhatsApp to your contacts", clicking Don't Allow returns you to the main chat list.

So, unless there's something else you need to do...

Make a Call works the same way.

I can create a community and a group chat in that, and even send messages to the group.

I can't add anyone to the group though, same "Give us your contacts" thing.

I blocked whatsapp from contacts, so it doesn't popup the prompt anymore, but I don't even get the "to help you connect ..." prompt either.

when I go to the green "add chat" icon, I just get a list with my whatsapp contacts (not system contacts) and if I add a phone number I can talk to them directly (and/or add them to the whatsapp contacts instead of system contacts).

  WhatsApp Messenger
  Version 2.24.24.77

Maybe if you already have some contacts it will let you see your contacts list and add them manually.

But I have none, and so it doesn't.

I don't know the version number, but my check above was from the version on Google Play store. The attempt I initially made was several months ago.

Grapheneos let's you trick apps into thinking they have all your contacts but you actually give them a sub list ("contact scopes")

That is not actually true, on iOS at least. They will bug you to do it, but you can use whatsapp w/o giving access to your contacts.

Unfortunately not on Android.

One of the perks of the AppStore review I guess: it is not allowed to have the app not work if the contacts permission is not granted IIRC :)

WhatsApp doesn’t work for a fixed line or a business phone number

I use my Skype credit when abroad and making local calls so this is quite painful

Try sending a WhatsApp message to the business's phone number. 9 times out of 10 it will work.

A 90% success rate isn't even acceptable for an entertainment website, so definitely not good enough for this.

Airlines, insurance, ikea, … basically everyone who redirects you to a bot menu can’t be reached by WhatsApp

In many countries that'll be ~0/10.

Not remotely a useful alternative for many uses, since it doesn’t call ordinary phone numbers (does it?).

WhatsApp is not an alternative phone. It's a popular messaging app. I don't spend a couple hundreds a year on Skype because I need a chat app but because I have a specific need to call a traditional phone number.

Basically, this. I use Skype to make international phone calls to deal with things like banking, tax etc in a country where I have citizenship but do not live. Exactly the same situation as you - I don't know up-front when the bank is going to randomly put a block on my credit card or when I am going to need spend 2 hours on hold with the tax office, so maintaining a monthly subscription is not appropriate. In the ideal world I would never need to make a call to a traditional phone line at all, but the occasional time that I do, I have Skype. It's very annoying that this is going to go away.

I suggest Rebtel. Works great from anywhere.

I’ve found Callcentric to be pretty great for making (international) landline calls. Their Pay Per Call rate is reasonable, though I’m not sure how it compares to Skype’s prior offering. Only downside is that there’s no official client I believe. But there’s plenty of VoiP clients out there. I’m personally using the Groundwire app on my iPhone to place international calls to distant extended family every once in a while.

Oh I had just plugged callcentric too. The rate tables are here:

https://www.callcentric.com/find/rate/

For North American use they were 0.0198 a minute .

Versus telnyx at 0.005 per minute but wants business registration.

Skype was 2.3 cents a minute and it was never great.

For anyone who had Skype because they didn’t have a voip phone , or know how to set up software: the free “Lin phone” client for Linux Mac windows and mobile can be configured with a SIP provider.

You just type in sip.callcentric.net and your login is the 1777xxxxxx account number. Password is set separately under the extensions tab.

That’s all you need and you can prepay a credit balance like you did with Skype

Thanks for callcentric/linphone - I got them subscribed and installed and can now drop skype - at last!!! I might even pull out the old Grandstream handset (that I used to use with pennytel before they closed) out of storage and use it with callcentric.

I think Viber still allows it? Although they "freeze" your credit after a while and you need to unfreeze it

Callcentric is still available for $0.00 a month and pay per minute on outbound. Any destination.

I am utilizing them for$1.99 a month inbound and pay per minute inbound too, though they have unlimited in and out I just don’t use it as much as the monthly fee. Love them.

Frankly better rates on twilio and telnyx for high volume and business use which also allow pay as you go but both now require corporate/business registration, EIN, blah blah both of which I’ve done for business use but were a headache.

There are others like voip.ms which fell in the middle rate wise but also demanded so much documentation or hassle I just said no thank you

I think Google voice still lets you do this.

Has any popular service disappeared overnight quite like Skype? It was common to set up Skype calls with friends/relatives as late as 2018-2019. Starting 2020 people would laugh at you if you even suggested it. What happened?

Microsoft happened.

Business analysts added their touch.

iMessage (family), FB (friends), and Slack (work) replaced my audio calling needs.

If I truly need to call a US phone number, Google Voice will do it for free.

I live in perpetual fear for the day Google sends voice to the graveyard with 30 days notice

Google voice is a US-only thing.

Not sure whether that's bad or good. At least I am not tempted to sell myself to Google.

I’m still using it. Why would anyone laugh, it still does what it’s always done.

It's what my mum's learned to use, so it still has a place in my life.

The credit is useful when she's not on skype and I can use a few cents (if that) to dial her landline from the other side of the world and say "Hey, turn your computer on!". It's true this is no longer that special - I get a few hours international calls for free with my mobile plan these days so I don't need-need skype for it.

I imagine the reason they want to move to a subscription model is that there are too many people like me - $10 credit lasts a few years and probably represents a liability on their books as well as a customer they aren't getting any more money from for some time.

I'm the same, I buy $5 in credit and it lasts me a few years. It comes in handy when traveling or when calling foreign numbers.

Yea, that’s the issue discussed here. They removed this feature. You can’t use them for the occasional landline calls anymore.

I guess it depends on how you view it.

For me, it stopped doing what it always did for me, when MS bought it.

It used to be dead simple, make calls on shitty airport wifi. Chat messaging that worked reliably.

I used it for dead simple group messaging at work and personal use - desktop, laptop, phone. Send a message and it'd arrive.

Then in something like 2015 that all started to break. I'd send a message from one computer, and it'd only deliver to one of the recipient's devices. Then the replies from that device would only go to one of mine.

Neither had complete message history. Sometimes they would sync up, but then other times not.

It resulted in an argument with someone who thought I was slacking off and ignoring them. It took comparing message history in person to find out that half the messages I sent them were not on their device and vice versa. Even signing out/in again didn't show the missing messages.

Calls started doing similar things where I'd call someone, it'd time out. I'd message them asking to call me back when they were ready, only to find out that they hadn't seen the call come through at all and were waiting for me to be ready.

Eventually we gave up on it for work - moved over to Slack for messaging and something else for voice when we needed it (This was before Slack had voice functions).

The few friends I still spoke to on Skype went over to something else, too.

So, if someone suggested connecting using Skype I wouldn't laugh at them, but I also would suggest just about anything else.

> Then in something like 2015 that all started to break.

Interesting. For me it just always worked, and continues to do so, so I have zero reason to tell all my releatives to stop using it.

Some relatives are on Whatsapp so I unfortunately have to use that as well. I also use Viber as a backup comms channel with part of the family as well , as sometimes that's the only thing that works.

> Eventually we gave up on it for work

Right, I haven't used it at work for a long time. We did use it at some point, but video calls on it with multiple people were just horrible... which is why Zoom took over everyone else as it just worked and everything else, including Slack, did not work almost at all.

I was just saying that, for family calls, Skype for me has been great and I guess your impression of it is outdated. It's a pretty good tool and I would laugh at anyone that thinks otherwise just to be mean back at them :D.

They completely ruined the UX. Skype was clean and simple when it was popular, then became a bloated mess.

Pulling out the distributed backend and replacing it with the horrors of Microsoft Lync did not help either.

I used it extensively until Microsoft did that absolutely atrocious “redesign” that tried turning it from a messenger into a flashy social app, making it an unusable ugly mess. Telegram was just starting to grow but I had to switch.

I remember Skype being used by everyone for everything up until 2016-2017. Even when meeting people online it wasn't uncommon to exchange Skype handles so that we could voice chat. Then it really just... disappeared.

Combination FaceTime, discord, zoom, Google meets even, probably more, all taking off. Used to not have many choices if you wanted to video/voice call people. Now it seems every social app has it baked in.

MegaUpload and RapidShare.

Coming to Skype, no matter what happened to them, they always did and still have the highest quality and lowest latency for calling phones and landlines all over the world. I've tried many, many services, including Google Voice, and nothing even came close. Skype was so easy to set up and use, but after Microsoft bought them, they brought in some complications and a little bit of confusing UX. But overall, I am sad to see the decline of this great product.

My take is the pandemic forced a lot of people who did not use much Skype into Teams, Zooms, etc. Then WhatsApp joined in too.

A much bigger number of people that had never heard or used Skype by 2018 were VC jockeys in 2020. The critical mass moved on, network effect did the rest.

It was definitely this. Skype was already on the decline, and then COVID hit and everyone had to work from home. Meetings apps took over (Zoom, Webex, eventually Teams (Microsoft antitrust violation)), and in that business battle most had free tiers. It was easy for people to use their work account or the free version of something they already knew how to use. There was no reason to sign up for Skype for anyone not already on it. Then the social network effects took care of the rest.

During the pandemic I took my old Xbox over to my parents with the Kinect and used Skype on Xbox so they could see their grandkids on their TV and it was like room to room chatting.

I miss that.

They integrated with Live accounts. It was around 2017 I think, so with a slight delay and migration period we're looking at the same timeline.

Moving from "legacy" account to microsoft accounts was a huge PITA, a lot of related other changes also degraded the experience (they basically migrated the whole platform). It became overnight a true enterprise software that would only be used if someone told you to do so.

I still use it as a backup because apps like whatsapp or line are also a PITA to use on desktop, but I get why people flew from it.

I was once called in and questioned by the police in Munich because of Skype’s phone service. When I moved to Germany, lots of places required a local phone number, including the bank to set up an account. But you needed a bank account most places to get a phone number. I will not follow that thread down all the you-can’t-get-there-from-heres. Anyway, to solve a problem, I got this fixed SkypeOut phone number. It turns out that O2/Telefonica provided the German numbers to Skype, and whoever had the number before me was committing some kind of fraud with it involving shipping containers. The police asked them who owned it and they said me. So the police called me in for questioning. I had no idea why. I don’t speak German and they didn’t provide translators. I luckily had a good, ex-punk friend who volunteered to translate for me. We spent a couple hours in the 1930s era police station. It all worked out in the end thanks to my friend and my retention of the sign up emails from Skype. But what a mess. Thanks Skype. Has made me leery of other similar phone number services.

That really sounds awful, especially if you don't speak the language.

If they only go by phone number I'd guess this could have happened with any phone. Companies regularily reuse phone numbers.

I guess the phone company is more likely to see if they reassigned it, but Skype might not need to notify them/might have stopped doing that at some point.

My elderly grandmother who lives in the Bay Area uses Skype daily to talk to her sister in Hungary. I bought her an iPad a few years ago and loaded $50 of credits on it. I check her balance when I visit and occasionally top it off. Now I need to set up a monthly subscription??

As an aside, Skype has a terrible iPad app for accessibility. My grandmother can’t see very well anymore and needs the font to be increased a lot. The iPad Skype app doesn’t do well at large font levels. The interface spills out all over itself and it’s unusable. Microsoft badly needs usability testing.

Serious question: why not use FaceTime Audio (or something similar) these days?

Because the other side is on a land-line

Correct.

Maybe web.skype.com will be better? Just a guess.

Anyway, that's how I use Skype when I still have to use it. Which is about once a month.

I didn’t know that existed. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip!

This is happening due to Microsoft buying Skype so they could create/market Microsoft Teams. In their continuing push of Teams, Microsoft has eliminated the Skype Credit process entirely. I am canceling my Skype account and going with my cellphone provider's WIFI Calling feature. What we all knew and loved about Skype has passed away.......

I hope they refund people or still allow people to use their existing credit... I use Skype to get a virtual number so I can call places in England from the U.S. before I visit there and so I can continue to use the same number while I'm in England :)

My credit was credit from using bing. I use to use it on the rare case of needing to call my bank. (I live overseas)

Oh man, I use Skype to call foreign numbers ever 4 months or so when we’re on holiday.

Exactly. I still have to call foreign phones, but not regularly enough to really wanting a subscription. It can be 500 minutes one month and then close to zero for several. Pay as I go seems the right choice. But there seems to be no competition in that market. My cell operator charges something like 20-30 cents per minute and Internet-based services close down one after the other.

The company I work for (full time contract) uses Skype as their communications platform. Besides notifications sometimes being wonky and getting false missed call notifications (this only happens like once a month), it works well. I also have like $4 in credit left, I sometimes use it to call foreign numbers. It's a shame, really, since it works well and I in no way need a subscription because I use maybe $1/year in credit.

Similar situation here. My company uses Skype for all in-house video calls, in large part because none of our clients uses it. So far, I haven't had any problems with it. The same cannot be said for Teams.

Linphone works good for internal use and is free to other linphone users.

The drawback is that unless you can in a newer version, you must choose between using your free linphone video messenger account OR your external sip account that can do landlines.

Having mentioned both in this thread: my small business is using grandstream phones that receive calls on twilio [because it’s the only one that will ring up to 10 extensions on a single login], and then competitively make outbound on all the others I mentioned based on dialing patterns.

And then we use linphone for internal video, since we’re a Linux shop and teams is out. [it’s wonderful but just exasperating that I can’t configure a second account and use it for everything.]

Linphone otoh will call a proper SIP address for free, eg ourtelephonenumber@twilio or oursipusername@sip.telnyx.com so I can conference in Cisco tandbergs, or I can conference in someone on one of the grandstreams that way. [when linphone is configured as a linphone rather than a SIP phone]

I confess to still using skype w two old friends, mainly because i resisted getting a phone until a few months ago and couldn't text by SMS. But I'll be unsurprised when microsoft finally pulls the plug

Skype is still alive!?

Back in the day my entire extended family used it to connect with each other across the globe. But today? I don't know a single person, old or young, that still uses it!

I use it every month for book club meetings, just for convenience, it’s easy to use and hasn’t changed much in years and years

It's definitely still one of the best consumer VoIP solutions and I've found that video/audio calls still work really well, better than other apps

I still use it daily, the business version was swallowed by Teams but I hope Skype will survive, not as bloated and just does the job.

The business version was nothing to do with the real Skype though. It was just a lame rebranding of Lync. Just some Microsoft branding BS.

If it still existed now it would have been called copilot video or something :)

i know of two companies (via acquaintances) that use skype (the regular non business version). one is a medium sized spam company that trades IPs and malware from eastern europe whose spam clients are all using skype. and the other is an online porn company whose contractors are all using skype. i couldn’t find out why they’re not using something else.

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