Grasshopper Vs. FreedomVoice

When searching for Grasshopper, I came across FreedomVoice. Their service offering for my purposes was essentially identical to Grasshopper. However, FreedomVoice is a little less expensive and comes with 400 minutes of talk time. Additional minutes were then charged at a lower rate than Grasshopper. That was enough to convince me. I signed up.

FreedomVoice Review:

Signing up was super easy. I selected the plan I wanted and was immediately redirected to a page where I could pick whether I wanted a 1-800 number, vanity number, or local number. I wanted the 800 number (if I wanted local I would have gone with Google Voice).

There was a solid list of 800 numbers. I picked out my favorites, focusing on numbers with a lot of even digits, or simple numbers. Here was my list:

800-752-5412
800-655-2427
800-615-1280
800-953-7449
800-251-4468
800-407-1114
800-337-8212

I texted my list to my wife and a few friends to see if any numbers stuck out to them. The first friend to reply said that 11/14 was his birthday, and I liked how simple the number was, so I went with: 800-407-1114. I had the number memorized almost immediately, which made me feel very satisfied with the choice.

I spent some time adjusting settings. I was surprised to see the functionality to route calls based on the number dialed, or by the caller id. I won’t need that functionality, but it’s still pretty amazing. I set it up so calls to my phone would display my 1-800 number. That way I would know it was a WP Harbor call. There were also some call announcement features, and an auto-attendant, but I didn’t want to set those things up just yet.

The FreedomVoice App:

I downloaded the FreedomVoice app and called the friend with the 11/14 birthday. The call connected, and displayed my 800 number on his caller ID. I was impressed that I was able to use the number so quickly. It hadn’t been an hour since I picked the number. My credit card hadn’t even been charged yet!

The app is pretty cool. Free. Nice design. It was easy to import all my contacts, although I don’t think I’ll be making too many outbound calls. I’d rather save the minutes for inbound sales calls.

I have two complaints about the FreedomVoice App:

1. There is no ability to change account settings from the app. For example, if I wanted to disable forwarding while in a meeting. But… now that I think about it, I can’t really ever imagine a time when I wouldn’t want calls to come to my phone, so I’m over it.
2. You have to use key codes to put a caller on hold or forward a call. I think that is really because once you make a call, you are using the phone’s default phone interface that probably can’t be customized by a 3rd party app. For example, to send a call to 555-555-1212, dial “* #”, then “1”, then “5555551212#”. Not the end of the world. I don’t expect to be doing any transferring. And I imagine after doing this a few times I’d have it memorized. It just feels very cryptic.

Overall, I’m really happy with my choice to go with FreedomVoice. I’ll let you know if that changes!