Phone Call Costs

Discussions center on the costs of making and receiving phone calls, including country-specific models like US recipient-pays versus caller-pays elsewhere, historical per-minute charges, and implications for spam and modern unlimited plans.

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Keywords

SkypeIn ISP US skype.com AT WhatsApp USA MMS wikipedia.org SMS phone calls phone calls pay caller cost sms incoming charge charges

Sample Comments

wrs Jul 17, 2025 View on HN

Making real phone calls costs real money.

petsos Aug 29, 2013 View on HN

Wait, it costs money to receive calls in the US?

dbatten May 11, 2018 View on HN

Telcos charge for connecting phone calls and routing voice packets. Even robocallers have to pay those fees.

ars Jul 18, 2013 View on HN

In most countries the caller pays, not the callee. So he is saving his callers money, not himself.

manigandham Nov 9, 2019 View on HN

Phone calls do cost money. Unlimited mobile calling plans are very recent, and many areas in the world are still by the minute and rather expensive.

NeoTar Apr 25, 2024 View on HN

The user could be from a country where paying to receive phone-calls is unknown. From some brief Wikipedia research, this is only a common model in the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiving_party_pays)

CaptSpify Dec 21, 2017 View on HN

Why should anyone have to pay to do trivial service to their own phone?

pests Aug 17, 2020 View on HN

Phones call with interesting fees? Do you mean Google Fi which I know many users of?

literallycancer Jun 15, 2017 View on HN

Imagine you had to pay extra when calling someone in a different state in the US (like it used to be with landlines). Why would anyone want to go back to that? Except the telephony providers, of course.

mhb May 3, 2012 View on HN

Does this reasoning work when I don't want to pay for the pay-per-call calls I made on my phone?