Two hours a month pays back the new Skype Pro calling plans
Business Week's Olga Kharif blogged Skype's prices are creeping up in reference to the coming Skype Pro pricing plans. What is your breakeven point on the new plans?
Skype says the plans will be around two euro a month. That puts it about $31 for 12 months, a touch more than the US+Canada Unlimited Calling Plan. At the global SkypeOut rate of 2 cents a minute (1.7 eurocents), Skype Pro pays if you're SkypingOut [SkypeOuting? or is SkypeOuting admitting to your friends and family that you use Skype and are proud of it?] for 1553 minutes per year, 129 per month (about two hours), or average 4.3 SkypeOut minutes per day.
Maybe you don't SkypeOut four minutes a day. With a free plan, would you switch from landlines or mobile to Skype for a few calls a week?
How about that long call? That two hour, long-distance but in-country call to your true love ("You hang up." "No, you hang up." "I'm still here." "Hang up, honey." "No, you hang up, dear." "I love you so much.")? To your family? Infinite call waiting with your local phone company's customer service line?
Skype in the workplace may be the big winner. Fixed per-capita rates fit nicely into annual budgets, so Skype Pro is more convenient to buy than wading through phone bills for each office each month. Customer-facing jobs (eBay sellers? Call centers?) can be on the phone for 20 to 30 hours a week, paying off 52 weeks of Skype Pro service in the first 2 weeks.
Comments
129 minutes per month is well above the average for residential users. Given that people have shifted a significant portion of their long-distance calling to their cell phones (to use up the minute bundles they are already paying for), the average minutes of calling have dropped steadily since 1998. I believe it is currently about 40 minutes placed on the mobile and 50 on the home phone, with mobile increasing and wireline minutes dropping each year. Therefore, if one were to place all their calls using Skype (and placing no calls via their home phone anymore, not a likely scenario for most regular people), even at landline rates (2.7 US cent/minute) they would have to make more than 96 minutes of calls per month, almost twice the average, to have the Skype plan pay off. So check your actual calling before you jump on this one.
Posted by: David Beckemeyer | January 19, 2007 09:08 AM
in your calculation, you didn't add the connection fee...
depends on how many calls you make, you may never get your money back unless you make VERY long calls each and every time...
Posted by: icepick314 | January 19, 2007 01:25 PM