A monthly fee for a phone service sounds pretty normal to me?

In the age of FT audio calls and such, it seems out of place. I get paying for the hardware, and even a bit of a premium because the UI has so many parental controls. But charging a monthly fee seems surprising since the differentiation versus FT/GV/etc. is on the UI side, not the "you can talk to your friends" side. There is no monthly cost to a UI.

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toast0 9 hours ago | parent [-]

If you want to call POTS numbers, seems reasonable to pay a fee. voip.ms (of Canada, I think) charges ~ $2/month for a number and ~ $0.01 / minute for calls to US/Canada, calls to other subscribers are free. They work with deposits and a balance. Something in that range seems reasonable... maybe a little bit more if there's some work to make it specifically kid friendly (parental controls for incoming/outgoing calls?)

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apparent 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair enough...$10/mo seems high. And I say this as someone in the target demo.

	▲	philips 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What price point would feel good to you? I am working on a similar service for my own needs (and some other friends). But, my current plan is to hit $100/yr or so but the hardware is included in that cost. I am assuming $2/mo for costs of the number and minutes and retail costs for VOIP hotel phones is about $50. Hopefully the hardware costs amortize out and then I can offer a discount to users on subsequent years. (If you want to go DIY you can save quite a bit of money too- I provided some breadcrumbs for doing that in my comment on the parent)