Faxing. It’s something that most people would rather not have to deal with, but for most, it’s a must. Or is it? Do you really have to deal with cranky machines, dusty toner cartridges, perfectly (mis)timed paper jams? No, you don’t. You don’t need a phone line either. How? Well of course, some of you are saying, eFaxing. And who to go with to do such a thing? eFax, right? Sorry, wrong number. I recently discovered two different options to meet differing needs, depending on how much of a need you have for faxing.
The first, for those of you freelancers out there who have very varying needs, is FaxZero. FaxZero lives up to it’s name by allowing you to quickly, easily send faxes for free, within the US and Canada. For the privilege of placing a small ad on the cover page, you can send up to three pages, up to twice a day. Need more? They also give you the option to send an ad free fax, up to 15 pages, as many a day as you like, for $1.99 each, via Paypal. Ah, a la carte faxing, without the trip to Kinkos!
Now, supposing you are finding yourself regularly needing to send faxes, and hey, receive them too? One of the best I’ve found out there, both in terms of pricing and services, is the Virtual Fax service from Callwave. This inventive company also produces other things such as a text message sending widget, text based voicemail, and a host of other things.
In the case of their fax service, I did a cost comparison to eFax, and the difference was flooring. Callwave gives a generous allowance of both incoming and outgoing pages per month, email and SMS notifications, and fax storage from 6 months to unlimited. You choose to keep your current number, or select another one. In my search for obscure small towns (like the one I live in) they had many available. Unfortunately, it looks to be only US numbers available.
In what should appeal to the greenie in all of us, signing up for their Plus service ($12.95 monthly, 300 pages in, 200 pages out, unlimited storage) gets a tree planted for you by Global Releaf.
So now you can feel free to fax, paper free, ink free, machine free, guilt free, with only a scanner and your nimble mouse finger.
Paul – These are great services. You may find ours interesting as well – EchoSign.com is the only 100% web-based e-signature service. The first 5 e-signatures are 100% free (no credit card) so if you want to try an e-signature, you can go even for “paper free” and “guilt free” …
Thanks Jason. For the layman, what is this useful for?
Hi Paul,
Great article, I was just wondering whether you need to have a scanner to use these services, or can you use a Word document for example? For $12.95 monthly, it seems buying a scanner and paying for some trees to be planted yourself for each roll of paper you buy (and/or buying recycled fax paper) would be more economical?
Great question, Joel. You can use a number of file formats, so no a scanner isn’t always necessary. For something that needs signing, then you would. But in these days of having electronic signatures (like that company mentioned above in the comments,and with Acrobat) you wouldn’t.
But let’s say you needed to use a scanner for every fax you sent. The consideration could expand to beyond cost, to are you able to find copies of faxes from a year ago (they store them for you on CallWave) How about how much resources are you using, how often do you have to get toner, how often do you need to fix it? Is it more expensive to fix then the machine itself, and thus you throw it away? Well the same could be said for a scanner as well.
On that note, I invite you to read the article I’ll be writing today, on Second Rotation, a company that buys old electronics from you, lets you ship for free, they sell them to people in need, recycle what they can’t, and the proceeds go to charitable organizations. A win all around. http://www.secondrotation.com
thanks for your question.
Thanks Paul, makes a lot of sense. I actually got rid of my scanner (gave it to a friend) and now just use the library or Kinkos when I need to scan. Not as convenient but you’re right about maintenance, toner (for a fax) and disposal. I’ll take a look at your Second Rotation article, the website looks like a great idea! Have you heard of http://www.buymytronics.com/? I’ve never used them though.
No I’ve not seen them, I’ll check it out, mention it in the article! Thanks Joel.
GotFreeFax.com is another website that lets user send free fax online to the US and Canada. User can either upload a PDF/Word file or enter text to fax. Plus, it does not add Ads to the fax, which makes it more suitable for faxing formal documents.