Fax Over Internet

For those who don’t often have any need to send a fax, buying a machine for doing it is fairly pointless. Going to a copy shop to send one, however, is inconvenient and can be far more costly than it needs to be.

The solution is to use a fax-over-internet service. These services allow you to send faxes from the comfort of your home or office without having to have a fax machine of your own. To do it this way, you only need to upload a copy of your document and use the service’s site to enter relevant information like the recipient’s name and fax number. When the fax is sent, an email receipt is typically mailed that repeats the from/to information along with the time it actually went out.

There are many companies that allow you to send internet fax documents. Like many other online services, these range from free to expensive, depending on your needs. Free services are great for people who only need to send a couple of faxes a day; at FaxZero, for instance, the limit for free faxing is 2 a day, with a limit of 3 pages each. Free services also send a cover sheet containing an ad along with any fax they relay, which can make them unsuitable for correspondence that requires the sender to look more professional.

Paid fax service companies on the internet offer a wide range of value-adds to set them above even premier free services. The most obvious is that they don’t send any ads with the fax, allowing the user to appear as if they aren’t using an outside service. Above that, they allow users to send more faxes in total, as well as more pages per fax.

Prices vary widely for paid fax services. On the low end, it’s just $3.49/mo, with a $5.00 setup fee. However, at the cheapest company, there is a 5c/minute usage fee for this plan. Other paid fax companies, while seemingly more expensive at $9.95-$12.95/mo, make up for this by including between 130-1000 pages within their base monthly limit. Pages over the limit cost between 3c and 15c per page, depending on the company and plan.

When fax volume is heavy, one may wonder why they should use an internet fax company instead of just getting a fax machine. One reason is that faxing ties up a phone line and doing a lot of it almost surely will necessitate having a dedicated line put in. Depending on the phone’s long distance plan, the costs of the calls may add up to more money than an internet fax subscription would cost. Lastly, a physical fax machine requires that the user be near it in order to send or get faxes. With an internet service, the user can access fax capabilities anywhere they can get a Wi-Fi connection.

For both convenience and cost savings, it can be a great improvement to send a fax over the internet. These services are accessible from many places, are often cheaper than getting a dedicated fax line, and are easy to use as well.