Below is a review I was trying to post, but the website would not let me post it. Perhaps the website was affiliated with Skype, and wouldn’t post it because someone actually said something bad about them. Wouldn't put it past them. So, for future reference, and because I want to share my frustrations with the world, here is what I had to say…

I found Skype to be a very awesome program to use while living abroad. Instead of paying outrageous fees, I could talk to anyone else with Skype installed for free.

At the time, however, most of my family wasn’t using Skype. My husband and I decided to sign up for Skype’s paid service, which would allow us to call landlines for a very cheap price. We were also able to obtain a US phone number, so our family could call us from their phones to our computer. There was also the option of forwarding calls to our cell phones, which seemed like a nice option to have.

Everything was super awesome until my credit card was about to expire. My husband went to update the information for our credit card on Skype. Skype refused to allow us to just update our credit card. They told us we had to close our account and begin a new subscription. This sounded odd, but we trusted Skype at the time and always recommended to everyone, so we did as they said.

After closing our account and starting a new one, Skype informed us that we were now under their new terms and conditions which meant, the price we were originally paying for their services more than doubled.

I wrote to them telling them how upset this made me—that I recommended them to all my friends abroad and all my family at home, and then they did this dirty under-handed thing. Their reply pretty much said, “That’s just the way we’re doing it now,” without even any sort of apology.

Then, I returned back to the States. We kept the paid service up until then in order to keep in contact with family. Being back home with a temporary phone and applying for jobs, we decided to use their call forwarding option where our calls can be forwarded to our cell phone. We tested it (since abroad we tried it and found it to not work), and everything seemed fine.

Later, one prospective employer e-mailed me to say she couldn’t reach me at the number I left. I tested the number again and it worked (and others had called me with it). Later, we found out it only works when you have Skype turned on on your computer (and sometimes, it didn’t even work then). I’m not sure how many calls I missed from prospective jobs because of this.

I guess I should have known better than to rely on their services in the first place…

Lesson—don’t pay Skype anything. They’re unreliable and sneaky…