Pay As You Go Fax
Are you looking for a way to send faxes without having to pay an ongoing subscription? A pay-as-you-go online fax service is an easy way to send faxes without having to pay monthly bills. It simply lets you send your fax directly from your computer with just a little information about the recipient.
Also called pay-per-use fax service, it is usually very cheap compared to the alternatives of:
- Finding and using a fax machine at your local print shop
- Finding and using a fax machine at a nearby business center
- Using a subscription-based online fax service.
While there are multiple ways to send faxes online, a pay-as-you-go (frequently shortened to "PAYG") fax service will help you avoid any unexpected charges or fees, and it's just as effective as subscription-based service. This makes it perfect for those who don’t have a fax machine or those who only require such services on occasion and don’t want to commit to a subscription. This might happen if you just need to quickly send documents to companies, banks, and government offices domestically or internationally.
Pay-as-you-go fax reception services - do these exist?
You will normally not find services that offer fax reception on a PAYG basis. This is because once you have given out your allocated number to someone so they can send you a fax, there is a chance that additional faxes will be sent to you at a later date. Fax service providers who take privacy seriously will not want to allocate the same number to someone else who might receive faxes intended for you. Which means they either need to stop using that number forever (expensive) or "put it on ice" for a few months before reallocating it (cumbersome). This is frequently too much of an effort for them to bother offering this service, and why no pay-as-you-go fax reception services exist. Correct us if we're wrong.
faxbeep.com is a PAYG fax service, which will let you send faxes to any destination worldwide, and only charge you for the number of pages you actually send. In fact, if your fax has multiple pages, and some or all of those pages fail to go through, faxbeep will only charge you for successfully-transmitted pages.
Features of PAYG fax services
No subscription fee
This one is obvious and is what differentiates a PAYG service from a subscription-based service. With this feature, you don't need to be concerned about the next month rolling around and you getting charged a subscription fee for a service you didn't want to commit to.
Does the service require registration?
This one is more subtle. Some fax services require you to first register an account with them before you can use their service. Sometimes this is required to actually provide you with service. For example, when they offer an email-to-fax or fax-to-email service, they need your email address to accept your messages and forward them to fax, or vice versa. At other times, they could actually provide service without registration, but it's just a way for them to build up a mailing list to send you marketing messages.
Cost of sending a fax
x
Does the service charge for failed pages?
x
Are ads or other branding attached to the fax?
x
Pay-as-you-go fax service providers at a glance
| Requires account registration? | "Domestic" country | Price for a domestic fax | Price for an international fax | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| faxbeep | 👍 No | Wherever the user is | $0.95 for first 3 pages | $1.99 for first 3 pages $0.12 per add'l page | |
| GotFreeFax | 👍 No | USA | $0.95 for 3 pages | ||
| HelloSign Fax | 👎 Yes | USA | $0.95 for 3 pages | ||
| faxZERO | 👍 No | USA & Canada | Free: 3 page-fax, up to 2 times a day, but fax has ads Paid: $0.95 for 3 pages, "priority handling" | $2.55 for first 4 pages, $1.25 thereafter |
Did we miss any providers you think should be on this list? Tell us about it through our contact page.