What Skype actually was
Skype occupied a strange and useful niche: the service you used once a year and didn't think about.
Moving from Berlin to Boston? You need to call German removal companies for quotes while your local cell contract is already canceled. Moving back? You need to call US customer support lines to close accounts and fix payment issues. These aren't daily calls. They're the calls you suddenly need to make when you realize the only way to reach someone is a phone number—and your current phone situation doesn't support that.
Skype handled this. You'd pay $25 for credits, make a few calls, and not care that credits would eventually expire because the alternative was worse. A German prepaid plan charging $3/minute for overseas calls would cost $50 for a single 15-minute call. Skype was 10x cheaper and it worked.
Microsoft's explanation for the shutdown—consolidation with Teams—is probably the complete story. Teams serves enterprise customers. Skype served individuals making occasional international calls. When a company needs to cut costs, the product serving lower-value customers gets absorbed. The Skype team, by all accounts staffed with brilliant engineers, presumably moved to other Microsoft projects or elsewhere.
The three categories of "alternatives" (and why none of them fit)
Search for "Skype alternatives" and you'll find lists mixing three completely different types of products.
Messengers: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram. These work exceptionally well for what they do—text, voice, and video between users who both have the app installed. If your use case was Skype-to-Skype calls, any messenger replaces that. But messengers can't call phone numbers. Your grandmother's landline doesn't have WhatsApp. The ferry rental agency in Greece doesn't check Telegram. The German tax office (Finanzamt) isn't on Facebook Messenger.
Meeting apps: Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx. Designed for scheduled video calls with multiple participants. The infrastructure, pricing, and interface all assume you're hosting or joining a meeting, not dialing a phone number in another country. Zoom does offer a phone add-on, but it's priced for business use—$10-20/month for a plan, not pay-as-you-go credits for occasional calls.
Google Voice. Google's attempt to add phone calls to their ecosystem alongside Gmail, Chat, Meet, and Workspace. Logical on paper. In practice, Google Voice only works reliably in the US and only serves US customers. If you're an expat in Europe trying to call US numbers, or calling from the US to family abroad, Google Voice either won't work or won't work well.
The pattern: each category focuses on its core use case. Messengers optimize for in-app communication. Meeting tools optimize for remote work. Google Voice optimizes for US-to-US calling. None of them treat international calls to phone numbers as an important feature.
When to use what
The first question isn't "which app is best." It's "what are you trying to do."
If you're calling or texting other app users: Use WhatsApp, Messenger, or whatever app you both already have. This is free and works fine.
If you're calling landlines or mobile phones: The answer depends on several factors.
Check your cell plan first. Many carriers offer international add-ons for $5-15/month that include calls to specific countries. Some plans include international calling at reasonable rates already. Others still charge $1-3/minute—in which case, any VoIP service is cheaper.
Is this a one-off or recurring? For a single important call, the $20-30 you'd spend on VoIP credits is trivial compared to the cost of the call not working. For regular calls to family abroad, a monthly plan or subscription makes more sense.
Does call quality matter? A quick check-in call can tolerate some audio issues. A two-hour session where you're working as a professional interpreter, and your hourly rate is triple the monthly cost of the VoIP service, cannot. Important calls—negotiations, legal matters, medical consultations—need HD quality where you hear everything clearly.
What the "10 Best Skype Alternatives" articles get wrong
Most alternatives lists fall into two categories: SEO content stuffed with repeated information, or articles fixated on "how to make free calls."
The free calls obsession misses the point. The person stranded at a Greek ferry terminal, ferry about to leave, rental agency nowhere to be found, holding only a local phone number—that person doesn't need free. They need it to work. The professional interpreter billing $150/hour doesn't care about saving $5 on call costs. The importer negotiating a deal with a Taiwanese supplier needs a two-hour session that doesn't drop, not a free service with unreliable quality.
Three Starbucks visits cost $20. For that amount, you get peace of mind when calling family in Russia, or a callback number with voicemail so you don't miss customer calls, or the ability to reach a German government office when your German is only good enough to order food.
The lists also ignore what these services actually require. "Everyone uses WhatsApp" assumes everyone you need to reach uses WhatsApp. They don't. The assumption that you can just Google "free international calls" and successfully negotiate with overseas suppliers is disconnected from reality.
What to actually check before choosing a VoIP service
In our experience at DialHard, the number one thing people overlook has nothing to do with rates or features. It's whether their setup can make VoIP calls at all.
WebRTC—the technology that enables audio and video communication from a browser—requires cooperation from your browser, your device's permissions, your WiFi network, your ISP, and sometimes your corporate firewall. Any of these can block or degrade calls.
Equally common: microphone permissions. On mobile especially, if you accidentally tap "Block" on a permission prompt (or it times out), browsers often block future requests silently without showing the prompt again. We recently spent a week helping a user troubleshoot calls that wouldn't connect. The diagnostic showed WebRTC working, network open, bandwidth sufficient—but microphone access denied. The fix was buried three levels deep in Android settings. Other apps worked fine; Edge had been silently blocked for this one site.
The most frustrating scenario: you've done your research, found a reliable service, loaded credits or subscribed, made your first call, and see this:
AcquisitionFailedError (31402): The browser and end-user allowed permissions, however getting the media failed.
Now begins multi-day back-and-forth with customer support—if you can find their email among the AI chatbots, if you get a human on the first try, if they respond within 48 hours. Best case: they help you troubleshoot and you eventually make calls. Worst case: you never get a refund (some services have non-refundable credits in their terms) or recover something after a month or two.
Before committing to any service, verify:
- Your browser supports WebRTC (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari all do; some privacy-focused browsers block it)
- Your browser has microphone permission—both at the system level and for the specific site (on Android: Settings → Apps → [Browser] → Permissions → Microphone)
- Your network allows WebRTC traffic (corporate networks and some public WiFi block it)
- The service offers a free test call or trial credits
- The refund policy for unused credits
- Whether support is reachable by email and responds within a reasonable timeframe
DialHard offers a free browser compatibility test that checks whether your setup can make calls—takes about 30 seconds after a quick email signup. If everything works, you also get five free minutes to test on an actual line before spending anything.
The actual alternatives for international phone calls
For occasional calls (a few times per year): Check if your carrier has a reasonable international rate or add-on first. VoIP services with pay-as-you-go credits—DialHard, Rebtel, Viber Out—offer rates typically ranging from $0.01-0.10/minute depending on destination. Expect to pay $15-30 for credits; accept that some may expire unused.
For regular calls (weekly or more): Monthly plans from VoIP providers often offer better per-minute rates. Some services offer unlimited calling to specific countries for flat monthly fees. Check whether the countries you call most are covered.
For business or professional use: Prioritize reliability, call quality, and support responsiveness over price. Look for services with automatic refunds for dropped calls. Consider whether you need a callback number, voicemail, or call recording. Verify the service works from your office network before committing.
For specific situations: Calling from a country where most services don't work well? Check which providers have good routing to and from that country specifically. Calling someone who only has a landline? Messenger apps won't help; you need actual phone termination. Need real-time translation or subtitles? Very few services offer this; most require both parties to speak the same language.
What DialHard does differently
DialHard focuses specifically on international calls to phone numbers—the use case Skype served and most alternatives ignore.
Rates are transparent and published. Call quality prioritizes reliability over cost savings. Dropped calls trigger automatic refunds without contacting support. The service works from browsers without downloads.
This isn't the right choice for everyone. If you mostly call other app users, use a messenger. If you need a full business phone system, look at providers built for that. If you make one international call every two years, your carrier's high rates might still be cheaper than maintaining credits on any service.
But if you're the person who suddenly needs to call a phone number in another country and needs it to work—the situation Skype used to handle—that's what DialHard is built for.
The bottom line
Skype's shutdown removed a service that handled a specific, underserved use case: occasional international calls to actual phone numbers. The alternatives filling that gap aren't messengers (which require both parties to have apps) or meeting tools (which aren't designed for phone calls) or Google Voice (which only works in the US).
The actual alternatives are VoIP services designed for international calling, your carrier's international add-on if the rates are reasonable, or—for the truly occasional call—just paying your carrier's high per-minute rate and accepting it as the cost of not maintaining another service.
Before choosing any VoIP service, test that it works with your browser, network, and device. Check the refund policy. Find out how to reach support. The worst outcome isn't paying a few cents more per minute—it's having credits on a service that doesn't work when you need it.