Overview
- Plan Reviewed: FaxBetter Account
- Free Trial Period: No, but you could try the Free Account instead.
- Monthly Fees: Variable, averaging about $10.
- Page Counts: 500 pages sent and received.
- Users: 1
- Overage Charges: 6¢ per page sent or received over limit.
- Mobile App: No.
Choose FaxBetter if:
- You require a toll-free toll number for your faxes.
- You want unlimited online fax storage.
Don’t choose FaxBetter if:
- You need more than one user or email to send faxes from.
- You need a local fax number.
FaxBetter occupies a weird niche in the online fax services industry. It has a limited free version as well as a very cheap paid version. It claims to be the fax provider for Google, Microsoft, and a bevy of other Fortune 100 companies despite having no clearly available enterprise-level option and a monthly page limit of 500 pages. That’s pretty suspicious.
Check out our roundup of the Best Online Fax Services
FaxBetter pricing
If you navigate to the FaxBetter website, you’ll see two things advertised immediately.
- They have a free plan they really want you to use.
- Their paid plan is the “cheapest” on the market!
Pushing a free plan isn’t an unusual strategy. It’s a great way for businesses to get their foot in the door and eventually convince you to pay for their product. It’s even more persuasive because you don’t have to input any credit card information to get onboard.
The thing about FaxBetter’s free plan is that, well, it’s hardly a fax plan. You can’t actually send faxes… it only sets you up with a number to receive them. That’s not very useful considering there are a multitude of other free services that allow senders to fax straight to email.
Oh, and did we mention that you have to receive a fax every seven days or else your account expires?
Onto the paid plan, of which there is only one kind. It’s advertised as starting at $5.95 per month. That’s possible, assuming you pay for the year up front and accept a couple other limitations. Average customers will end up paying around $10 per month if you don’t choose to be billed yearly.
To be fair, 500 combined pages per month for $10 is a fairly competitive rate. It’s better than the market standard of 300 or so.
Also advertised is the free toll-free number that’s assigned to your account upon sign-up. That’s accurate, but it is an (866), (877), or (888) number rather than the coveted (800). To get the widely recognized toll-free number, you’ll have to fork over an additional $100.
Overage charges for both sent and received pages come in at 6 cents a page, which is neither good nor bad. What is bad, however, is their policy regarding overages. The moment you go one page over – if someone faxes you, even – you will be charged the overage rate for 250 more pages.
Yeah. That’s 15 dollars by the way, which is almost triple their supposed “best monthly price”. They are the only online fax service with this policy, so take that as you will.
FaxBetter features
There’s a lot of things that are bad about FaxBetter, and we’ll get to more in a moment, but in the interest of fairness, here is what it does well: storage.
FaxBetter offers free, unlimited online fax storage. You can access your sent and received faxes from anywhere using their fax portal. It’s described as “unlimited lifetime” storage, although it is unclear whether or not you will retain access after you cancel the service. Given their policies on other matters, the answer is probably ‘no’, so do occasional backups yourself.
Even the free plan offers impressive storage capabilities. FaxBetter will hold on to up to 1000 pages for free accounts. Getting people to send at least 1 fax a week for 1000 weeks so that your account won’t be canceled (and the rest of those faxes lost) is a whole other story, however. Don’t forget that you can only receive up to 20 faxes per month on the free plan – surplus faxes disappear into the void!
BetterFax does not have a limit on the number of pages you can send in a single fax. It does not advertise how many files one may attach to a fax, or the file size limit. It supports the standard range of online fax formats (Pdf, Tif, Word, Excel, Jpg, Html, and Plain Text), but none of the extended range of file formats that more full-featured fax services might have (such as alternate image formats like PNG).
Somewhat inconveniently, you are unable to do fax broadcasting with BetterFax, so any faxes that need to be sent to multiple recipients will have to be all sent manually and separately. You also don’t have the ability to preview a fax before you send it, which forces you to trust the (demonstrably untrustworthy) system.
Don’t expect to have multiple users or more than one number from which to fax. And, while toll free numbers are available, it is not possible to acquire a local area code or an international number.
