I Cancelled My Vonage Home Phone and I Am Saving $33 a Month!

At the end of July, we canceled our home phone service. I never really used the home phone as I have been making and receiving calls on my cell phone for years, my wife used it though. When she updated her cell phone to an unlimited talk plan, she just started using just her cell phone too. I realized I was paying $32.41 a month for a phone line we weren’t using. That’s almost $390 a year.

Seven years ago, I signed up for Vonage. I am sure you have seen Vonage advertised on TV, usually using that catchy Woo-Hoo rockabilly song. Vonage is a low cost phone service that uses Voice Over IP or VoIP technology. Rather than use a dedicated wire to the phone company, VoIP uses your high speed internet connection to deliver your phone service. You plug a wire from a VoIP adapter into your broadband router and your phone cable into the adapter. Your phone works like normal except it now uses your broadband connection.

Once it is set up, it just works. If you move, you just take your VoIP adapter and plug it in to the broadband connection in your new home. You can even take it with you to another location when you are away and your home phone will work at the new location. We moved a few times, and each time we just unplugged the VoIP adapter and plugged it in at our new home and it was ready to go.

But as cool as all that is, we just didn’t need Vonage anymore. We didn’t even transfer the home number. When I first signed up for Vonage it was half the price I was currently paying. It was maybe $16 a month before fees and taxes. It was a great deal compared to what I was paying Verizon for a landline. Over time however, Vonage kept increasing the price until it was up to $32.41 a month. Our use of the home phone line dropped while the price kept going up.

I remember once logging into the website to see if I could downgrade to a cheaper plan. The website was designed to let you upgrade, but not downgrade. I’d have to call and speak with a rep. I didn’t get around to calling, so that strategy worked. There are a lot of cheaper VoIP service out there, and for a while I considered transferring the service to on of those.

At the end of July, I called Vonage to cancel. You cannot cancel from the website. You have to call. they also ask a number of questions to make sure you are the account holder. When I tried to cancel, they wanted to negotiate. I was offered better and better deals to stay. I think they got down to about $10 a month for some plan. But that’s $10 before taxes and fees, and I had already decided it was time to say goodbye. It’s funny because when the Vonage rep asked me what I was willing to pay a month, I told him zero. He sounded like he has heard that before. I remember seven years ago when I cancelled the Verizon landline, the rep commented that I must be switching to VoIP.

The Vonage representative made an good attempt to keep my business, I was polite but firm. It wasn’t like those recent reports in the news where people recorded their phone conversations while trying to cancel Comcast cable service.

So in the end the $388.92 that was going to Vonage will be used to pay the wife’s Straight Talk bill. Next, its time to review the Verizon Fios bill and see if we can get that lower.

What about you? Are you still paying for a home phone line? If so, how much? Or are you only using your cell phone? Leave a comment and share.

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