Best posts made by Skyetel

Hey Guys - we just announced our Spring Update. This update is the largest update in our history.

Check out the details here:
https://skyetel.com/skyetel-spring-update/

@DustinB3403 I totally get where you are coming from. I'm afraid that not our business model. If you are only willing to consider published pricing, then we won't be the cheapest provider available :).

@JasGot I don’t believe the install methods have changed. So the existing guides should work.

@scottalanmiller here's our international pricing: https://files.skyetel.com/SkyetelHighCostPrices.xlsx. This is on our pricing page, but its a link, so its easy to miss

We have some pretty awesome fraud protection with our international system - give this a read:
https://skyetel.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SUG/pages/243761174/High+Cost+Calling

@JaredBusch said in Introducing Postcards - Our SMS & MMS UI:

@Skyetel said in Introducing Postcards - Our SMS & MMS UI:

@JaredBusch yes, he’s legit. Cody is one of our rockstars so be nice

Your nice or mine?

Whichever is nicer

@Harrygill I think we may have gotten our wires crossed. We told you that our published pricing would already save you about 1/3 of your phone bill and guaranteed you that if your phone bill was not reduced, we would adjust your pricing accordingly.

Additionally, you were also given $50 in free Skyetel credit to test us out.

As mentioned previously, we do not compete on published rates - only rates you are currently paying.

@JaredBusch

Let’s table this till next week. I’ll have one of our other engineers update the install script to be more inclusive for Operating Systems.

Hi Guys,

Our pricing falls into two categories, retail (whats published on our website) and relationship (what we offer privately when you reach out). We offer our retail pricing to everyone who signs up. Relationship pricing is what it sounds like - we want to get to know you and extend you pricing that suits what your needs are. You do not have to be a reseller or wholesaler, but those groups are typically who we deal with most (which is why we call them out directly on the website).

The reason we don't match/compete with other published pricing is because we are not trying to build a business full of customers who we don't know. We want to know you, know your needs, and give you white-glove service. We're not trying to do a cattle call. Relationship based pricing allows us to make sure that when technical issues arise, you have the resources to get help (whether thats from us or from a third party). Users who simply sign up on our website tend to not have that, and thus, require more support hours. We also have a lot of home users who use us for their personal home phone (my grandparents included!). For them, our retail pricing is only costing them $2-$4/mo and so they don't get a huge benefit of wholesale prices.

So with that in mind, the way we work with MSPs is we negotiate pricing with the MSP directly, and then that confidential pricing applies to all of their customers. This is true for all our referral partners - whether you sell IT services, PBXs, or ice cream.

I hope this clears everything up

Chris

@scottalanmiller Thanks for the phone call. I have updated our website with your suggestions.

@wrx7m I'm obviously biased - but PRIs are a complete waste of money these days. Most SIP Trunk providers are delivering just as good of service as a PRI but at a fraction of the cost. I'd put our service up against any PRI any day of the week. So long as you have a good internet connection, using a PRI is a big waste of money.

Again though... I'm pretty biased lol

@Dashrender @scottalanmiller Almost all carriers are using SIP for Local Calling. Toll Free calling is the last refuge of TDM (which is one of the reasons its so expensive). If your carrier is giving your a PRI, I'd bet almost anything its pure SIP

@Dashrender It used to be that legacy carriers had the best uptime (back when they exclusively used TDM), but they didn't switch from TDM to SIP gracefully and still haven't gotten their act together. Every big carrier has their own quirks but they are caused by the same fundamental problem: no big CLEC is a single network, they are only single billing mechanism for multiple underlying networks. A really good example of this is CenturyLink - Depending on where you are, you could be on TW Telecom's Network, or Qwest's, or Level 3, or the OG CTL network... its practically endless. That sort of architecture worked better when everything was TDM; voltage is voltage. With SIP... man - you have protocols, packet buffers, MTUs, ISPs, etc. It's infinitely more complicated to stitch together aging disparate networks transparently. Alternatively, If you are a small legacy carrier (like Cox) you don't have the money to trash millions of dollars of TDM to replace it with millions of dollars of VoIP equipment, pay to train your employees, and get your customers on board in a time period where you don't die from the transition (this is why the little guys tend to just get bought by the big ones)

Carriers like Twilio, VoIP.MS, Skyetel (us - shameless plug!) are better at SIP because thats all we ever were - Skyetel doesn't own a single piece of TDM equipment at all, and I bet neither do Twilio or VoIP.MS. We don't have to worry about training ready-to-retire employees who are more comfortable dealing with Muxers than Jitter. This fact is actually recognized by the FCC and is part of the reason why they let carriers like us skip the whole CLEC registration process and go straight to numbering authority.

All that to say - I'd bet on our network over any Legacy Carrier every day of the week. Truthfully - I'd bet on most SIP-Only networks over legacy carriers too. But i may be biased

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@IRJ said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

Can we please just nuke this whole thread? All the feedback was already taken into consideration. It's really not becoming a good look for anyone.

I think everyone is okay with that, but it's Jared's thread and would need his okay.

We're okay with it - and we apologize for any confusion we may have caused here. We updated our Port In page per @JaredBusch 's suggestions.

@scottalanmiller said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@JasGot said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

@JaredBusch said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

aka hidden it like your pricing.

Hidden like this:
https://skyetel.com/pricing/

Well no, that's their MSRP. But they have incredible pricing that can't be discussed publicly. I mean, we ARE discussing it right now, but you know what I mean.

Go check YOUR pricing inside of your Skyetel dashboard, it's a fraction of what is on that public pricing page.

Yea - he is referring to our "Relationship Pricing" that we mention here:

@scottalanmiller shhh... don't let SpiceWorks know

@JasGot said in Skyetel auto enables billable services without notice:

Looking at this from a reseller perspective......I would never do business with a company that published reseller pricing to the public. How on earth would you survive if your customers knew your costs for the products you are reselling to them? And yes, I can justify our margins, but why the hell would I want to have that battle, when it is completely unnecessary?

This is one of the top reasons why we don't publish those rates. About 80% of our customer base resells us to their own customers, and many of those end users will price compare our resellers to Flowroute, Voip.MS, BluIP, etc. We want our retail pricing to be what we would expect our resellers to charge their customers while our Relationship pricing be what we offer to those who are reselling us and/or those who provide technical support services that has end users not contacting our support team directly.

Since this issue seems to come up a lot, I am going to post a new post about our Relationship pricing in the next couple of weeks.

@Dashrender I created a new thread about our pricing:
https://mangolassi.it/topic/19453/relationship-pricing

For clarity's sake - @scottalanmiller is correct. The "Relationship" is with NTG - so the NTG pricing applies to their customers. All Scott does is put in a ticket with the account information for his customer, and our support department handles the rest (updates the NTG customer's rates). It takes 30 seconds.

The only exception is if that customer turns out to be fraudster or randomly started calling really really expensive places or gets hacked all the time. In those cases, we'd call NTG about it since we have a Relationship and address the issue. That has never happened before though - so its not something to worry about.

@Dashrender said in Relationship Pricing:

@Skyetel said in Relationship Pricing:

For clarity's sake - @scottalanmiller is correct. The "Relationship" is with NTG - so the NTG pricing applies to their customers. All Scott does is put in a ticket with the account information for his customer, and our support department handles the rest (updates the NTG customer's rates). It takes 30 seconds.

The only exception is if that customer turns out to be fraudster or randomly started calling really really expensive places or gets hacked all the time. In those cases, we'd call NTG about it since we have a Relationship and address the issue. That has never happened before though - so its not something to worry about.

Ok, so the rates are so cutrate that you're really worried about a massively different type of use client is brought on board by NTG, etc. That does make it much easier than.

The clients that NTG brings you each get their own account number and billing statements directly to themselves, right?

Correct - they use their own Credit Card, and have complete access to our portal. There is no re-billing. We just expect that support tickets come from NTG and not the customer directly.

@Curtis make sure you lower the registration timeout to something like 80 seconds. That tends to make it work better.