Comments on: Skype steals your lunch money

By: mdy

mdy — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:56:27 +0000

I guess I’m more sensitive to this type of billing because so many of the services we use here in the Philippines are “prepaid.”

We’ve got prepaid internet, prepaid landlines (POTS), prepaid mobile… There’s even talk of prepaid electricity (but I haven’t actually seen that yet).

In our case, unused prepaid credits expire after 60 days even if you’ve been consuming part of it. The only way we can prevent the expiration of the credit balance is to ADD more credits.

So I actually felt that Skype was being generous because they gave me a much longer window (180 days), and I didn’t have to add to my balance to prevent expiration. I only had to use a few cents.

Everything is relative, I guess. 8-)

Cheers!

By: Doug Haslam

Doug Haslam — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:48:17 +0000

Might have been three– definitely two. I misunderstood what they meant by SMs, and used IMs. It just seems ridiculous that they would take my money because I wasn’t using the credit.

By: mdy

mdy — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 03:40:21 +0000

Out of curiosity, did they really send you three emails to remind you?

I got one such email before, and was able to reset my Skype credit by sending an SMS message for a few cents.

I guess 180 days haven’t passed since then because I haven’t received a further reminder.