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Popfax replaces your old fax machine with a cool online app. Coffee not included.

Toner low? Paper out? Line busy? Machine jammed? Few pieces of office equipment are as frustrating as the fax machine. Yet, most businesses still use them. Popfax replaces your desktop fax machine (and the extra phone line) with a web-based app for sending and receiving faxes and voice-mail. You can even choose phone numbers in other countries to receive faxes on – and they’re all delivered right into your email.

The French company has a truly worldwide presence, with numbers available in over 50 cities worldwide. They offer a free trial for those who are still unsure if they want to keep their old fax machine a while before making the move to paperless online faxing.

How it works

When you sign up with Popfax, you buy credit in your account that you use up as you send faxes. You’ll also buy a subscription for your fax number, from a month up to several years.

We checked their pricing against J2 and Myfax, and found Popfax was consistently less expensive for both occasional and power users. A typical business sending a few faxes a week can expect to pay about five dollars a month. And incoming faxes are free. That’s a huge plus!

International rates are significantly cheaper than other companies, and far cheaper than what you’d pay through the phone company for long-distance faxes. For example, to Jamaica our phone company charges 50 cents a minute, so a two-minute fax (one page) costs a dollar. With Popfax it costs thirteen cents. You can check their worldwide pricing under the “tariffs” tab on their home page.

Cool features – the “option pack”

The Option Pack gives you some really useful extra features, including 1GB of storage over an unlimited time, to store all your sent and received faxes (a page is about 30kb, so 1GB will hold thousands of pages). You’ll also get access to email-to-fax, SMS (text message) sending to mobile phones, plus access to the “registered fax” service, which lets you receive legal confirmation that a fax was received and read, by making the receiver confirm with a code before they can read the fax. It’s a patented technology Popfax invented. The option pack is an additional $2.50 per month.

Pros: Cheaper and easier than your old fax machine, numbers available worldwide

Cons: Website could stand to be easier to navigate

Rating 10/10

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