For those of you who run a home office and occasionally need to send a fax I have found the following solution to be a really cost effective one, and will only cost you around $10 in fees to set up and should be enough to send around 90 faxes for that $10, which for me is more than a years worth of faxes. You will need a computer, a printer, and a scanner for this to work properly. Right now I see a mix of companies allowing faxes or email attachments, and I am guessing one day all “faxing” could be done through email attachments and for “free”.
Here are some perks of this setup: no second line needed, no re-occuring monthly fees, the ability to send faxes from any computer in the world (as long as you have your documents with you), ability to view a fax from anywhere in the world as long as you have the software installed.
And the possible negative aspects: no real fax machine, may take a bit more time to use. Probably not the best solution if you send many faxes or have an office with more than a few people in it. You need a computer, scanner, and printer to use it.
Here is how it works:
1. Recieving Faxes – Sign up for Efax – www.efax.com they have different services available, but offer a free version that ONLY allows you to accept incoming faxes. This converts them to a electronic document, and allows you to print, or view them on the monitor. They will send you spam once a month begging you to sign up for their premium service, but their basic service is free, and you get some weird number out of the local area. I am in 630/773 and my fax is 435.xxx.8181, pretty awesome actually that my last number is the same as my home phone! Cost = Free
2. Sending faxes. I shopped around and found a great service to send faxes from. Efax wants 9.95 a month to be able to send faxes, I send maybe 1-2 a month which would be like $5 a fax…. I found a cheaper service that allows you to prepay at $10 and only use 11 cents of credit (or similar) per page that you send. No monthly fees, or other BS. You send my emailing the telephone number @ a certain domain and it will either send the body as the fax, or you can send attachments and it will make the body the cover letter and the attachments are the other pages. The place I use is called: Interfax. l again avoid anything other than the prepaid sending fax package…otherwise you are paying a monthly fee for recieving faxes. Cost = $10 per every 91 pages you send, and the credit stays good for a year.
3. Scanning a Document to Fax: I use an all in one printer and scan things in as full size jpg images. All in one printers are dirt cheap these days and they have numerous models available. I have a HP 3210 all in one, which is a higher end photo printer which prints great looking photos, it also allows me to scan slides or film. Cost = Free if you have it around $99+ if you don’t.
A standard fax process would be like this:
- A company either sends me a fax (to my efax number), or emails me a document that I need to fill out
- I print the form out and sign it (printer/all in one)
- I scan the form into my computer (scanner/all in one)
- I use interfax to send the fax (interfax)
- I go on with my day. (wooo wooo)
In summary I urge you to use technology and give the finger to your phone company and any company trying to charge you monthly fees for sending or recieving faxes. Again use the following:
Efax – free fax recieving
Interfax – 11 cents per page to send a fax, $10 prepaid card required.
Printer and Scanner or All-in-one – to do the printing and scanning
What fax solution do you use and how many faxes do you send per month?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I would like to send A efax in europe greece ,belgium : is it possible with prepaid and how much does it charge me for?
Thank you
Great article – Thank you for taking the time to create it. I found it very informative
Say I want to Scan a 1000 page jury transcript to email? Its kinda confidential… What the best price on it??
Hey there, just wanted to say thanks. After checking into a bunch of options, I do like yours the best….except for the non-local number problem. Unfortunately that’s a deal killer. Wish I could find a service that let me accept faxes for free (I need about 3 local numbers), but then send out through interfax… (e.g. I don’t want to pay for 3 send/receive accounts, but rather 3 receive accounts and 1 send account).
Thanks again!
Thanks for sharing your research. I often need to send faxes from my laptop. This presents 2 difficulties.
1) Sometimes I’m not near a phone line [and therefore not able to use XP’s built-in fax service to send the fax via my laptop’s modem].
2. Sometimes I’m using my Acer netbook which has neither a modem nor even a port to plug a phone line in to.
Have you come across a solution that enables sending a fax directly from laptop to recipient’s fax machine [via internet] – preferably as a print to fax method? (That’s the most convenient way to fax a web page. No need to save it, upload it, convert it, etc!)
Thanks.