$200 in Hidden Fees on Onebox!
This is a follow up to a post I wrote last week about how Hidden Fees on “free” numbers can often cost more thanpaying for it in the first place. I found something today from Onebox that went even further than the hidden fees I talked about from Kall8 and TollFreeNumber.org. Onebox not only wants to charge $50 to release a toll free number you bring over from another carrier, but they also want to charge you $200 if you got the number directly from them. The agreement is also marked in purple from another post about a totally insane provision they added that you have to see too.
If that’s not a great example of a backend fee designed to lock customers into their service I don’t know what is. J2 or Onebox certainly has the right to charge any fee they want too. But if they ake up something that’s not industry standard and slip it in the fine print where most customers don’t see it, I feel I have an obligation to my customers to announce it.
They will probably claim that it takes time to release numbers, which is true. It probably takes about 3 to 5 minutes of someone’s time to release a number even if they don’t work at Rita’s speed. If they think that’s worth $50, we’ll be glad to handle that for them for half of that. The fact that they charge $200 for numbers that they assigned means they essentially charge $150 for locating numbers.
So you can pay our $49 up front fee, for better help finding numbers, faster activation, free temporary service and better proof of ownership and the ability to transfer it anywhere you want, or you can get one that looks free from someone like Onebox and wind up paying three times as much in the end. I know the people at Onebox and they know we release numbers faster than anyone else and they know we can and will yank them back if customer’s need us to. They’re not a bad service so I think they may be able to work something out to waive that fee for numbers from us, so we don’t have to put them on the list of companies to avoid or start yanking numbers from them. But if they don’t agree to waive that fee, I may have no choice.
I’m not actually complaining about the $200 fee for numbers they get you, because that essentially makes my service look like a bargain. I’m going to talk to them about waiving the $50 fee for number from us and post the response on here or allow them to respond too. We really do work with carriers to transfer 800 numbers faster and easier than any other carrier because we want to be The Internet’s Toll Free Search Engine and we hate to see any company sneaking in hidden fees for our customers!
UPDATE: They’ve changed their fees. Now they will charge you $40 to release a number if you transferred it in to them, and if they got it for you they will charge you $100 to release it. If you try to transfer it away without paying this vindictive fee they have in their fine print that they can charge you a $500 penalty. This is absolutely insane, but it’s in their terms of service!
Related posts:
PhonePeople holds customers hostage at TollFreeNumbers.com
Why is ownership of your toll free number so Important?
j2 doesn’t want me to tell people what they’re doing
Big Companies behaving badly
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Bill Quimby (510 comments.) says:
September 16, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Not only did OneBox invent a brand new kind of fee fee that nobody else charges, a $50 “port out” fee, but they do a lousey job of the transfer process. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve released numbers to them and then the customer has their customer service call us and ask us to turn them back on.
They say it takes 3 or 4 weeks to transfer numbers and then when they send us the request we release it the same day we get the request. But they customer service rep is still telling the customer that they have to wait for 3 or 4 weeks, even though it’s been sitting on their resporg for 5 days already in this case.
Onebox customer service seems to have no access to resporg information and no ability to activate numbers if they’re released.
They made up a rule that phone companies are supposed to keep numbers active even after they’re released for 90 days to cover their own inability to activate the numbers. They are their own resporg, but most of the people I’ve ever run into outside of their resporg department are totally helpless.
Sorry to vent but I just got off the phone with a particularly clueless customer service rep.
Bill