Duc Pham

For the past 10 years, whenever I needed to call an international number, I used Skype. It had my back when I had to clear things up with the US university admissions from Austria, arrange a hotel pickup in Bali, or call my EU bank to see why my card was blocked while I was trekking through Argentina. I could call anywhere in the world for cents, and it was delightful.

In February 2025, Microsoft announced it was closing Skype down, and on May 5 it officially stopped operations. I was really sad when I heard the news with Skype, a huge chunk of my life disappeared. It felt the same way as if, one day, nobody would be playing on Call of Duty 2 servers anymore (that hasn t happened yet, right?).

Anyway, here I ve compiled a list of the top 6 alternatives to Skype for international calling. I used the following criteria to select them:

I m growing a small SaaS. And cloud costs are starting to hurt. I keep hearing about founders stacking $100-300k in Google Cloud credits, but all the advice feels vague or locked behind big-name accelerators.
Where did you actually get credits?
Any creative hacks or things to avoid?
If you ve cracked this, I d love to hear what worked.

And if you re still figuring it out too, just drop a comment. If I ve gathered some useful stuff, I'll be happy to share.