Last month I wrote about my woes with the Gizmo Project, up until then one of my VoIP providers of choice.

Days after the post was published I was contacted by one of the company’s engineers/support employee who apologised for the PayPal payment issues the company was facing and wanted to find out more about the billing problems I experienced with their Gizmo5 service. As I’ve written before, I was really impressed by the company’s customer service.

Sadly I am equally disappointed by their capacity to do business. Shortly after my discussion with Gizmo, in which I was informed that they had practically no clue about when PayPal would reappear as a payment option, I tried using my credit card directly. The transaction failed, even though I’ve been using my card for years with no problems. Despite my repeated efforts I could not get the transaction to go through. Gizmo told me that they were getting a mismatch in the credit card address and could not do something about this (they are the first online merchant to ever tell me this), and credited my account with $2.00 — a very kind gesture — that nevertheless did not provide a permanent solution to my problem.

It’s been a month since my last communication with the company and PayPal still is not available as a payment option. Moreover, my credit card still does not get accepted and sooner or later I will run out of credit once again. In recent forum posts on the Gizmo website it seems that the PayPal issues the company is facing are not going to be solved any time soon and as such, I am forced to look elsewhere for my VoIP needs. Having given up on Skype as a closed, proprietary, underperforming and — most of all — incompatible solution, I’m looking for a good, cheap SIP provider. Leave a comment below or contact me in private if you have any suggestions worth looking into. Ideally I’d like a service like Gizmo, with the difference that it has a sane business model and is willing to take my money.

Just recently Gizmo Project announced its Gizmo5 beta, a service that allows users of mobile phones to place calls for very low rates through a MIDP Gizmo client. A data connection is required just for setting up the call. In other words, the idea is that you pick a contact (or dial the number you wish to call) and then Gizmo calls that party and calls you back on your mobile. You pay for the call via the regular CallOut credits.

Now, I thought I’d give this a try. I had about $0.20 in my account and given the price of the calls to landlines it would have cost me about 4¢ at most to try it out. Sadly, it didn’t turn out this way. While my phone was supported and I downloaded and ran the software just fine, the calls never successfully completed. I tried placing four or five calls to my landlines at home, none of which were successfully completed.

Nevertheless, the calls were charged to my account to the amount of 19¢, leaving me with $0.01. While trying to add credit to my account I realised that the Gizmo store did not accept Paypal anymore. Scouring the forum and the support pages left me even more perplexed: the support pages indicated that Paypal was a supported payment option that should be available at checkout. The forums gave the impression that there were continuing problems that had been — at some point — fixed, only to reappear later.
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