Getting toll free 1 800 numbers can be beneficial to your business. It can make a great difference depending on what kind of business you own. If you own a restaurant, or a coffee shop, you will not need a 1 800 number because local customers can call you toll free anyway. Not many people would call you from another state or another country. But if you own a business that does international shipping, or provides communication services, a 1 800 number is definitely essential.
There are many different companies that offer toll free 1 800 numbers to businesses. They are usually priced by the number of minutes per month they afford. If you are only going to be using the phone for 100 minutes or less each month, you can pay as little as ten dollars monthly, but if you own a large business with lots of phone lines, you'll have to likely pay more in the range of $100 a month. It all depends on what kind of service you need.
If you want to be available internationally, you have to pay more. Fortunately, international 1 800 numbers are rarely needed by most businesses. It just isn't practical. Even if you are a large shipping company, you will only have to talk to people in large companies a moderate amount, and they will gladly pay the cost to call you internationally as part of the cost of doing business. It is in the end much better to let them foot the bill than paying the high and often extreme rates for international toll free numbers.
As a consumer, be wary of 1 800 numbers. I remember when I was growing up, they were all free - that was what "1 800" meant. And most of them are still free. Many people are still not warned of this, sometimes people will get a number that starts with those numbers, but charge a high toll to call it. They may even tell you somewhere that there is a toll usually - at least they are supposed to, but even if they do, they will try to hide it, in small print at the end of a commercial or something like that so it is hard for you to notice.
Before you know it, you may be paying as high as $2 per minute when you thought you were actually calling for free. This tricky scheme is especially common overseas where the telecommunication regulations controlling the phones and the phone companies are not as tight as they are in the US.
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