[asterisk-biz] VoicePulse pricing encourages large number of accounts was: VoicePulse engaged in very dubious business practices

[Mike Fedyk]

David Pollak wrote:
> Turns out that I hadn't canceled one of the DIDs on one of my 
> VoicePulse accounts.
I believe this is the original cause of this entire episode for VoicePulse.

They charge $11 per DID with a limit of 4 concurrent calls per account.  
If you want to increase that, it is $20/mo per additional concurrent 
call, so it becomes $31/mo to have 5 concurrent calls available.  This 
encourages having each DID in a separate account.  Which makes managing 
all of the accounts harder.

Also, if you have a DID, each outbound call uses a channel that could be 
used for incoming calls.  If you use all channels for outbound, you 
won't receive any calls from the DID.  I have not used their service so 
I don't know if they have done something to make having a lot of 
accounts easy, but after looking at their pricing, I can understand why 
he had a lot of accounts.

I don't understand the logic of the limit of concurrent calls.  If you 
are charging per minute (and they do for outbound calls) why not allow 
use of as many channels as requested and make money on the minutes?

I am not trying to attack anyone, but I would like to see if VoicePulse 
has a response to this, and possibly change their pricing so they won't 
have an incentive to have limits on calls.

Mike