Free International Calling Apps: What Works and What Doesn’t

When people search for free international calling apps, they are usually in one of a few situations.

They are living abroad and need to call a bank, an insurance company, or a government office back home. Or they are travelling and need to call a hotel, an airline, or a car hire company before they land. Or they run a business and occasionally need to reach an international client or supplier without a significant phone bill.

What most of these people discover is that the answer to “can I call internationally for free?” depends entirely on who they are trying to call.

The honest answer about free international calls

Let me be direct about this: there is no such thing as a free international call to a real phone number.

If you need to call a landline or a mobile number in another country, it will cost something. Any service claiming unlimited free calls to actual phone numbers either has serious conditions attached, covers only a handful of countries, or is not what it appears to be. The time you spend chasing a free option is usually not worth it.

The better question is not “how do I call internationally for free?” but “how do I call internationally without paying too much?” Those are different questions, and the second one has a good answer.

App-to-app calls: the genuinely free option

The one situation where international calls are genuinely free is app-to-app calling. If both people have the same app installed and are connected to the internet, calls between them cost nothing.

WhatsApp, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and Viber all work this way. That is real, it works, and for keeping in touch with friends and family who are already on one of these apps, it is the obvious choice.

Most people already know this. The problem is assuming these apps can do more than they actually can.

Your bank is not on WhatsApp. You cannot FaceTime an airline to change a ticket. Hotels, government offices, and most businesses operate on normal phone numbers, and none of these apps can dial a regular number. The moment you need to reach someone who does not have the app, or a business that does not operate through apps at all, you are back to needing a different solution.

I built ZippCall partly because I kept running into this myself. I split my time between the UK and Morocco, and I regularly need to contact HMRC, airlines when I need to change a flight, and car hire companies before I land in a new country. All of them require calling a normal phone number. WhatsApp does not help with any of those calls.

Services that offer free calls to real numbers

Some services do offer free or near-free calls to actual phone numbers in certain countries. Google Voice is the most well-known, giving US-based users free calls to US and Canada numbers. TextNow offers something similar.

These are legitimate for specific situations. If you are US-based and regularly call US numbers, Google Voice is genuinely useful. But they come with conditions that matter:

Geographic restrictions. Google Voice requires a US phone number to sign up and only covers US and Canada numbers. It will not help you call Germany, Australia, Japan, or most other countries.

Subscriptions. Many services that present themselves as free actually require a monthly fee for any meaningful international calling. Low cost is not the same as free, and a monthly fee makes little sense if you only need to make the odd call. For regular international callers who want a subscription-based option, see our guide to international phone plans.

Limited country coverage. Most of these services support a small list of countries. If the country you need is not on that list, you are out of options.

There is also a category of app that lets you earn free calling credits by watching adverts. I would not bother with these. The time spent watching ads to earn a few minutes of credit is not a practical solution when you have an actual call to make. There is no genuinely free international call, and services that frame it that way are usually a distraction.

When you need to call an actual phone number internationally

This is where most people end up: the app-to-app option does not apply, and the “free” services do not cover the country or number they need.

The practical solution is a pay-as-you-go VoIP service. The things that matter when choosing one:

Transparent per-minute rates. You should be able to see exactly what a call will cost before you dial. No surprises.

No subscription. If you need to make occasional international calls, a monthly fee is not a good deal. You should only pay when you actually call.

Credits that do not expire. Top up once, use the credits when you need them, and they should still be there months later.

Calls to real phone numbers. The service should reach landlines and mobiles in the country you need, without requiring the person you are calling to have anything installed on their end.

Full disclosure: I run ZippCall, so factor that in. ZippCall is a browser-based service (no app download needed). You dial from your browser, the person you are calling answers their normal phone, and you pay per minute at a rate you can check before the call. Credits do not expire, there is no subscription, and it covers 200+ countries. For a broader comparison of VoIP options, see our guide to VoIP for international calls.

A few real situations from people who have found this useful (from our reviews page):

One customer in Thailand calls his family in Germany regularly. His family does not have a smartphone or internet at home, so WhatsApp is not an option. He calls their home landline.

A US expat living in South Africa needed to call her bank and health insurance company on US 800 numbers, calls she could not avoid and could not make on WhatsApp. She found that at around 2 cents a minute, an hour-long call cost her just over a dollar.

A voice actress in the US rarely needs to make calls she cannot handle on WhatsApp. But when she needed to call her bank in Ireland several times, her carrier wanted $3 a minute. She paid a tenth of that.

These are not unusual situations. They are the cases where app-to-app calling falls short and where paying a low per-minute rate is the right answer.

For current rates by country, see zippcall.com/countries.