Grasshopper Review (formerly GotVmail)
Editor’s Rating:
Avg. User Rating:
| Overall |   |
Grasshopper Review Summary
Grasshopper Pros
- Unlimited extensions on all plans
- Additional phone lines on upper plans
- increased minutes on all plans
Grasshopper Cons
- Highest fees to transfer 800 or local numbers
- No outbound Internet Faxing
Bottomline
If you don’t need true ACD Queuing or outbound Internet Faxing, then Grasshopper offers solid plans, without having to commit to a year long contract to get discounted pricing. They also have a very solid offering in the small business market, with plenty of minutes with that plan – double that of their competitors.
Grasshopper Features/Benefits
Grasshopper was created through an extensive rebranding effort of what used to be called GotVmail. As part of the rebranding, Grasshopper.com came up with a whole new, much more friendly user interface. This really was the major change that took place via the rebranding effort. Previous to that they had made several changes to their plans that made them much more competitive.
| Pricing: | Pay as you go: $9.95/mo Ramp: $24.00/mo Grow: $49.00/mo Max: $199.00/mo |
| Setup/Installation Fee: | |
| Disconnect/Cancellation Fee: | No |
| Free Trial: |
Yes, Get a 7 Day Grasshopper Free Trial! |
| Customer Service: | 24/7 Good |
| Included Minutes: | Pay as you go: none Ramp: 500/mo Grow: 2,000/mo Max: 10,000/mo |
| Incoming Lines: | Pay as you go: 1 Ramp: 1 Grow: 2 Max: 3 |
| Extensions: | Unlimited |
| Local & 800 Transfer Fee: | $30 – one time |
| 800 Vanity Number Fee: | $30 – one time |
| True 800 Number Setup Fee: | $15 – one time |
Likes
No Pre-Paid Yearly Plans: We like the fact that you do not have to commit to a year long pre-paid contract plan to get a low monthly price. Kudos to Grasshopper for this. The other vendors could and should take note of this, and follow suite to truly offer top notch plans to their customers. This is one of our biggest pet peeves with VOIP and cell phone carriers.
Find Me/Follow Me: Grasshopper offers a really cool feature to allow you to program the days and hours of day you want each phone number tried when using the find me/follow me feature. This offers users allot of flexibility when out of the office.
Additional Incoming Phone Lines: Grasshopper and Phone.com are the only two providers that provide additional incoming phone lines at no additional cost on their Small Business and Corporate plans. We believe this is a great move, and all providers should offer this option so that business’s(without additional cost to them) can provide their customers with both a local and toll free method of reaching their their business.
Dislikes
Setup/Activation Fee: This is by far the biggest issue we have with Grasshopper. We feel for any vendor to be competitive and provide truly top notch service to their customers in the small business/home office market, they can not be charging a Setup/Activation Fee. The only plan they don’t charge an activation fee on is their highest "Max" plan. Updated: January 12, 2012. The activation fee has been eliminated from all plans.
6¢ per Minute on all Plans: Calculate the minutes you think you will use, because Grasshopper now charges a flat 6¢ per minute on all plans, for minutes over your plan minutes. Even though they offer higher minutes on their 2 top end plans, they offer substantially lower minutes on their lowest end plan, compared to Phone.com. Plus their highest end plan is twice the cost of their next closest competitor. So it will all come down to how many minutes you think you will use which will determine if they are competitive in price or not.
No Outbound Internet Faxing: This may or may not be a big deal to most people, however we see it more as a "gap" in Grasshopper’s offerings, as it is a feature offered by the other top 2 providers in the space, and a direction we feel the market is definitely moving in. They do offer inbound internet fax, which allows you to receive faxes via your phone system, without having to have a dedicated line or fax machine. The faxes can be sent to your email or control center, and printed. However, outbound faxing completes the package and allows you to also send faxes from the system, totally eliminating the need for a fax machine or other service all together.
No true ACD Queing: Again, we doubt this will be a big issue to the Very Small Business/Home Office/Professional or Small Business space, because Grasshopper does provide Hunt group Queing. This is where a call is routed to a group of people and it will "hunt" through the group until it finds a person who answers the call, or if unanswered for a specified period of time send to a designated voicemail. ACD Queing on the other hand will allow for different variables(like time of day), prioritization of staff, and real time intervention by a supervisor. Grasshopper does offer a custom option to program random "rotational" extension calling, but you have to call customer support to have it set up.
Where to Buy
Summary
If you don’t need true ACD Queing(which VirtualPBX is the only vendor in this space to provide "true" ACD queuing), and outbound Internet Faxing isn’t a big deal for you, then Grasshopper offers solid plans, without having to commit to a year long contract to get discounted pricing. They also now offer unlimited extensions on all of their plans, and their "Grow" plan comes with almost double the minutes of any of their competitors for a similarly priced plan.
With high hopes of becoming one of Northern California’s and the San Francisco Bay Area Premier acoustic “popcorn ceiling removal” Pro’s, our company decided on adding the 800 feature. An 800 number is known to bring a certain level of trust to a company and that was exactly what we were looking for.
I’ve used Grasshopper for well over a year now, have 5 numbers with them. Their plan is perfect for my needs, and their service is very reliable.
Whilst they have had two outages since I have been using them, their service has FAR EXCEEDED my expectations. Their customer service is great.
While I expect many people will have different observations of Grasshopper, I can say honestly that Grasshopper will treat their loyal clients fairly.
I have and will continue to recommend Grasshopper.
James
RenovatedCeilings.com
I learned from the outage back in June that I needed another layer to protect against this kind of problem. I took my primary business number and gave it to AT&T, then had that forwarded to a Grasshopper number. At least that way I had some ability to change the call forwarding to my cell phone, instead, once learning of a problem, which is what I did last weekend. It costs me more, and I run the risk of an AT&T problem as well (also a cell phone problem), but I feel more comfortable that I have some control now. Still, SHAME ON GRASSHOPPER for affecting our businesses so profoundly.
I have been using Grasshopper for about a year now and have no qualms. The interface is very easy to use and very affordable for the price.
I have tried other companies and quickly became unsatisfied with their lack of options and expensive pricing, when I happened to find Grasshopper, I was very excited.
I will never use another company again. Grasshopper is perfect for small businesses. While they did have two service interruptions, from my opinion, all companies have difficulties once in awhile but they kept updates on twitter and were of course working very hard to get the services back up. I can also say, with my internet and phone service at home (comcast and now cox) I have multiple down times throughout the day which is A LOT MORE annoying that Grasshoppers. Besides these two problems, Grasshopper is a very reliable service!
I highly recommend GRASSHOPPER.
Ron Hogan
R&H Drywall
RHDRYWALL.COM
All service is down again! ANother service interruption on aSaturday (our company’s busiest day)! Can’t wait to hear the excuses this time….
This service is not ready for prime time, they say they are compatible with Mac systems but really they are only compatible with Window’s IE browsers. The rep said I would need to use Firefox with the Mac but even then it didn’t work well at all. I can not believe anyone would build a business on Flash in today’s environment and then bill it as compatible with Macs. I mean come on guys where’s the truth in advertising.
If you use Macs do not, I mean DO NOT use these guys. I’m using RingCentral right now and not very satisfied with them either but at least I can use Safari and I don’t need Flash installed on my Mac to get it to work and I’ve never experienced any dropped service. Just wish their UI was easier to use.
I am so glad I found this site , I signed up with this shoddy outfit 5 days ago and they have not managed to give me a working service. Their staff promised me a call by the end of the day, no calls. So much for instant service for entrepreneurs. I have called EVERY day and tried to escalate to a manager but they refused to put me through. I asked for the name of the CEO and they said “whats that”, I said the owner and they said some guy called Siamak. he is not cantactable. Clearly the company is in trouble, at such times you would expect the boss to roll up his sleeves and sort things out, even talking to customers!
We run ecommerce stores and need a different number for each site, so they will be losing a lot more than 1 number. I don’t expect our business relationship to last very long if it ever gets off the ground.
Aaaack!!!!!!!!!!! They are at it again!
Calls placed to my business get the “we’re sorry, all circuits are busy now” message. I get this whether calling from my Sprint cell phone, my Time Warner Cable land line, or my new AT&T land line (installed specifically to have a back up after last week’s epic fail). Each of those lines can successfully dial other numbers.
Fortunately, I CAN re-route the call forwarding on that AT&T line to my cell phone (instead of the dead Grasshopper number), now that I had AT&T take over that phone number. Coincidence? Is Grasshopper punishing me for having an exit plan?
The recent implosion of this service caught me by surprise. They have always been an excellent service at a very reasonable cost. Because we have a back-up plan, I bypassed the service until it was fixed. Any service relying on the internet and computers in general is not fallible. We will continue to use Grasshopper for the forseeable future as I believe they handled the problem by communicating with their customers on a regular basis during the ordeal. My phone company (Bell) would NOT have been as understanding, and I KNOW they would have had an “In Your Face” attitude.
Kudos to you Grasshopper, Manning Fire Equipment Inc will continue to work with you.
Mick Manning – Pres
Grasshopper’s founders, Siamak & David, sent us a letter apologizing profusely, and describing that the problem was caused by a double, simultaneous disk failure.
“On Tuesday & Wednesday Grasshopper experienced a major outage unlike anything we’ve
experienced since launching 8 years ago.”
…
“To those of you who reached out to us upset, you had every right to and we
understand your frustration. To those of you who were supportive during the outage,
please accept our sincerest thanks. We’re amazed and honored to have such great and
loyal customers.”
It sucks to be in their position. But it also sucks to be in the position of their customer that lost so much business. So, I am sorry, but I cancelled my service.
(In case you’re curious: I tried virtualPBX first, but now I am going to phones.com: best features.)
Everyone here who is sticking up for Grasshopper is saying they had one little slip up and everyone is angry about it. The truth of the matter is I have been with Grasshopper for 4 years- there have been NUMEROUS times I have dialed my lines and/or had employees call me stating the lines weren’t working properly from dialing in and getting empty air to employees having their extensions ringing (expecting a call) and not being able to accept the call or the air just being dead once the call is accepted.
I have been paying Grasshopper a 214$ average bill for this entire time and expect at the high price for there to be no issues. Finding out 23 hours AFTER the systems were down from one of my employees is NOT the way a loyal long term customer would like to be notified of a major disaster on the phone lines. My company lost a potential 138/hr PER EMPLOYEE for 2 days straight while my customers had NO clue what was going on. All they got on the line was one ring and silence for 24 hours and then generic robotic messages that really made it sound like I had not been paying my bill when I had JUST been billled 214$ by Grasshopper 2 days before the outage.
Customer service was no help- they didn’t tell me disc error or anything else. Their response to me was, they didn’t know but were working on it with no estimate or when my business would be live again.
I am porting all 3 of my numbers to Ringcentral and will be asking for the money back that was paid IN ADVANCE for a month of Grasshoppers service. From someone who doesn’t like change this is a big step but I do not feel safe relying on Grasshopper anymore. SO it’s not the one “little” mishap- it is one of many mishaps that just happens to be gigantic and the tip of the iceberg for myself and my company.
Highly recommend — the company has been ther and provided good service to us for many years. A recent down period was a hardship for many, but the company communicated with users in an outstanding fashion, and I feel this company is now prepared to provide even better, more reliable service in the future
They had one slip up and everyone is mad. Overall had a lot of luck with Grasshopper great people and great support! Handled the situation well.
I could not in good faith recommend Grasshopper to anyone. I don’t know the extent of the damage they have caused my business yet but any loss is unacceptable. How would you like losing your phone system for two business days and hearing nothing about it?
I am still in shock they had no fall-back plan and no way to even access their customer database to notify us there was a problem. I had to hear about it when a client called my cell phone directly wondering if we went out of business. Not the kind of call you want to get, believe me. Not even a recorded announcement. And when they first got a recording up my clients heard a “not in service” message. Unbelievable.
I have to say… stay away from them.
Up front: I’m here to write a post in defense of Grasshopper. Let’s get Grasshopper’s bad news out of the way, first.
Blunder #1: not having a mirrored backup of their customer database so that we could be emailed that there was an issue, and where to look for updated information.
Blunder #2: not having a system in place that in the event of a major issue such as this, callers are told that there is a temporary (and/or major) issue. Better yet: go old school, and simply send incoming calls to a busy signal.
For Grasshopper’s responsibility that’s it, and I’ll tell you why.
This is technology. Technology fails sometimes (and on rare occasions fails catastrophically), despite the best efforts to plan ahead and place double or triple redundancies on place. Notable technology failures in recent years include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AT&T, Microsoft, Bank of America, and Sony.
Is it a damned inconvenience? You bet!
Could they have done more? Based on what happened, I believe so. But our company has been using Grasshopper in one form or another since 2004, because the service is ahead of the curve in terms of features (even when compared to phone systems costing many multiples more…and I’ve used some of them). It’s also reliable, flexible, convenient, inexpensive, and follows me wherever I want it to go. And in all that time, this is the only time anything like this has happened.
So now, I’m going to turn it back on you, dear reader. If you had expectations that because of this history they were absolutely bullet-proof, that was unfortunately an unreasonable expectation. Listen to the 1-June edition of NPR’s *On Point,* if you want a real eye opener on how truly vulnerable our technology is: http://bit.ly/jqSwY3 We’re not just talking phone systems; we’re talking infrastructure, power plants, and a lot of the technology that makes life better.
But doomsday scenarios aside, there’s a lot you can and should do to cover yourself in the event of an emergency. Indeed, it’s every business’ responsibility to have an emergency response plan in place in the event of a catastrophe, be it weather, personnel or technology related. If you don’t…your fault…and no cause to complain.
And on that point particularly…Grasshopper played a critical part of our own emergency response to the 2006 October snowstorm that struck Buffalo, NY, where our business is headquartered. Power was knocked out region-wide for days, and I was in Seattle at the time. Grasshopper (then GotvMail) allowed me to reroute extensions to people who had electricity, reroute support calls, and post an emergency alert updating our customers who happened to call. That folks, was an absolute lifesaver.
Next: every business has a website. Use it to update your customers. If you don’t or don’t have the ability to update it (and don’t take offense, here) shame on you.
Then: send out your own email blast: MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact all have free plans and those that aren’t are reasonably priced. If you’re not using one of them (or your own broadcast email system)…again…shame on you.
Everyone has a cell phone. If you don’t…(you know already). As much as you might be reluctant to, give the number to your customers in case of emergency. The good ones will use it only when they have to, and then forget about it until next time. The bad ones…well you can handle them how you see fit.
Every single email that you send should include a signature that has your contact points, including the emergency ones. If you have a Help Desk (we use Zendesk), put that in your signature, too.
Back to Grasshopper…
I’m confident that we’ll hear exactly what happened in the coming days, and in the details it will become clear that they legitimately did everything they could under the circumstances, and where they failed they will correct the problems, both technologically, logistically, and interms of communication.
I’m sticking with them, and will continue to recommend them.
Worst service. They have been down like this twice in the last 12 months. The FCC needs to regulate these companies and shut the bad ones down or at least make sure they disclose the previous outages on the home page of the website. I know Grasshopper will likely go out of business due to this outage and the previous outage in which they gave one month of free service for one day of no service. They are likely going to give 2 or 3 months of free service this time. I would imagine half of their clients half left or are planning to leave. This cost me thousands and no one sent me a real email or a phone call. I’m disgusted no company should be allowed to consistently make mistakes of this caliber. If anyone is looking at this phone service please don’t be fooled with the sales pitch you will have problems that will cost you business and your reputation. My business relies on the phone and we used our grasshopper number in all our advertisements. Shame on me. Please listen to my warning and go elsewhere and get details of previous outages.
This system down time with no backup is unacceptable any responsible business would have sufficient backups for data and websites. I have been with grasshopper since they were gotvmail. I have had a lot of choppy service this year. I would like to see them stay in business as they offer a good service when it is working, but at this point the damages to my company may be severe. I had a customer that was supposed to call me back today to place an order for over $8,000 and had another customer that was inquiring about a piece that cost $13,000, if I lost both of these sales due to this outage I will have lost almost $5,000 in profit, not to mention all the small sales I get daily. People do not buy high ticket items without talking on the phone 80% of the time. At this point this is very bad for our business, I hate to be one of many to make a good company fall, but who could rule out a good lawsuit possibility at this time. After being down for over a day earlier this year I did not even get so much as a free months service for the downtime and may have lost $1000′s in sales that day. I will withhold my name for now as I do not want to Jeopardize myself if I decide to sue grasshopper with others, but I do have anonymous email goodolefun@gmail.com. Right now I am really irritated and don’t know if I should keep incurring damages by waiting since there is no time line or if I should immediately move to a new company to try to cut my losses. I hope they get this fixed immediately. I thinks its pathetic for a company to go down over a supposed server failure and I find it highly suspicious that the pricing is down and not the rest. Somebody needs to come clean quickly.
Jeez people, where’s the love?
I’ve been using Grasshopper (GotVMail) for over 6 years with almost no issues. This is the FIRST TIME that they have had a serious outage. They have an excellent customer service department, and they have been posting updates about their outage every hour or so since the problem started.
I use their service a great deal – my monthly bill is a minimum of $1000, and often over $3000. That is a lot of usage, and a lot of flawless (or almost flawless) service.
Clearly they do need to address their emergency failover plans, but this level of “Hate” seems a bit unfair.
Now there is a recorded message when you call a grasshopper # that says “we are experiencing technical difficulties with our phone system – please call back in 1 hour” This has been the message all day…… I’m recalling everyone I spoke to in the last 2 weeks to give them my cell #…… I’m now working just to keep from losing clients………… Grrrrrrr asshopper!