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.
About 
One of the biggest reasons to get this service is to make your business sound more professional. I took time and professionally recorded a crystal clear perfect recording for our message. When I uploaded it to the website, it sounded like a recording from a 1950′s wind up children’s toy. Now my company sounds cheap. I would not recommend this service.
Hi Chuck – sorry to hear you’re disappointed with how the greeting came out after uploading it. I think this is something we could certainly help you out with. Could you send me an email to social(at)grasshopper(dot)com? Thanks! – Allison
I previously used Grasshopper but switched to Google Voice. Why would anyone pay a monthly fee when Google voice is free? Grasshopper offers multiple extensions but I simply gave each of my employees a separate Google phone number. In June of 2011 the service was out for two full days! (Perhaps too much time being spent in the Wii room? See career info) Leaving customers no way to contact those unfortunate enough to be using grasshopper to “sound more professional”. Ultimately it comes down to dollars and cents, Why would you pay 6 cents a minute and worry about overages when you can talk to your customers free for as long as you wish (U.S. and Canada.) Also Grasshoppers International rates are exorbitant! Call a mobile phone in Germany for 10 cents with Google or pay 80 cents with grasshopper. (http://grasshopper.com/js/international-rates.html) vs (https://www.google.com/voice/rates) I’ve had dropped calls and quirky things like the service ignoring the # key. There is no way to save contacts for daily conference calls requiring you to dial each phone number each time for every conference call. I encourage anyone thinking of going with grasshopper to seriously consider Google voice. If you really need to have a “Virtual PBX” there is a multitude of services out there, all of them better! (Kall8, ringcentral are just a few.)
(Service outage: http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/06/06/daily38-Grasshoppers-phone-service-down-since-Tuesday.html)
We want to point out that Google Voice is not a Virtual PBX, and that is why we have not reviewed them. They do not offer the same features as providers like Grasshopper, RingCentral, Phone.com and the other virtual pbx providers do. They are strictly a VoIP service provider.
Lynn and the VirtualPhoneSystemReviews Team
We took this service specifically for it’s ability to do voice to text. What an awful service. a grasshopper enginer repeated the same sentnence 8 times and every time it came up with only 25% of the words right. The live transciption is a pain to use as well as you have to send it to them then wait for a translation…. you could type it youself faster. Good Bye Grassflopper!!!
Hi Rick – Thanks for the feedback. We know the read your voicemail feature isn’t perfect which is why we offer unlimited, human transcriptions at no extra charge. That way, you can still get your voicemails without having to listen to them.
That would be great if you could send every message directly to human translation. By the time you send it and get it back it’s easier to translate it yourself. BTW the error ratio on your voice to text is about 70% incorrect.
Rick: you could just do what I do and send your Grasshopper extension to your Google Voice account. VM transcription is built in to the service, and while as you say: the transcriptions are at times significantly incorrect, you can still get the gist of what the VM is about.
Plus, dialer apps on both iPhone and Android with the ability to call from your cell while using your Google Voice number, mean that your direct line is totally manageable.
I still love Grasshopper as a vPBX, but that’s all we use it for.
3 reasons I dropped grasshopper for Google Voice:
1. Dropped calls. 20% of callers…disappeared.
2. Toll free phone numbers aren’t valuable now.
3. Horrible customer service. They don’t answer emails. And when you call, guess what you get? A voicemail machine.
The clock is ticking on Grasshopper. 24…20 months left?
Hi Robert – Sorry to hear that! We appreciate your feedback and understand Grasshopper isn’t for everyone. We’re here 24/7 and always happy to help. Thanks for giving us a try!
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!
Thank you grasshopper for costing my company over 50k in revenue and three BBB complaints. I understand that problems occur in any business its what you do to correct those problems. I never knew your service could be down for two solid days and counting. We were not down this much in Katrina and that was a natural disaster.
Please keep your reviews civil, and refrain from using profanity or personal attacks. Any reviews with profanity or personal attacks will not be approved. Our rules also state “only use your real name and email”.
Thanks,
Lynn and the Virtual Phone System Reviews Team
Grasshopper has awful service have been without phones all day and our phone is our business!!! Getting rid of you ASAP!!! Was given an email address for the person in charge of grasshopper this afternoon, siamak.taghaddos@grasshoppergroup.com
Also please file a complaint against them by calling 1-800-342-3552. They need to be shut down or pay us the hundreds if dollars we lost!!!!
grasshopper is also unable to locate your bte number to port your calls to a new company…
we were able to go back in our email from when we first signed up with grasshopper and are currently working with att to get rid of this service. Final note: Was informed of many down times with grasshopper this afternoon so if your call load is less than normal check your number…no thanks we will just take our business elsewhere
One of the worse mistakes I have ever made. I just started an ad that I paid $5k for with a number from grasshopper, and the number and their entire company has been down for the last couple of days. Not only have I lost money but it has given us a bad name and reputation.
DO NOT USE!!!!!!!!!
It appears to have gone out of business. Nothing works any more.
That is a spiteful review — you obviously did not even bother to check on the status of the company!
This is the worst service EVER!!!!!!!! They have not only cost us business, however they have delayed the processes in helping small businesses make money too! The phone system is our bloodline and it is crucial not to only have a great phone service, but to have great support when we need it. Now they will not respond to any service issues and have left us to only pursue to another company for our phone services.
I really liked grasshopper. Then the issues began with incoming calls. Our business relies on our phone system. When it is down, our staff pays the penalties with their pay check! It is an unfortunate result since the error is not on our side. How do explain that to your staff? Would grasshopper employees like to come to work and not get paid because of a service that your company uses?
I’ve got to agree with Ruth. I have been relatively happy with Grasshopper, up until now. While the switchover from GotVmail to Grasshopper was relatively painless, their website for making adjustments became much more cumbersome and complicated. However, when I needed customer service it was always easy to get someone on the line. The situation now, with their system being down for almost 24-hours, really exemplifies the problems with these types of systems: lack of control. I have THREE businesses through Grasshopper, all of them have been down since their problem began. Due to the cost of lost business, one day of problems like these can wipe out years of satisfied service. I would recommend that anyone considering a service like this have a solid back up plan in place.
Grasshopper, you are seriously screwing this company up, we are losing money by the second with your less than adequate service. We rely on our phone system top make money and surely if we were to operate with the less than quality service you are providing us the last few months, our doors would be closed for good. You are definately under seriously scrutiny from the owners of this firm
This is the worst service EVER!!!!!!!! They have not only cost us business, however they have delayed the processes in helping small businesses make money too!
I hate to review twice but my last one did not have the star. I hear they have 70,000 clients I can’t believe only a few have complained.
Grasshopper get ready to lose all your clients.
So few have complained because it was darn hard to find this site where we CAN complain!!! Simply googling “Grasshopper” gets you links to all the wonderful things about the service.
GRASSHOPPER is killing us right now.
We are dead in the water. We are losing incoming calls & our clients are calling in thinking we closed our doors & cancelling!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Grasshopper – We have lived with minor problems since we started with you almost 2 years ago. THIS is the straw that broke the camels back!!!!!!!!!!!! YOUR FIRED!!!!!!!!!!!
Looks like I was a victim of grasshopper as well. Lost phone service for 2 days I really want to scream it is so bad. They don’t care about their clients. I can’t wait to get away from this lousy provider who fails to let anyone know when there phone service is down. They have admitted to total system downtime 2 times in the last 12 months. I have had problems with my line for months and figure best case about 90% of my calls were processed with no issues. Sometimes sound quality is bad other times the phone rings and no one is on the other line. It seems grasshopper put us out of business for the last two days. Thank You. I’m sure this will put them out of business. If you buy from them just remember I warned you and you will experience problems.
I liked Grasshopper very much until yesterday. My business has been effectively shut down with their epic system failure, still in progress. Callers get dead air or rapid busy signals. I get no calls. That means no business. I am an emergency equine veterinarian in a highly competitive area. Imagine having a sick or injured horse, and not being able to reach your vet? You go elsewhere. Grasshopper tech support is “very sorry.” Is that what I would tell my clients, if I ever hear from them?
I would not recommend this company to anyone. They are shady!
First, their system has glitches- it took forever to set up. I had to keep calling customer service back over and over and they kept treating me like I was doing something wrong, when in fact, I wasn’t. They even tried to set it up for me and had problems.
My biggest issue though is their billing. I had the $9.95 plan and every two months the amount kept going up and up and up- and this was for the base charge, not including any call time. So shady! Their contract states that they can change the prices any time, and they sure do. Within a few months my monthly base charge was up to $18- that’s amost double!
Stay away!
I have had nothing but great experiences with Grasshopper. I have called them day and night for support and never waited more than a minute or two for someone based in the U.S. (Florida, I think). I am a tech dummy and I must have called them a dozen times in the first month! I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than a couple of minutes. Most times my calls get picked up right away.
And for the person with the $900 in credit card charges…I wish I had that much money to miss a monthly charge for 4 years!
I wasn’t happy with them. I switched over to Easy Office Phone. Much better customer service overall.
Good product, and pretty easy to set up too, but needed some help configuring a few things and the 800 support was not only there late at night, but the woman couldn’t have been more helpful and professional. They helped me get more out of the services I’m already paying for.
The quality standards of Grasshopper have gone significantly down hill the past few years. I’ve signed up many, many clients of mine to their service and had mostly good experience.
That, is, up to about 18 months ago. Calling their sales team will get you quicklly connected to a rep who can hardly speak English and has no decision-making authority whatsoever. Beware of any old billing issues that may affect your ability to sign up for a new phone number. In my case, a $12 “outstanding bill” from 2007 was their initial reason for denying the creation of a new 800 vanity number in 2011. After spending several hours on the phone, they finally agreed that the fee was inproperly applied and removed it from my account.
Their website is buggy. I spent a good hour identifying a vanity number that would work for my company, only to find that it disappeared during the final checkout step. Again, numerous phone calls resulted in a half-*ss answer that it would take several days to switch over to the number I had originally requested.
It took longer than a few days to transfer over. All the while, I was being charged. Finally, it transferred over and I was prompted to login to my portal and set things up. My account- which had been accessible just a few days before – came up as cancelled. I called them AGAIN and was subjected a horrible redundant music loope over and over and over and over again.
The rep who answered was the same rep I’ve dealt with nearly every phone call and provided the bare level of assistance needed to resolve my issue.
Very, very disspointed with this experience and I don’t believe I would EVER sign up or refer someone to Grasshopper again!
I liked them but they just double my rate w/ 10 days notice.
I get a bunch of hangup voice mil MP3′s with nothing on them
which I pay for. Was a good deal but not now. I’m changing.
A real person answers the phone very quickly. The website is easy to navigate and you can easily set up, manage, and change your phone extensions. The price is better than OneBox and the service is almost instantaneous instead of the 45 minutes it takes to get someone on OneBox. I have switched!
I would give Grasshopper a NEGATIVE 5 stars if I could. In 2006 I transferred an 800 number from Grasshopper (formerly Gotvmail) to another carrier. They continued to charge my credit card until May of this year (2010) to the tune of over $900 for a number that they did not hold or service. I reported my dismay with this billing scam to a customer service representative. They said that “all they could do” was refund 6 months of “service” for bogus charges on a nonexistent virtual phone line (approx $120). I asked to speak to a supervisor, who parroted the same line adding that it was an “Executive” decision. I then asked to speak to the executive who made the decision and was told “that is not possible”. When I insisted on speaking to someone higher in authority, the supervisor hung up! Evidently Grasshopper’s interest in satisfied customers is as virtual as their phone services. STAY AWAY FROM THEM!!
Wow Jerry, your credit card did not even expire for 4 years??????????? I’d say: change your credit card dude…. and check your bills more frequently… LOL
Ever since GotVmail changed to Grasshopper we have had nothing but problems. The most notable problem was the fact that when calls would get forwarded to us we were not able to accept them and would lose the call to voicemail. The other is that at least 30% of calls were never forwarded or lost in virtual voicemail land. We have also had weird connection issues that caused us to have to actually disconnect and reconnect with a client.
Its a bummer!
This was a fantastic service when it was GotVmail the grasshopper transformation made it user unfriendly and cumbersome. The ease of operation before has been transformed in to a fog that even their customer service reps can’t maneuver. Don’t go here. It is not even half of the GotVmail system that was before. What a shame.
I found out about Gotvmail here and from Lynn. I switched over to them from another provider whose service was under par to say the least.
I have been very please so far with the service and must say that the number of minutes for the price far surpasses all the other options I saw.
I only pay $50 for 2000 minutes, it would have cost at least double that anywhere else.
Having tried some other options, and having used just my cell phone for a whiel I would highly recommend this.
Grrrrr…..asshopper!!!!!!
Agreed