Skype Shut Down. Here's Your Replacement for International Calls

Microsoft retired consumer Skype on 5 May 2025, twenty-two years after it launched and fourteen years after Microsoft bought it for $8.5 billion. Existing users were pointed at Microsoft Teams, sign-ups closed, and Skype Credit stopped being sold.

The shutdown was not sudden in the way it felt to the people it happened to. Microsoft had been folding Skype's engineering into Teams for years, and Skype for Business had already been retired in 2021. What made May 2025 different is that it ended the consumer product — the one your parents used to call a landline in another country, the one with a balance sitting in it.

Two things went away that Teams did not pick up. The first is Skype Credit: a prepaid balance you could spend calling any ordinary phone number at a published per-minute rate. The second is Skype Number: a real inbound phone number in a country of your choosing, which people could ring from an ordinary phone.

Microsoft allowed a window to port a Skype Number to another provider and to spend or refund remaining Credit. That window has closed. If you still have a Skype Number you did not port, it is gone, and you need a new number rather than a transfer.

Skype users lost three distinct capabilities, and they are worth separating because different replacements cover different ones. Confusing them is why so much "Skype is dead, use Teams" advice turned out to be useless in practice.

Calling ordinary phone numbers

Skype could dial a landline or a mobile anywhere in the world, and the person answering needed nothing — no app, no account, no internet. This is the capability with the fewest replacements, and it is the one most people actually miss.

Receiving calls on a real number

A Skype Number rang inside the app but looked like an ordinary phone number to everyone else. It let people who had no idea what Skype was still reach you, and it let you show a local number in a country you did not live in.

App-to-app calls and video

Free Skype-to-Skype voice, video and screen sharing. This is the capability with the most replacements — Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, WhatsApp and FaceTime all do it, several of them better than Skype did.

If all you used Skype for was video calls with other Skype users, you have already been replaced several times over and you can stop reading. If you used it to phone a real number, keep going: that is the gap.

Microsoft Teams replaces Skype's chat, meetings and app-to-app calling, and it does not replace Skype's calling to ordinary phone numbers for consumers. Teams Free has no equivalent of Skype Credit and no equivalent of a Skype Number, so a Teams account cannot dial your mother's landline.

Microsoft does sell phone calling for Teams, but through Teams Phone, which is a business product. It is licensed per user per month on top of a Microsoft 365 subscription, and it is built around organisations with a tenant, an admin and assigned licences. Buying that to call one number abroad is roughly like leasing a van to move a bicycle.

This matters more than it sounds. The pitch "Skype is retiring, move to Teams" was accurate for the collaboration half of Skype and misleading for the telephony half, and Microsoft's own migration messaging did not draw the line clearly. A very large number of people migrated to Teams, discovered months later that they could not dial a phone number, and went looking for a second service.

What Teams is genuinely good at: group meetings, screen sharing, persistent chat, file collaboration, and integration with Office. If that is your use case, Teams is a straight upgrade on Skype and free. Keep it, and add a pay-as-you-go calling service alongside it for the phone-number half.

The honest answer is that no single product replaces all of Skype, because Skype was three products wearing one coat. Match the replacement to what you actually did with it.

"I called family abroad on their normal phone."

You need a pay-as-you-go VoIP service that terminates on the public phone network. TwinPhone does this from a browser tab: you add credit, type the number, and the person answers on their ordinary handset with no app involved. Calls to the US and Canada are $0.02/min, India is from $0.1064/min, and Mexico is from $0.02/min. This is the closest like-for-like swap for Skype Credit that exists.

"People called me on my Skype Number."

You need a rented virtual number. TwinPhone rents US and Canadian numbers from $3.19/month, and they take inbound calls and inbound SMS in the browser. If you specifically need a UK or EU number, TwinPhone cannot help yet — those regulators require the operator to verify your local address, and that flow is not built. Look at a local provider in that country instead.

"I used it for work calls."

Look at whether you need a phone system or a phone line. If you need extensions, queues and an auto-attendant, that is RingCentral or Dialpad territory. If you just need to make outbound calls cheaply and log them, pay-as-you-go is far less expensive than a per-seat plan you pay for in the months you do not call.

"I used it for video calls."

Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or FaceTime. TwinPhone does not do video and is not trying to.

Replacing Skype Credit costs roughly what Skype Credit cost, which is the point — the money was never the problem with Skype's retirement, the availability was. With TwinPhone the smallest top-up is $10, the balance does not expire, and there is no subscription attached to outbound calling.

Calls bill per second, with a minimum charge on very short answered calls. That minimum exists because both of our carriers invoice us for a full minute the moment a call is answered, however briefly, so a three-second call is not free to us and is not free to you either. Above that floor you pay for the seconds you actually used.

Worked examples, using rates you can check on the rates page before you dial:

• A 20-minute call to a US or Canadian mobile: about $0.40.
• A 20-minute call to a Mexican landline: about $0.40.
• A 20-minute call to an Indian mobile: about $2.13.
• A rented US number so people can call you back: $3.19/month.

Compare that to what a US mobile carrier charges for the same international minutes — typically several dollars a minute — and the arithmetic is the same as it was in Skype's day. The rate for whatever country you are calling is shown on screen before the call connects, so you are never guessing.

Moving off Skype takes about ten minutes and does not require installing anything. TwinPhone runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave or Safari, and the sign-up asks for an email address — no phone number, no SIM, no card.

1. Open twin-phone.com in a supported browser and sign up with an email address or a Google account.
2. Add credit. The smallest top-up is $10 and the balance does not expire, so there is no pressure to buy more than you need.
3. Allow microphone access when the browser asks. This is the only permission the dialer needs.
4. Enter the number in full international format — country code first, and drop any leading zero from the national number. A Berlin landline written locally as 030 1234567 is +49 30 1234567 from abroad.
5. Check the per-minute rate, which appears before the call connects, and dial.

If you want people to be able to call you back, rent a number from the virtual numbers page as a separate step. You do not need one to make outgoing calls, and most people replacing Skype Credit never rent one.

One thing worth knowing before you start: your old Skype contacts do not transfer. Skype stored them against a Microsoft account, and there is no import path into a third-party calling service. What you need is the phone numbers, not the Skype handles, and those you will have to collect the ordinary way.

TwinPhone is a bad fit for several real use cases, and knowing which ones saves you the trouble of signing up to find out. It replaces Skype's outbound calling and inbound numbers; it does not replace everything Skype did.

You mainly want video calls

TwinPhone has no video and no plans to add it. Use Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or FaceTime — all free, all better at it than Skype was.

You want app-to-app messaging

There is no chat product here. TwinPhone sends and receives SMS on a rented number, which is not the same thing as a messenger.

You need a number in the UK, the EU, Australia or Japan

TwinPhone rents US and Canadian numbers only. Those other markets require the operator to hold verified proof of the end user's local address, and until that flow ships, a provider in the target country will serve you better.

You call one country constantly and nowhere else

If you spend 200+ minutes a month calling a single destination, an unlimited country plan from a service like Rebtel can beat per-minute pricing outright. Pay-as-you-go wins on flexibility and on low-to-moderate volume; it does not win on a single heavy corridor.

You need a phone system rather than a phone line

Extensions, ring groups, IVR menus and call queues are not part of the consumer product. That is what RingCentral, Dialpad and Grasshopper are for.