Gizmo goes (almost) totally free

Free is still a tough price point to beat, and VoIP carriers are maintaining their drive to the bottom. The Gizmo Project, a product (semantic note: if you give it away, is it still a product?) of SIPphone, announced this week that all calls--IP, PSTN or mobile--are free forever to the U.S. and 60 other countries. If you want an inbound phone number, that'll cost a few bucks a month. And the "free" offer is for "active" users, so we supposed that Gizmo will charge you if you don't use the service. Frankly, I don't understand "free" as a business model unless the free product is a tie-in to something paid (like Microsoft Windows). And I don't see that tie-in here.

For more information about The Gizmo Project:
- read this article in Information Week