HelloFax: In-Depth
Back to HelloFax Overview and Comparison
HelloFax: Featuring Digital Signatures
HelloFax, founded in 2010, is one of the most recent companies to enter the online fax market. HelloFax and their sister company, HelloSign, are tightly integrated with Google products and have a strong focus on e-signatures. Joseph Walla, the company’s founder, launched the company inside of Y Combinator and then received an investment from Google Ventures, which has provided the business with an incredible amount of visibility. Because of this connection to Google and it’s modern website design, the service has become today’s “hip” online fax service.
Other than it’s relationship to Google, HelloFax’s primary claim to fame is it’s intuitive e-signing process. The goal is to completely eliminate paper from the faxing equation by allowing people to sign the documents and fax them back without every printing them. eFax also offers this feature, but HelloFax arguably handles it the best. Their one limitation on this front is on mobile devices. HelloFax doesn’t offer a smartphone app, therefore users can’t sign and fax documents using a smartphone or tablet.
HelloFax has previously made claims of HIPAA compliance, but this is no longer an option. The company took HIPAA compliance off their benefits page in late 2013. If you are in the medical field, it would be safer to go with one of the companies that publicly offer to sign a BAA (SRFax and FaxAge both display this prominently on their sites).
HelloFax Samples (click images to expand)
HelloFax’s Primary Services
Home Office: HelloFax Home Office is the company’s least expensive subscription plan. This plan includes 300 monthly send/ receive pages for $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. Home Office includes all the features of the higher level plans, but limits the number of users that can share the account to five. These features include e-signing, integrations with cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Evernote, unlimited online storage of faxes and the ability to send a fax to up to twenty recipients. HelloFax also offers local phone numbers in 46 U.S. states plus Washington D.C. as well as Canada and the U.K.. Toll-free numbers are NOT available.
In addition to being relatively expensive, the service has four primary weaknesses that make it substantially less attractive. First, the company offers no phone support of any kind. Email and social media are the only means for resolving issues with the service. Second, they do not have any smartphone apps, so the benefits of e-signing and faxing are greatly diminished when out of the office. Third, people that want to save contacts in HelloFax’s online interface will likely be frustrated, because this isn’t possible in a conventional way. The only way to add contacts is to import a Gmail or Yahoo contact list, and, even then, there is no way to actually view or manage these contacts. Finally, when sending a fax using HelloFax, the service uses an unusually high contrast, which results in darker text, but can render images unrecognizable. Take a look at the “sent” fax sample above.
HelloFax has an above average e-signing feature and a nice looking interface, but the price, lack of features and fax quality issues make this hard to recommend.
Professional: HelloFax’s Professional plan includes 500 monthly send/ receive pages and increases the number of users from five to ten for $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year. This is outrageously expensive on a per page basis. Many of HelloFax’s competitors offer this number of pages in their lowest tier plans and charge less than $10 per month with even larger savings for annual plans.
Small Business: HelloFax’s Small Business plan includes 1,000 monthly send/ receive pages and increases the number of users from ten to twenty for $39.99 per month or $399.99 per year. This is even more outrageously expensive on a per page basis than the Professional plan. MetroFax, Fax87 and RapidFAX each offer 1,000 pages for less than $15 per month.
Enterprise: HelloFax Enterpise is for businesses that need substantially more than 1,000 pages per month or twenty users. These plans are custom quoted for each customer.
Free: HelloFax offers a free service that allows people to send five free fax pages (total, not monthly). These accounts can not receive faxes or send to multiple recipients, but e-signing and cloud integrations are available on these free accounts. If you send more than five pages, additional pages are charged at 99 cents per fax for faxes up to ten pages and 20 cents per page for larger faxes.
HelloSign:
In order to expand the reach of their e-signing capabilities, HelloFax launched HelloSign. HelloSign is a competitor to companies like DocuSign and EchoSign and is designed to make it easy for people to both sign documents and keep them organized, as well as send out files to be electronically signed by others without their having to download or install any special software. HelloSign offers this service for free for up to 3 documents per month. HelloSign Pro is $15 per month for unlimited documents and HelloSign Business is $50 per month which gives users additional templates for obtaining sigtatures, branding, in-person signing capabilities, two-factor authentication and team overview visibility.
For Gmail users, HelloSign offers a very useful browser plugin that allows users to electronically sign Gmail attachments and send them back without having to print the files or even leave the Gmail interface. It’s by far the easiest way to sign email attachments, but it’s only free for up to three documents per month.