SRFax

Mike Charalambous is the CEO of SRFax, a Canadian-based Internet fax service provider that provides services in the U.S. and Canada. FaxCompare Kate Harrington sat down with him to talk about the fax industry and the future of Internet faxing.

FaxCompare: Roughly how many new subscribers do you see each month?

SRFax: On average we see about 1,000 new subscribers each month. We’re not a huge company – if you look at a company
like one of j2’s [Global, owner of eFax and MetroFax], they probably get 50,000 new subscribers a month. I think the faxing industry is improving, and we’ve seen great growth. Consultants are, for the first time, saying that demand for online faxing service is now surpassing in-house fax service.

And that’s amazing, because the enterprise market is the biggest fax user, and most of them have in-house servers because they have seen that as more secure and cost effective. But the forecast for the next three to five years is that the online fax market will surpass the server-based market in revenue. That’s exciting for us.

FAF: Have you seen certain industries embracing Internet faxing?

SRFax: I think the biggest growth market has been the medical industry. We’ve got a few electronic medical records companies that have integrated their software with our software. On the whole, healthcare, finance, and legal are heavy users of online faxing.

FAF: What feature requests do you most often hear from customers?

SRFax: I think portability – being able to bring your number with you when you switch providers – is the biggest one, which we do supply. And then there’s a demand for an app. With smartphones today you can do just about anything, and faxing is no exception. If I had to say one of the things we need to have – and are in the process of developing – it’s a smartphone app.

Another big request, which we do offer, is HIPAA compliance. We are also one of the few online fax companies that will sign a business associate agreement.

FAF: What business size do you see the most online fax demand come from?

SRFax: It’s really split in two – we have a lot of customers with smaller, home-based businesses who are buying the Home 200-page plan. Then on the business side, the majority of customers are well over the 2,500-page plan. About 10-15% of our customers buy plans in the middle from 800-2,500 pages per month. The rest are either small business owners or large corporations that need well over that amount.

FAF: What do people not know about the fax industry?

SRFax: There’s been a lot of growth in this industry in IP faxing. But I don’t think it has staying power. Faxes are transmitted by sound, and that Internet phone line doesn’t always work well for that. If you get any noise interference on the line, it’s lethal for faxing. The general public and even some businesses don’t understand that an Internet phone line doesn’t work that well. People will go to VoIP-based systems, it doesn’t work, and they end up coming to us.

FAF: What’s the most interesting thing that’s happening now in the fax industry?

SRFax: That the industry is moving toward cloud-based services. A lot of people don’t know that Internet faxing or cloud-based services exist, and it’s exciting to see that trend reversing and people looking for services like ours, as opposed to looking for hardware or legacy service.

People have been predicting that the fax will die for a long time, but I don’t see that happening. There are too many industries that need it – there would have to be a major shift in thinking across many industries for faxing to start tapering off.

I think another thing to be aware of is that for cloud-based services, the waters have been muddied badly over the last five or six years. When we started 10 years ago, there were only six or seven providers. Today there’s probably 50. But of those 50, half of them have terrible customer service and aren’t reliable. Customers sign up with a cheap service, have a bad experience, and end up thinking the entire industry is bad. But if they’re serious about remaining with a cloud-based service, they’ll get to a good provider.

Conclusion

Whether you’ve got a home office or are building a business that will have to scale up rapidly, faxing is an important tool. Now that faxing has been freed from the fax machine, it can provide an easy, secure, and mobile way to send and receive documents. And as with many industries, the growth of cloud-based technologies will only help Internet faxing grow and become more feature-rich.

SmartFax and SRFax are both known for their value. Both offer low priced plans and good, basic service. For a closer look at how the two compare side-by-side, we took a more in-depth look at what they each offer:

Value: Both offer good prices, although SRFax offers more options, with a Lite plan, Ultra Lite plan, and three different business plans (from small to large). Its Lite plan is $9.95 per month to send and receive up to 500 pages, or roughly two cents per page. That comes in lower than many services. Its overage rate of six cents per page is also lower than the typical overage rates of 10 cents per page. SRFax also offers a 60-day free trial period.

SmartFax keeps it simple, with only one plan for $6.95 per month to send and receive up to 250 combined pages. Its overage rates are also very low, at 8 cents per page. SmartFax offers a 30-day free trial period.

Features: SRFax is compatible with all mobile devices, but it does not offer a mobile app. However it does offer a few handy features, including a “never busy” service that allows you to receive multiple faxes simultaneously without giving clients a busy signal, the ability to send from email or the web, PGP encryption for added security, and HIPAA compliance.

SmartFax again keeps things very simple when it comes to features. It offers a blocked/allowed phone call list so you aren’t charged for faxes from numbers you label as blocked, although that service is only Mac-compatible. Customers can also have faxes delivered to email.

Sending and receiving: SmartFax allows you to attach up to five documents per fax. You can send each fax to one recipient at a time. Its text quality is fine, but picture quality on sent and received faxes is poor. Faxes are stored free for 30 days, after which there’s a charge of five cents per fax per month. SmartFax does allow you to send a fax from an unlimited number of email addresses, but you can only receive a fax on two email addresses, making it better suited to small businesses or sole proprietors.

SRFax also allows you to attach up to five documents per fax, and allows you send a single fax to up to 50 recipients at a time. You can also schedule faxes for later delivery. Its text and picture quality are both good on sent and received faxes. SRFax will store an unlimited number of faxes for free for a year. Up to nine email addresses can send faxes, and an unlimited number of email addresses can receive them.

Neither service allows you to preview a fax before it is sent.

Fax number options: Both services offer only a limited about of local fax numbers; SmartFax offers them in 25 states, and SRFax offers them in 13 states, plus 40 cities in Canada. Both offer (866), (877), and (888) toll-free numbers for no extra fee. SmartFax does not port numbers, while SRFax will port a number into your account for $25 if you are in their service area.

Bottom line: if you’re a small business looking for the most basic package and you don’t want to pay for bells and whistles, SmartFax is an excellent choice. If, however, you need more choices as far as plans go, or need features like encryption, SRFax offers more plans and features.

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How Do SmartFax and SRFax Compare?