Nayab Arewa

I ve been building apps for 3 years little to no success. Recently, I launched my first successful startup Yadaphone. It lets people and teams make cheap international calls from the browser. In under 3 months, it reached 1500 users, 7 enterprise customers, and brought in $15,000 in revenue.

Before that, I thought I had a clear idea of how indie hacking works: you build something, launch it, get users, and continue doing the same stuff as at the start, but on a larger scale (and get $$$). That couldn t be further from the truth. Here are the top problems I wish someone had warned me about.

For the past 10 years, whenever I needed to call an international number, I used Skype. It had my back when I had to clear things up with the US university admissions from Austria, arrange a hotel pickup in Bali, or call my EU bank to see why my card was blocked while I was trekking through Argentina. I could call anywhere in the world for cents, and it was delightful.

In February 2025, Microsoft announced it was closing Skype down, and on May 5 it officially stopped operations. I was really sad when I heard the news with Skype, a huge chunk of my life disappeared. It felt the same way as if, one day, nobody would be playing on Call of Duty 2 servers anymore (that hasn t happened yet, right?).

Anyway, here I ve compiled a list of the top 6 alternatives to Skype for international calling. I used the following criteria to select them: