I needed to send a single fax. Just one. A two-page document to a government office that only accepted faxes. What should have taken five minutes turned into a 45-minute ordeal that left me genuinely angry at the internet.
The Problem
Every fax service I found wanted me to create an account, verify my email, enter a credit card for a "free trial," and then sign up for a monthly subscription. For one fax. One single fax that I'd probably never need to send again.
Some services offered "pay per fax" but buried the option behind three screens of upsells. Others put watermarks on your documents unless you upgraded to a paid plan. A few wanted $9.99/month for the privilege of sending up to 100 faxes — when I just needed to send one.
I'm a software developer. The whole time I was thinking: this shouldn't be this hard.
What Faxing Actually Costs
Here's the thing that really got me: the actual cost of sending a fax through an API is pennies. The infrastructure exists. The APIs are straightforward. There's no technical reason why sending a single fax should cost $10 or require a monthly subscription.
The subscription model exists because it's more profitable, not because it's better for the customer. Companies would rather lock you into recurring revenue than give you what you actually need: a simple, one-time transaction.
So I Built SimpleFax
SimpleFax is the service I wished existed. Upload your document, enter the fax number, pay $3.99, and your fax gets sent. That's it.
- No account required. You don't need to create yet another login.
- No subscription. Pay once. There's nothing to cancel.
- No tracking. No analytics cookies, no behavioral tracking, no selling your data.
- Files deleted immediately. After your fax is sent, your documents are gone from our servers.
Built for People Who Just Need to Send a Fax
Most people who need to send a fax do it rarely. Maybe once or twice a year. Maybe once in their entire life. The subscription model punishes these people — it's designed to extract money from forgetfulness, not to provide value.
SimpleFax is built for the person who needs to fax a signed form to their insurance company, or send medical records to a doctor's office, or submit paperwork to a government agency that's stuck in 1995. You shouldn't need a monthly subscription for that.
The Bigger Picture
SimpleFax is part of a broader idea: that software tools should respect your time and your wallet. Not everything needs to be a subscription. Not everything needs an account. Not everything needs to track you.
Sometimes you just need to get something done. SimpleFax lets you do that.