Call your family back home.
Every day if you want.
You moved to build a better life. Staying connected with the people you left behind shouldn't cost a fortune. Telvio makes daily calls home affordable.
Download Telvio FreeCalling home is expensive and unnecessarily complicated
Every option comes with a cost — either money, time, or a reason your family can't pick up.
$15–50/month
International carrier plans
Carrier add-ons for international calls cost $15–50 per month. That's $180–600 per year just to hear your family's voice. You pay whether you call a lot or a little.
Hidden fees, expiring credit
Calling cards
Scratch cards with hidden connection fees, short expiration windows, and poor audio quality. And you need to buy them at a store, not at midnight when you want to call.
Your parents don't use apps
App-to-app calls
WhatsApp only works if both sides have it. Your parents answer their home phone — they're not downloading another app. You need to call a real number.
Simple calls to real phones at honest prices
Calls their regular phone
Your mother answers her landline. Your father picks up his mobile. No app required on their end. No internet needed at their home. You call a real phone number, they hear it ring, they answer. That's it.
Buy once, call for months
The $4.99 Standard pack gives you a solid pool of minutes. At $0.24/min to India, that's over 20 minutes of calls with your family. The minutes never expire — no pressure to use them up.
No monthly commitment
No subscription. No auto-renewal. No penalty for a quiet month. Buy minutes when you need them, keep them until you use them.
Your family hears your voice
Text messages and video calls are great, but sometimes a phone call is what matters. Hearing your parents' voice, letting them hear yours. Telvio makes that affordable every single day — not just on weekends or holidays.
What you actually spend per year
Before — carrier add-on
$180/yr
- AT&T international add-on: $15/month
- Limited minutes, overage charges apply
- Billed every month whether you call or not
After — Telvio
~$30/yr
- $4.99 every 2–3 months for the same calls
- Minutes never expire
- No subscription, no auto-charge
Save $150+ per year
That's money back in your pocket — for groceries, rent, or sending home.
Rates to the countries you call most
Per-minute rates to landlines and mobiles. No connection fees added.
| Destination | Landline | Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| 🇮🇳 India | $0.24/min | $0.24/min |
| 🇲🇽 Mexico | $0.05/min | $0.05/min |
| 🇵🇭 Philippines | $1.16/min | $1.16/min |
| 🇳🇬 Nigeria | $0.32/min | $0.32/min |
| 🇨🇳 China | $4.54/min | $4.54/min |
| 🇻🇳 Vietnam | $0.65/min | $0.65/min |
| 🇵🇱 Poland | $0.69/min | $0.69/min |
| 🇩🇴 Dominican Rep. | $0.30/min | $0.30/min |
Rates shown are samples. Full list of 200+ countries available in the app. Rates subject to change.
See all country ratesQuestions from immigrants
Does my family need to install any app to receive my calls?
No. Telvio calls their regular phone number — mobile or landline. Your parents pick up the phone the same way they always do. No app, no internet connection, no smartphone required on their end.
Can my family call me back on the same number?
Telvio is an outbound calling app — you initiate calls to their phone number. Your family can call you back on your regular mobile number as they normally would. Telvio does not assign you an inbound number.
Is the call quality better than calling cards?
Yes, consistently. Calling cards often route through multiple third-party networks with low-quality compression. Telvio uses modern VoIP with clear audio over your WiFi or mobile data connection. No echo, no robotic voice, no dial-in PIN.
Which package is best if I call home daily?
The $9.99 Premium pack offers the best value for regular callers. At $0.24/min to India, that's over 41 minutes — nearly 3 hours of calls. Since minutes never expire, you don't need to rush to use them.
Can I use one Telvio account to call multiple family members?
Yes. You call any phone number in any country from a single account. Call your mother on her mobile, your father on the landline, and your grandmother in a different city — all from the same balance.
Will the rates I see now change?
Rates are generally stable and any changes are rare. The rate shown in the app before you connect is what you pay — no hidden fees, no connection charges added on top. You can always check current rates in the app before dialing.
Your family is one call away
Download Telvio free. One free minute to any country included.
Download TelvioCalling a country you left
The calls that matter most are usually the ones an app cannot make. A parent with a landline and no interest in installing anything. A local government office. A bank that still verifies by phone. A hospital. A neighbour who will fetch someone. None of those is on the other end of a messaging app, and no amount of persuasion changes that on the timescale of an urgent call.
So the question is not which free app is best. It is what it costs to reliably reach an ordinary telephone number in a specific country, and whether that arrangement will still work in two years.
The honest answer varies enormously by corridor, and it is wholesale economics rather than anybody's pricing policy. Calling Mexico, India, the Philippines, Canada or Colombia is genuinely cheap. Calling much of Africa, Central Asia and European mobiles is not cheap with anyone, because the operator at the far end charges a lot to accept the call. A page that tells you otherwise is quoting a rate it will not honour.
Sending money is not the same as sending minutes
Many services bundle international calling with remittance, top-ups or SIM sales, and the bundling makes comparison harder rather than easier. A generous calling rate attached to an expensive transfer fee is not a good deal; it is a cross-subsidy, and which side you lose on depends on how you use it.
Mobile top-up — sending credit to a phone in another country — is a genuinely useful and separate product. It is worth pricing separately from calling rather than accepting a package rate that hides both.
The same applies to calling cards sold in shops. The advertised rate is usually real and the connection fee, the maintenance fee and the rounding are usually where the money is. A card at one cent a minute with a 49-cent connection fee costs 50 cents for a one-minute call, and the arithmetic is on the back of the card in small type.
Arrangements that survive
- Call the landline where there is one. In most countries it costs a fraction of the mobile. Over years of weekly calls this is the largest single saving available, and it requires no comparison shopping at all.
- Use credit that does not expire. Life interrupts routines. A balance that lapses after 180 days is a recurring loss to anyone whose calling comes in bursts.
- Do not depend on the other person's phone. A service that reaches any telephone works whether or not the person you are calling has charged their smartphone, has data, or has updated an app.
- Keep the numbers stored properly. Full international form with the plus sign. It survives changing your own phone, your own country and your own SIM.
- Have a second route. Networks change and services close. Two arrangements is not excessive when the alternative is being unable to reach family.
Language, and what it costs you
This site is published in many languages for a specific reason: dialling rules, numbering plans and pricing structures are hard enough to reason about in a first language, and almost every reference on the subject exists only in English.
Where a translation and the English differ, the numbers are the same — prices are substituted at build time from a single source file rather than translated, so no translator can accidentally change a rate. What varies is only the prose around them.
Support is answered in English. A detailed message in any language is more useful than a vague one in English, and machine translation is now good enough that the reply will make sense; but the reply itself will come back in English.
Bottom line
The calls that matter most are to people and institutions that will never install an app, so what you need is a service that reaches ordinary telephone numbers — and then the landline rather than the mobile wherever there is a choice.
Be sceptical of calling bundled with remittance or sold as a shop card: the advertised rate is usually real and the connection fee, the expiry and the rounding are where the money goes. Price the calling separately from everything it is packaged with.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest way to call family in another country?
An internet calling app that reaches ordinary phone numbers, dialling a landline rather than a mobile wherever the choice exists. In most countries a landline costs a fraction of a mobile, and over years of regular calls that single choice saves more than switching provider.
Do calling cards still make sense?
Rarely. The advertised per-minute rate is usually genuine and the connection fee, maintenance charge and per-minute rounding are where the cost is. A card at one cent a minute with a 49-cent connection fee costs 50 cents for a one-minute call.
Why is calling some countries so expensive?
Because the operator at the far end charges a high wholesale rate to accept the call. That is set by local regulation and competition, not by the company selling you the minute, which is why an expensive corridor is expensive with every provider.
Does the person I call need a smartphone?
Not with a service that connects to the telephone network — the call arrives as an ordinary phone call on any phone, including a landline with no internet at all. Only free app-to-app calling requires the other person to have installed something.
Is it cheaper to call or to send credit to their phone?
They are different products and worth pricing separately. Bundles that combine calling with remittance or top-up usually subsidise one side with the other, and which side you lose on depends entirely on how you use it.
Can I get support in my own language?
Write in whichever language you are comfortable with — a detailed message translates far better than a vague one. Replies come back in English. This site itself is published in many languages, and prices in every version come from the same source file rather than being translated.
