Buy minutes, not subscriptions
Choose a package, call whenever you want. Minutes never expire and there are no recurring charges. One purchase, permanent balance.
Starter
For a quick check-in call
Up to 30 min to Canada
From $0.03/min depending on country
~30 min to Canada or Mexico
~8 min to India
Standard
For regular international calling
Up to 70 min to Canada
From $0.03/min depending on country
~70 min to Canada or Mexico
~20 min to India
2.5× the credit of Starter
Pro
For heavy callers and families
Up to 140 min to Canada
From $0.03/min depending on country
~140 min to Canada or Mexico
~41 min to India
5× the credit of Starter
Pricing questions
Do minutes expire?
No. Purchased minutes never expire. Buy them today, use them in six months. There is no deadline and no auto-renewal.
Are there any hidden fees or connection charges?
No. The per-minute rate is the only cost. There are no connection fees, no monthly charges, and no surprise surcharges. What you see on the rates page is what you pay.
How is payment processed?
Payment goes through the Apple App Store (iPhone) or Google Play Store (Android). Telvio never sees your credit card details. The stores handle all payment security.
Can I buy more minutes before using all of mine?
Yes. New minutes are added to your existing balance. If you have 10 minutes left and buy the Standard package, you’ll have 130 minutes total.
What if the call quality is poor?
Call quality depends on your internet connection. On a stable WiFi or 4G/5G connection, quality is comparable to a regular phone call. Your free minute lets you test before buying.
Can I get a refund?
Refunds are handled by Apple or Google according to their refund policies. Contact the respective app store support for refund requests.
Ready to call?
Download Telvio free. Test with your included free minute, then buy a package when you’re ready.
Download TelvioHow the pricing works
You buy credit in one of three packs and spend it at the per-country rate. There is no subscription, no monthly minimum, no connection fee and no expiry date. That is the entire model, and it is deliberately simpler than most of this market.
Packs are credit, not minute bundles. A larger pack is more money on the account at the same per-country rate — there is no volume tier and no rate that improves with spend. Several competitors sell bundles that look similar and behave differently, so it is worth stating plainly rather than implying a discount that does not exist.
How far a pack goes therefore depends entirely on where you call. The same amount buys hundreds of minutes to the United Kingdom and a handful to China, because the wholesale cost of reaching those two networks differs by more than a hundred times. Every destination page shows the figure for that country.
What you are not charged for
- No connection fee. A flat per-call charge is still standard on calling cards and present on some apps at around five cents. On a one-minute call it can double the cost. There is none here.
- No rounding. Billing is per second. A forty-seven second call costs forty-seven seconds, not a minute.
- No expiry. Credit does not lapse and there is no dormancy fee. A pack bought for one call keeps its value indefinitely.
- No subscription. Nothing recurs, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing to forget you are paying for.
- No account fee, and no account. There is no sign-up, so there is no identity to maintain or delete.
Where the price of a minute comes from
Very little of it is our decision. The dominant component is the wholesale termination rate: what the operator at the far end charges to accept the call and deliver it to the person you are ringing. We pay that, add a margin, and quote the total.
Those rates are set by local regulation and competition, and by which routes our carrier holds. They vary by more than two orders of magnitude. At the cheap end a minute retails for single-digit cents — the United Kingdom is $0.03. Where termination remains a protected revenue stream, the same minute costs several dollars. Distance plays essentially no part.
This is why we do not describe every corridor as cheap. We publish live prices for 41 destinations and only the first handful of them are cheap in the sense the word usually implies; China, Switzerland and the Nordics are expensive with us as with everybody else, and a page here that called them pennies a minute would be quoting a rate we do not honour. The rate sheet is the whole list, sorted by price, with nothing hidden at the bottom.
Payment, refunds and the free minute
| How you pay | Through the App Store. Card details never reach us, and there is no payment form in the app. |
|---|---|
| The free minute | Every new install includes one free minute. It exists so you can hear the call quality on your own corridor before spending anything — quality is per-destination and no review generalises usefully across 200 countries. |
| Refunds | Handled by Apple under their policy, because the purchase is theirs. Their Report a Problem page is the route. We can help establish what happened on a call first, which is usually what the request needs. |
| Topping up | Any time. New credit adds to the existing balance; nothing is reset and nothing is forfeited. |
| Currency | Rates are quoted in US dollars. The App Store charges in your local currency at its own conversion, which is why the amount on your statement may differ slightly from the pack price. |
Working out what you will actually spend
Two questions settle it, and neither is the headline rate. How long is a typical call, and is the number you call a landline or a mobile?
If your calls are short — a check-in, a confirmation, a two-minute update — the billing increment dominates. Per-second charging is worth more to you than a lower per-minute rate that rounds up, because a forty-seven second call at a rounded minute costs twenty-eight per cent more than the time you used. If your calls run half an hour, the increment is noise and the rate is everything.
If you have a choice of number, check both columns on the destination page. In most countries a mobile costs more to reach than a landline, sometimes several times more, and that single choice usually beats any saving available from switching provider.
The cost calculator does both calculations for a specific country and duration, and shows what the same call would cost from a provider that rounds to the minute, so the comparison is arithmetic rather than assertion. The full rate table has every country we publish.
Bottom line
Three credit packs, spent at the per-country rate, with per-second billing, no connection fee, no subscription and no expiry. A bigger pack is more credit at the same rate rather than a cheaper minute.
What a pack buys depends entirely on the destination, because the price of a minute is mostly the wholesale rate the operator at the far end charges. Around twenty corridors are genuinely cheap; the rest are what they are, and we say so.
One comparison worth doing before you buy anything: work out what you currently spend. Most people calling abroad regularly are either on carrier roaming at one to three dollars a minute, on an international add-on they use twice a year, or on a calling card with a connection fee. All three are usually more expensive than credit spent at a published per-second rate, and the arithmetic takes two minutes with the calculator.
The free minute exists so that arithmetic can be checked rather than trusted. Call the number you actually call, hear the quality on your own corridor, and decide afterwards. Nothing recurs and there is nothing to cancel if you decide against it.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Telvio cost?
The app is free and there is no subscription. You buy credit in one of three packs and spend it at the per-country rate, with per-second billing and no connection fee. Every new install includes one free minute.
Do Telvio minutes expire?
No. Credit has no expiry date, no dormancy fee and no monthly minimum. Several large calling services expire unused balance after 180 days; money you paid and cannot spend is the highest per-minute rate there is.
Is a bigger pack cheaper per minute?
No. A larger pack is more credit at the same per-country rate — there is no volume tier and no rate that improves with spend. Some competitors sell bundles that look similar and behave differently, so it is worth checking whether you are buying credit or minutes.
Are there any hidden fees?
None. No connection fee, no monthly minimum, no maintenance charge on a dormant balance and no rounding up to whole minutes. The per-minute rate for the destination is the entire cost.
How is payment handled?
Through the App Store, so card details never reach us and there is no payment form in the app. Refunds are handled by Apple under their policy, via their Report a Problem page.
How many minutes will a pack give me?
It depends entirely on the destination, because a pack is credit rather than a minute bundle. The same amount buys hundreds of minutes to the United Kingdom and a handful to China, since the wholesale cost of reaching those two networks differs by more than a hundred times. Each destination page shows the figure for that country.
