this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Sorry if this is a stupid question, but did you still pay for the call itself, or was this fully free?
It depends on where you live. I lived in a rural area so the nearest local isp was far enough away that it cost. The cds and floppies that constantly came in the mail didn't charge though. There were a bunch of those free services and ad supported isps. I had dial up for a long time and watched the business model go from portal style sandbox like AOL to literal "all internet is free if you keep this ad open. " towards the end before I left for college.
You just gave me flashbacks of NetZero nightmares.
I absolutely had them in mind. They were one of the better ones. Dial up is nostalgia trip was not on today's bingo card but I'm gladdened by the reminder.
When I used dial-up, local calls were free.
Not free. Included in your monthly phone line subscription.
Depends on region. In Australia, local calls (within the same state) were a flat $0.20 or $0.25, while interstate and mobile calls were billed by the minute.
I've heard that some Americans were billed for incoming calls too?? Crazy.
Yeah, definitely depends on year and location. But phone calls are never free. Maybe unlimited, but you still face a monthly bill at the very least.
AOL used a combination of local and 1-800 numbers. The only additional fee you had to pay was the AOL subscription.
I'm pretty sure you still had to pay your phone provider who may have charged $0.10/call unless AOL was using 1-800 numbers to dial to?
You would’ve had to pay for the call itself, but probably only if you had to make a long-distance call. I think by that time local numbers were pretty universally unlimited minutes, but long distance was 25¢/minute or more. I was too young to be buying phone service myself, then, but remember TV ads promoting 25¢ or 10¢ or something like that as a good deal. Around 2003 when I was first living on my own I used to buy prepaid calling cards to call home and those got me as low as 3¢/minute, and that was a bargain.
10 10 3 2 1. Bobwehadababyitsaboy. I forgot about those ads. They were super bowl ad popular in my memory.
It was free, but iirc, you had to sign up for a monthly subscription, and the 700 hours was just your first month free.