Sometimes you just need to send a fax. Whether you’re dealing with legal documents, healthcare providers, or just working on your taxes – you can’t avoid faxing forever, and basically every sensitive or highly regulated industry in the country still relies heavily on fax machines.
For many people, faxing is still seen as a complicated and costly thing – but this isn’t the 1990s anymore, and sending a one-time fax is now even easier than sending emails! Thanks to the huge range of online fax services, you can find a one-time fax service that offers pay as you go faxing, and you can fire off a quick fax without any monthly subscriptions or long-term commitments – and definitely without needing a clunky fax machine.
The Best One Time Fax Services – Reviewed
We’ve been using and testing a bunch of “pay per fax” fax services in order to find the best options for sending an occasional one-time fax. We’ve looked at every kind of online fax service – including web services you can use from your computer – and if you prefer to use a mobile phone – mobile apps for faxing with iPhone and Android phones.
Each option has been rated from 1 star to 5 stars, with the following considerations taken into account:
- Pricing – it has to be a fair, reasonable price.
- Quality – any outgoing faxes have to be good quality and readable.
- Convenience – online faxing needs to be user-friendly and intuitive.
- Security – faxing often involves sensitive information, so we looked for encrypted faxing, HIPAA compliance, and other features to make your documents are secure.
The average fax is about 3-4 pages in total, so in order to conduct our testing, we sent the first 4 pages of this manual for a washing machine. This manual has a good combination of pictures, text and shapes which we can use to judge the quality of every fax.
Without further ado, let’s take a look, from best to worst, of the “pay as you go” online fax services we reviewed!
5 Stars – Our Top Choices!
Municorn Fax App | ★★★★★
- Type: iPhone, iPad, Android or Mac app, email-to-fax
- Price: Under $10 for a week of unlimited faxing
- Quality: Outstanding
- Convenience: Very easy to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy, HIPAA-compliant
We’re starting with an iPhone app from Municorn – FAX from iPhone. This one isn’t technically a pay-as-you-go app, but since the majority of online fax services offer subscription plans rather than one-time faxing, we tested the most popular subscription fax app on Apple’s app store. And if you need to send only one page, there’s the free test fax as well.
This app is the only popular app offering truly unlimited faxing for a very low weekly price, and since you can cancel this anytime, this can be used as a “one time” service – the added benefit being that if you need to send more faxes in a short time, or even send and receive faxes, there will be no extra charges.
Municorn, being a large technology company, is able to offer the highest level of security, including full E2E encryption and HIPAA compliance, so you know your data is as secure as possible. The quality of the fax we sent was also excellent, with full image, shape and text detail very clearly transmitted – below is an example of how the app scanned the document with extreme clarity. Plus, our 4-page fax sent in less than a minute – the fastest of any service we tested. This is a top choice and our top recommendation!
Here’s the test image to judge the quality of a fax:
Simplefax | ★★★★★
- Type: Windows, Mac, iPad or Apple Vision app
- Price: $10 for permanent, limited faxing abilities
- Quality: Good
- Convenience: Very easy to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy
SimpleFax is designed for people who occasionally need to send faxes. You pay a one-time fee of $10 to get the app, and after that you can send up to 20 faxes a month (limited page numbers) with no further fees. That’s it – very simple, as the name suggests! Perfect for the person who just needs to send a fax every now and then, and doesn’t want to get tied into any further monthly plans or subscriptions.
The pricing is by far the best thing about Simplefax – a one-time fee gives you the permanent ability to send 20 faxes a month, this is an absolutely fantastic deal if you are okay with the limits on page numbers. It also has the benefit of being fully encrypted and HIPAA compliant, so you can use it when faxing your sensitive information. The quality of the fax we sent was very good – not excellent, but easily readable for good enough for important documents.
There are, of course, a few drawbacks. Firstly, the app itself is quite limited – you can only fax PDF documents (whereas Municorn supports every major file type), you cannot receive faxes and the app doesn’t provide you with a fax number, the countries you can fax to are limited, and there is less customer support than Municorn can provide. But if you can accept those, this is one of the best ways out there to pay a small fee, and then have the permanent ability to send a quick, occasional fax. We highly recommend Simplefax.
4 Stars – Very Good Choices!
Easy Fax | ★★★★☆
- Type: Android app
- Price: $0.80 per page, can be cheaper in bulk or free if you watch adverts
- Quality: Good
- Convenience: Easy to use
- Security: Encryption
Easy Fax is an Android app which, as far as faxing apps go, offers a fairly average fax quality without all the top-level support and security you get from an app like Municorn’s FAX from iPhone app. It’s rather basic but has some nice little touches like scanning and editing documents, and it’s pretty easy to use.
You may be wondering why it’s our first pick on the 4-stars list, and that’s for one simple reason – it’s very cheap. It works out to between $0.80 or as low as $0.25 per page if you buy lots of credits at once, but here’s the kicker – you can get credits for free by watching adverts. If you don’t mind clicking on an advert and letting it run on your phone a few times, you could even send entire faxes for free using this app. Many people will love this as a way of sending cheap (or free) one time faxes!
We may not recommend it as the most secure option, so perhaps it’s best to use an alternative if you’re sending very important documents to secure places, however for anything else, this is a great low-cost choice!
FaxFresh | ★★★★☆
- Type: Web browser, Mac app
- Price: $1.99 for an 8-page fax, 25¢ per extra page
- Quality: Good
- Convenience: Moderately easy to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy
FaxFresh is a web-based service which works via web browser or using the Mac app. Customers can send faxes on a pay per fax basis, uploading PDFs online and paying a small fee of $1.99 for an 8-page fax, with a small fee for any extra pages. On top of that, FaxFresh offers full encryption, and only charges you when your fax is delivered – a nice touch!
There are a few drawbacks – the Mac app is very old and outdated, and doesn’t work well with Apple’s newer M chips, requiring users to install Rosetta just to use it, so it’s better to use the web version. There’s also very little support, with just an email address provided if you need any help or troubleshooting. There’s also no option to pay slightly less for a one-page fax, so the $1.99 minimum fee may put some people off.
Despite that, the quality of the fax we sent was absolutely fine, and this is a really good deal and service which can be used if you need to fire off a short fax on your web browser!
Genius Fax | ★★★★☆
- Type: Web browser, iPhone or Android app
- Price: $0.99 per page, cheaper if you buy credits in bulk
- Quality: Very good
- Convenience: Very easy to use
- Security: Some good privacy features
Genius Fax is the companion faxing app to Genius Scan, also available on all major platforms, and enables you to start faxing the documents you have scanned and edited in the scanning app. Genius has a web app but it best used on either Android or iPhone, as you can take advantage of all the scanning functionalities it offers – making it a top choice if you want to scan and fax any paper documents on a mobile device.
Genius Fax is essentially a pay as you go app, with users given the option to buy ‘credits’, which each can be redeemed for one fax page. The standard price for a credit, and therefore a fax page is $0.99, so this is the price a user would be paying if they typically want to send a fax occasionally. However, Genius Fax offers a bulk discount, and you can buy 50 credits for $19.99 (or $0.40 per page). If you want to receive faxes back, you have to pay an extra subscription on top of this.
Genius Fax scans and faxes documents to a very good quality, and offers quite a low price point for sending a few pages, despite not being a great deal for higher numbers of pages (you can get a lot more than 50 pages for $20 elsewhere). Whilst it doesn’t have some of the extra security features other apps do, it’s a very user-friendly and flexible option.
FaxSalad | ★★★★☆
- Type: Web browser
- Price: $0.08 per page, extra charges to receive faxes or send internationally
- Quality: Average
- Convenience: Easy to use
- Security: Encryption
FaxSalad is an online service operating on a pay per page plan, which allows customers to top up their account with money and use it to send faxes whenever they need to. Let’s not beat around the bush – FaxSalad’s number one appeal is the price per page, it is very cheap at $0.08 per page domestically. Whilst there are extra charges for international faxing, this is one of the cheapest offers you will ever find. The only caveat is that you need to top up your account with at least $5.00, but still, this is a great deal.
As far as the faxing quality goes, it’s very average – the details of images get lost and the text becomes slightly difficult to read in parts, so the quality is not the best at all – you can see this by looking at the washing machine in particular in the image below. That being said, there is an option to send fax as a “finer quality” transmission – when you do this, FaxSalad will dedicate more resources to improving the quality, however you cannot do this in conjunction with sending the fax in a HIPAA-compliant manner – so for any highly important and sensitive information we would recommend another service.
For all other reasons to fax, this price will be too good to turn down for many people! FaxSalad has great features like the option to rent a fax number for an additional price each month, or a monthly plan if you anticipate a heavy month of faxing. One last thing – you get 10 pages for free without even providing any payment details, so this is a great option to try for no cost!
Here’s the fax quality preview:
3 Stars – Not Bad!
Faxaroo | ★★★☆☆
- Type: Web browser
- Price: $2 for the first page, $1 per page thereafter
- Quality: Outstanding
- Convenience: Easy to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy
Faxaroo is a browser-based online service designed for pure pay-as-you-go faxing needs. Users can access the website from any kind of device, and send as faxes PDF, PNG, GIF or JPED files. The best thing about Faxaroo by far is the quality of the fax we sent – it was outstanding, and you can see the level of detail below. Faxaroo also boasts a range of ISO and encryption security features, giving you peace of mind over your faxes.
Despite this, there were a few things that marked Faxaroo down. The first is the price. Faxaroo claims to be the best deal, however at $2 for a single page and $1 per page after that, it is far more expensive than FaxFresh, and for the price of my 4-page fax we could have bought Simplefax and had 20 free faxes a month, or an unlimited subscription with Municorn’s app. Faxaroo is very good, but it’s not cheap.
Another gripe we had was no cover page option on the website – if you include a cover page in your document, this would be charged as an extra page, which makes the offering even more expensive. Furthermore, the fax we sent took over 10 minutes to send – unlike Municorn’s, which sent in less than a minute. Faxaroo is a very good and secure option to send a fax, but for these reasons, we had to give it 3 stars.
Here’s a test fax quality sneak pic:
FaxFile | ★★★☆☆
- Type: Android app
- Price: $0.60 per page, can be cheaper if you buy credits in bulk
- Quality: Good
- Convenience: Confusing to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy
FaxFile is a very no frills Android app for Android owners to send documents as faxes. FaxFile sells credits which users can redeem to send a fax page, and the cost of a credit (one page) works out at between $0.60 and $0.33 depending on how many you buy at once. Users have reported buying credits over 5 years ago and still having them available, so a single bulk buy might be enough to cover all your faxing needs for a long time!
FaxFile’s quality is good enough to make the low price-per-page attractive, however the app is quite confusing to use and looks very outdated. If you don’t mind this, what you get in exchange is a very high standard of security and privacy – the app shares and stores absolutely no data, and is fully encrypted, so this may be a good choice when sending important information to third parties.
2 Stars – Could Do Better!
My Scans | ★★☆☆☆
- Type: iPhone app
- Price: $1.00 per page, can be $0.80 if you buy in bulk
- Quality: Average
- Convenience: Difficult to use
- Security: No major features identified
My Scans is primarily a scanning app, with an option to buy credits to send scanned documents as faxes. In terms of scanning functionality, it’s a good app, and provides all the clarity and quality of scan that a physical fax machine or scanner would provide, and can save scans in all the major file formats for faxing, like PDF. If you want to scan and edit a document to later fax, this app would work well.
As a faxing app, My Scans falls short for several reasons. Firstly, it’s very expensive for what is a rather average quality of fax, with no major security features like encryption or HIPAA-compliance identified on their website. $1.00 per page is similar to what very premium faxing services charge, and they offer more security and quality in return. The app is also rather difficult to use, even for regular iPhone users, and it’s often unclear how to take advantage of all the features offered.
iFax | ★★☆☆☆
- Type: Web browser, email-to-fax, iPhone or Android app
- Price: “Free” when you sign up for a $100 membership
- Quality: Very good
- Convenience: Easy to use
- Security: Top-level security and privacy
iFax is a top online faxing provider, and very well-established particularly for helping corporations with faxing networks. Their service is excellent and offers a high level of security and faxing quality across all platforms.
The issue is, when you search for “one time fax service” (or something similar), iFax’s website will be very high in the results offering a one-time service for faxing. However, in order to send this “one time” fax advertised, iFax will try to sign you up for a 1-year faxing subscription – you have to read the fine print (bottom-right of the image below) in order to catch this.
Despite iFax being a very good online fax service for long-term users and corporations, this particular case could mislead and trick people into buying a one-year subscription for a one-time fax, and so we’ve had to give 2 stars to iFax as a “one time fax” option.
Send A One Time Fax Today!
If you want to send a quick fax or start receiving faxes electronically every now and then, a one-time fax service is the easy answer, offering low-cost and flexible occasional faxing. We hope this list helps you find the best pay-as-you-go option for you and your faxing needs!
