Skype Is Gone. Here's How to Call Any Phone From Your Browser, No App Needed

It has been a little over a year since Microsoft retired Skype on 5 May 2025, and I still get the same question from friends and family. Not "what do I use for video calls now." They sorted that out months ago. The question is quieter and more specific: "I just need to call a phone number. A clinic. A hotel. My mum's landline. What do I use?"

That is the part nobody replaced.

I have written before about why I built PuchiDen, and Skype's death is a large part of that story. This post is the practical follow-up. Skype is gone, you have a phone number you need to dial, and you do not want to install anything. Here is exactly what to do, and what happened to the bits of Skype you might still be holding on to.

What Actually Died

People say "Skype shut down" as if one thing happened on one day. Several things happened, on a schedule, and the schedule matters because some of it affects money you may have left on the platform.

1. New purchases stopped first, in December 2024. Microsoft quietly halted new Skype Credit purchases and new Skype Number sales months before the lights went out. If you tried to top up in early 2025 and could not, that is why.
2. Subscriptions ran to April 2025. Calling subscriptions and Skype Numbers auto-renewed only until 3 April 2025, then expired at the end of their period.
3. The service was retired on 5 May 2025. On that day SMS, call forwarding, voicemail, Caller ID setup, and credit gifting all stopped working (Microsoft's own page lists each one).

Microsoft's answer to "what now" was a single word: Teams. The official migration message is that your contacts and chats carry over when you sign in to Teams Free with your Skype account. For chat, fine. For the thing most people used Skype for, not fine at all.

Why Teams Is Not a Replacement (and Neither Is WhatsApp)

Here is the detail that gets buried. Skype had two quiet superpowers, and the free replacements inherited neither. The first was that it could call a real phone number. Any landline, any mobile, anywhere, whether or not the person on the other end had ever heard of Skype.

The second was the mirror image. You could rent a real number of your own, a Skype Number, and let people call you on it from any ordinary phone. I leaned on that one personally: my Estonian company's numbers ran on Skype for years, and when it shut down I moved them to PuchiDen. Same job, done the same way. I will come back to that half further down. The outbound side is the one most people ask me about, so let me take it first.

Teams Free does not do that. Calling an ordinary phone number from Teams needs a paid calling plan, which is a business-grade add-on, not something a regular person sets up to call a hotel. So the free replacement Microsoft pointed everyone to cannot do the one thing they miss.

And the messaging apps everyone reaches for next? They have the same hole, by design. WhatsApp, LINE, FaceTime, Messenger: every one of them is app-to-app. Both people need the same app, an account, and a data connection. A landline has no WhatsApp account, so it can never receive a WhatsApp call. You cannot WhatsApp a clinic's reception desk. You cannot LINE an airline's booking line. You cannot FaceTime your bank.

So the honest map after Skype looks like this:

• Video call a friend who has the app is solved five times over.
• Dial a plain phone number that has no app went from "obvious, everyone used Skype" to "wait, what do I use?"

That second row is the gap. It is the whole reason this post exists.

What To Actually Do Now

Open a browser tab. Go to puchiden.app. Dial the number. Talk.

That is genuinely the entire process. There is no app to download, no account to create (you sign up with just an email, no password and no phone number), and the person you are calling does not need anything at all, because their phone just rings like a normal phone. The call runs inside the browser using the same web technology your video calls already use, so you do not install a thing. I built it to feel like a public phone box: a keypad, a dial button, a hang-up button, and nothing else to learn.

If you want the longer version of how this differs from the apps you already have, I wrote a side-by-side on PuchiDen versus WhatsApp and Skype. The short version: it calls phones, not usernames.

The Questions People Actually Ask Me

"What happened to my Skype Credit?"

If you still have a balance, it did not vanish, but it did get stranded. Leftover credit stays usable through the Skype Dial Pad (in the web portal and inside Teams) until you spend it down, and Microsoft did not refund balances by default. So you can burn it off, but you cannot top it up, and when it is gone it is gone. Treat it as a gift card from a shop that has closed.

"Can I keep my old Skype Number?"

Not by moving it to Teams. There is no path that carries a Skype Number into Teams. The only way to save one was to port it out to a third-party carrier before it expired, and for most people that window has closed. If you used a Skype Number so that family or clients in another country could reach you on a local number, that is a real need and it has a real answer: a virtual number you actually control, which rings whatever phone you already carry. I will come back to that in a separate post.

"I used Skype to get a foreign number for bank SMS codes."

That is a different job from calling out, and it is worth saying so plainly. Calling a phone and receiving texts on a foreign number are two separate needs. For the receiving side, look at virtual numbers rather than an outbound dialler. For everything in the "I need to phone someone" category, the browser dialler is the simpler tool.

"What does it cost?"

You pay per minute, from prepaid credit, with no subscription and no contract. Unanswered calls are free, and the rate for the country you are dialling is shown live before you call. There is no monthly fee sitting on your card whether you make a call or not. For the kind of person who needs to dial a phone a few times a month, that shape fits far better than any plan.

The Honest Take

Skype, for all its late-period bloat, was the closest thing the internet had to a public phone. You did not think about it. You opened it, you dialled, you talked to someone on an ordinary phone in another country. It was infrastructure, and then one day it was gone, and the official replacement was an instruction to install a workplace chat tool.

I do not think the answer to "how do I make a phone call" should ever be "first, get the other person to install something." A phone call is the most basic networked thing there is. It should work like a public phone box worked in 1995: you walk up, you use it, it does not care who you are.

That is what I tried to rebuild, on the web, for 2026. If you have been putting off a call because you genuinely did not know what to use since Skype died, try it now. It will take you about thirty seconds to find out whether it does what you need.