Easy Fax - Send Fax from Phone

Review by eFreeware

The most distinctive thing about Easy Fax is that it treats the fax machine as something you no longer need to own. Instead of a dedicated device in a corner of the office, the app turns the phone you already carry into the sending end of a fax line, and it does this for documents, photos and receipts alike. The numbers suggest plenty of people have taken that idea seriously.

That framing matters because faxing has not disappeared, it has just become occasional. Contracts still get signed and returned by fax, clinics and government offices still ask for a fax number, and small businesses still receive paperwork that way. The people who need Easy Fax are the ones who send a handful of pages a month, not the ones running a fax-heavy back office. If that describes you, the appeal is obvious: no hardware, no phone line dedicated to a machine, and no trip to a copy shop with a fax counter.

It is a free download from the Business category on Google Play, with a 4.3 average from more than 21,000 ratings and over a million installs. Those figures do not tell you whether the app is right for your particular fax, but they do suggest it is a known quantity rather than a weekend project.

What kind of sender gets the most from it

I would expect Easy Fax to fit freelancers, tradespeople and small-office staff who handle their own paperwork. Someone who signs a lease, submits an insurance claim or returns a supplier form every few weeks has exactly the profile this app is built around. The document is already on the phone or in a cloud folder, and the fax is the last step rather than the main event.

It also suits people who travel and cannot rely on finding a fax machine where they are staying. A hotel business center may or may not have one, and a print shop may be closed by the time you remember the deadline. Having the sending tool on the same device as the document removes that dependency, which is the practical argument for an app like this over a traditional fax.

The flip side is volume. Because every page is paid for through credits, this is not a tool for someone sending long documents every day; at that point a fax service with a monthly plan or an actual fax line tends to make more sense. Easy Fax is at its best when the need is real but irregular.

Sending photos and paper documents

The app accepts images straight from your gallery, and it can also use the phone's camera to scan a paper document. That second option is what makes it useful for the physical side of life: a signed page, a receipt, a form that arrived by mail. You photograph it, and the app sends it as a fax rather than asking you to find a scanner first.

For receipts in particular, this is a sensible fit. Expense claims and warranty paperwork often arrive as small slips of paper, and photographing them is faster than flattening them onto a scanner bed. The same applies to anything handwritten that exists only as a physical copy.

I would treat the camera path as a way to capture a page rather than a document-processing suite. For straightforward pages that are legible in a photo, that is enough.

Pulling documents from cloud storage and other apps

Documents can be pulled in from cloud storage, including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and OneDrive. That covers most of the places a contract or invoice is likely to be sitting.

There is also an import path for documents coming from other apps.

Once a fax is on its way, the app reports back through notifications and email. That matters more than it sounds: a fax is not an instant message, and knowing whether a page went through or failed is the difference between a finished task and an unresolved one. The developer's stated aim is to keep you informed about your faxes rather than leaving you to guess.

Signing in and keeping credits with you

Easy Fax uses a Google Account for sign-in, which the developer describes as the quickest way into the app. The practical benefit is that your credits follow the account rather than the handset, so a tablet or a replacement phone can use the same balance. If you fax from more than one device, that is a meaningful convenience.

The credit balance is the core of how the app works, and it is worth understanding before you send anything. Faxing is not unlimited: each page draws on your credit balance, and the balance is what you top up when it runs low. The developer's own framing is that Easy Fax runs on credits, so the app is best thought of as a paid-per-use service wrapped in a free download.

Signing in with Google also means the account is the thread that ties your balance together. If you switch phones, you sign in again and your credits are there.

What a fax costs

The download itself is free, and the app contains advertising and offers in-app purchases. The purchases are credits, and credits are what pay for faxes. When you first sign in, the developer gives you 15 free credits, which is enough to try the service without spending anything.

Pricing is per page and depends on destination. A page to the United States or Canada costs 10 credits; a page to any other country costs 15. In money terms, the developer puts each page at between $0.25 and $0.50, with the exact figure depending on how many credits you buy in one go. Buying in larger batches lowers the per-page rate.

That structure is easy to reason about once you know your own pattern. A single five-page fax within North America is 50 credits; the same fax sent internationally is 75. If your faxing is occasional, the free credits plus a small top-up will likely cover a good while. If it is frequent, the per-page cost is the number that matters, and it is worth comparing against whatever else you would otherwise use.

There is a support address, [email protected], for problems, and the most recent update listed bug fixes and performance improvements. Neither changes the economics, but both are the kind of housekeeping you want to see in an app that handles documents with deadlines attached.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious alternative is a fax machine, and the comparison is mostly about cost of ownership. A machine needs a phone line, toner, paper and a place to sit, and it does nothing at all when you are away from it. Easy Fax needs none of that, but it charges per page, so the two trade a fixed cost for a variable one. For low volume, the app usually wins on convenience alone.

A second option is a staffed fax service, the kind found in copy shops, hotel business centers and some post offices. That works when you are near one and it is open, and it can handle awkward originals that are hard to photograph well. The trade-off is the trip, the queue and the opening hours, which is precisely the friction an app removes.

A third route is a subscription-based online fax service, which typically bundles a monthly allowance of pages with a dedicated fax number for receiving. It is built around sending, and it charges by the page rather than by the month. If you receive faxes regularly or send in volume, a subscription service is the more natural fit; if you send a few pages now and then, paying per page keeps the cost tied to actual use.

The final comparison is simply to the phone itself. Easy Fax is an app that replaces a piece of office equipment, which is why the concept holds up even though the underlying technology is decades old.

A practical choice for occasional faxing

Easy Fax makes sense for anyone who needs to send a fax a few times a month and would rather not own the hardware or make a trip to send one. The combination of gallery and camera input, cloud storage imports and email or notification updates covers the whole job from a phone, and the credit model keeps the cost proportional to how much you actually send. The 15 free credits on first login are enough to find out whether the workflow suits you.

The caveats are the ones built into the model. Anyone sending long documents regularly should work out the per-page math before committing, because a subscription service may come out cheaper at higher volumes.

For the occasional sender, though, the trade is a good one: a free download, a small balance, and no fax machine to maintain. That is a narrow promise, but it is one the app appears to keep.

What's new in version 2.5.1

- Bug fixes. - Improve performance.