Fortress Communicator’s pricing is mostly stable, but the wholesale carriers we buy minutes and SMS from do change their termination rates periodically. Here is exactly how we handle passing those changes on — or not.
The 30-day notice commitment
Before any retail rate change takes effect — whether it is a per-minute increase on a single international destination or a change to our published US/Canada SMS rate — we will give you at least 30 days written notice. The clock starts on the day the notice is posted to your account, not the day a carrier informs us of their change.
How notices arrive
You will see a rate-change notice in three places:
- An in-app banner at the top of the Dialer tab for the full 30-day notice window.
- An email to the address on file for your account.
- A post in this Help Center under the Rate Change Policy category, with the full before-and-after rate table.
What happens to minutes you already paid for
Bundle minutes — the 500, 2,000, or unlimited US/Canada allotment that comes with your subscription tier — are minutes, not dollars. A rate change does not change the size of your bundle.
Pre-paid balance dollars are dollars. A rate change on, say, calls to the UK means a $10 pre-paid balance will buy fewer minutes to the UK than it did before. The balance itself does not shrink; what each minute costs against it shifts.
If you do not want to accept the new rate
You can cancel your subscription at any time from the App Store subscription settings. If you cancel within the 30-day notice window of a rate change, you can also email support@fortressdms.com to request a pro-rated refund of any unused bundle minutes you paid for in advance. We honor those refunds without making you justify the cancellation.
Carrier-driven changes vs Fortress-driven changes
Most rate changes are carrier-driven — we are passing along a change in what our upstream voice carrier charges us to terminate calls on a particular network. The notice will say so, and we will not mark up the carrier change beyond our standard wholesale-plus-margin policy.
Fortress-driven changes (changing our own markup, or restructuring tiers) follow the same 30-day notice. We have never raised our published B2C tier prices and have no plans to; if we did, the notice would be at least 60 days.
Appreciate that you’re giving 30 days notice — most vendors just slip in a rate change on the invoice and you don’t catch it until your finance office is already asking questions. Quick clarification though: does the grandfathered bundle protection apply to facilities that are mid-contract renewal, or only to those already locked into an existing term?
This is exactly the kind of transparency we’ve been asking for from vendors — most of the time you find out about a rate hike when the invoice shows up and it’s already too late to plan around it. The 30-day notice window and pro-rated refund option actually gives our budget coordinator something to work with. Appreciate you spelling it out in plain language instead of burying it in a terms-of-service update nobody reads.
Appreciate the transparency here — most vendors bury rate changes in a terms-of-service update nobody reads until they see the invoice. The 30-day notice and pro-rated refund option is exactly the kind of policy that builds long-term trust with county facilities working on tight budgets.
Appreciate the transparency here — most vendors bury rate changes in the fine print and you don’t find out until the invoice hits. The 30-day notice and pro-rated refund option is exactly the kind of policy that builds long-term trust with facilities like ours.
Appreciate the transparency on this — too many vendors bury rate changes in the fine print and you don’t find out until the invoice hits. The 30-day notice and pro-rated refund option is exactly the kind of policy that builds trust with a county office that has to answer to commissioners for every budget line.
This is exactly the kind of transparency we needed after getting blindsided by a vendor rate hike with zero notice two years ago. The 30-day window and pro-rated refund option show you actually respect the facilities you’re working with. Quick question — does the grandfathered bundle protection apply to mid-contract upgrades, or only to plans that haven’t been modified?