How To Scan and Fax Documents Online for Free

Popular in the 1980’s, faxes are still around in many organizations and are the fastest and most reliable way to communicate via physical media. To give an example, PayPal requires you to verify your identity by sending a fax with copies of bank statement and government ID if it can’t process your card automatically.

In these kinds of situations, sending a fax for free as quickly as possible would certainly be useful. In this article, we’re taking a look at 4 websites that let you send fax online and come with a free or trial version.
1. faxZERO

The first one on our list is faxZERO. faxZERO allows you to send two free faxes a day, to the United States or Canada, as long as they don’t contain more than three pages each. Plus there is an ad on the cover page. Out of all the services we tested, faxZERO is the easiest to use and the only one that didn’t require creating an account.

faxzero - send fax online free

faxZERO also has a premium service that charges 1.99$ for each fax and limits the number of pages per fax at fifteen. If you need to send more than two faxes a day and you don’t want to pay for the premium service, you could consider deleting your browser cache and cookies and using another IP address, either through the TOR network, proxies or simply by resetting your router.
2. Qipit

Qipit is a more comprehensive service when compared to faxZERO. Instead of being just an online faxing service, Qipit helps you upload photos of documents, business cards or receipts from a mobile phone or digital camera, and improves the image quality through a patented technology called Realeyes3D. Next images can be emailed or faxed.

send fax from computer

The images you upload are stored online on Qipit’s servers and are also accessible online via the website.

You can upload photos via MMS, email or directly from your computer using the web interface.

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Once your document is on Qipit, you can choose to either view a PDF version of it, email the document or fax it. Qipit’s image optimization technology proved to be quite powerful. I never expected that a photo taken with a mobile phone camera could actually be put to use.

The great thing about Qipit is that it’s free:

Qipit is a free service; this includes sending domestic and international faxes. The costs that you have to bare are related to what your wireless carrier charges you if you are using Qipit with your mobile device. –Qipit FAQ.

3. ScanR

ScanR, a service similar to Qipit. The trial subscription gives you only one upload and fax, but the premium account is only 4,99$/month or 29,99$/year. ScanR features OCR (optical character recognition), a slightly better designed interface and sharing capability.

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An interesting quote from their help pages suggest that some fax numbers are restricted:

scanR currently sends fax to most phone numbers in East Asia, North America and Western Europe. scanR may block certain premium phone numbers and countries[…] –ScanR Help

You get the same uploading capabilities, via email, MMS or web interface.

Another cool feature of Scanr is that you can use is to convert document pictures that were obtained using you cell phone camera to a properly formatted document. Very useful for things like page captures from library books and lecture notes.

send fax from pc
eFax

Another faxing service is eFax. With eFax, you can also receive faxes, but unfortunately it requires you sign up for a 30 day trial using a credit card.