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Home > Guides > Fax machine vs online fax
For occasional use, online faxing beats owning a machine: no hardware, no dedicated phone line, and faxes go from your phone or computer in minutes. A physical machine still wins at high volume or when you need faxing during internet outages. Most people send only a handful of faxes a month, where online wins on cost and hassle.
| Your situation | Better pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You fax a few pages a month | Online fax | No hardware, no line rental, pay per fax |
| You fax hundreds of pages a day | A machine | Per-fax fees add up fast at that volume |
| Your internet drops often | A machine | A phone line keeps working when the net is down |
| Several people need to fax | Online fax | Everyone sends from their own device, no queue at the machine |
| You need to receive faxes too | A machine or a full fax service | Many online options are send-only, so check before you commit |
That last row deserves emphasis: plenty of online fax options handle outbound faxes only. LetterAgent's fax service, for example, is send-only with no inbound number, and it is currently in testing, so it is described as available in testing rather than a guaranteed send. If clients fax signed forms back to you, you need a real receiving number.
The machine is the cheap part. The ongoing costs are the phone line, toner or ink, paper, and the electricity to keep it on around the clock, since you never know when a fax will arrive. A dedicated analog line in particular adds up month after month for a device you might use twice. There is also a hidden reliability cost: fax machines often fail over internet-based phone lines, because the fax handshake was designed for old copper lines and does not tolerate packet loss. Offices that switched to internet phone service and kept their fax machine usually discover this the hard way.
Then there is the archiving problem. Older machines that print on thermal roll paper produce pages that fade within a few years, which is a genuine problem for documents you might need later: tax paperwork, signed contracts, medical forms. And the shared output tray is a privacy hole. Incoming faxes sit in the open where anyone walking past the machine can read them, which is exactly the situation privacy rules in healthcare and law try to prevent.
Online faxing removes the hardware and the phone line entirely. You upload a document or describe it to your AI assistant, and the service handles the dialing. With LetterAgent the flow is: ask your AI assistant, get a per-fax quote with the page count verified, approve the exact quoted price, pay once through Stripe, and the fax is sent. It covers US and Canadian fax numbers only, and it is currently in testing.
The trade-offs are real. Per-fax pricing is kind to light users and punishing to heavy ones: an office sending several hundred pages a day will usually find a machine cheaper than paying per page online. Online services also differ on features that matter, like whether they keep an archive of what you sent, whether several staff can use one setup, and whether they support inbound fax at all. And you need the internet: no connection, no fax.
Neither is automatically safer; it depends on your setup. A fax machine's weak point is physical: anyone near the tray can read your incoming pages, and the machine keeps no useful record of who picked what up. An online service's weak point is digital: you are trusting a third party with your documents, so the questions to ask are how files are encrypted in transit, how long they are stored, and who can access them. For regulated industries the online option usually wins, because access is per-user and logged while the office machine's output tray is open to the whole floor.
One safety myth to drop: a fax number is not identity verification. Caller ID on a fax can be spoofed, and a confirmation page only proves that a machine at the dialed number picked up, not that the right person read anything. When the document matters, call the recipient after sending and confirm they have it.
For everyone else, online faxing is cheaper, faster to set up, and easier to keep private.
Ready to fax it? Fax with LetterAgent: describe it to your AI assistant, approve the exact quoted price, and it is sent.
LetterAgent is a working name. Prices include print, postage, and our service fee. US prices in USD, Canadian prices in CAD (Canadian prices exclude applicable sales tax, added at checkout). Currently in private testing.
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