When I first signed up for Skype what attracted me the most was the ability to make international calls from my computer to an outside landline for a rate of $.02 per minute. I've been recently disappointed when I made my last call to Sweden at a rate of over $.26 per minute. This is outrageous and I feel like I've been caught in a "bait and switch" sales pitch. Does anyone know if there is a flat rate offered for international calls on Skype or possibly another service that does offer this?

Hi AJ, there wasn't a flatrate at any point for international calling, you should see the page where the rates are shown on skype.com.
I will move this thread to the Windows forum since this in not a specific 3.6 issue.
Regards,

what our friend above neglected to say (as you should have read before posting) is that skype charges different amounts for different types of lines.

so if you call a land line internationally then yes, its usually very cheap.

but if you call a mobile then its still gonna be expensive. otherwise everyone would use skype all the time! no one is gonna give you cheap calls to mobiles or special rate numbers. the country youre calling and the phone operators there have too much say on the pricing...

That is not necessarily true.
In many countries, including the United States, SkypeOut calls to both landlines and cellphones are priced identically.
Here is a listing if global calling rates: http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates/all_rates.html
In any country where call rates to cellphones are not specifically identified they are the same as to landlines.

If I can add to this debate. I live in Cape Town SA and would like to use Skypeout more extensively locally. I speak to family in NZ,USA and UK regularly for 0.17c euro. A call to the house next door to me costs 3 times as much. This doesn't make any sense to me.