Two Hundred Dollar International Phone Call to France

When we moved to Virginia from Capitol Hill three months ago we left our “land line” behind. It was a Comcast Xfinity bundled service. Now we have Verizon Fios and still have the “land line” option, but no longer have a phone to connect to it. We used to have a real land line through Verizon for the sole purpose of making international calls, and it was also the condo “door bell,” but we discontinued that a long time ago. So what we have left are our mobile phones with AT&T. We don’t make a lot of international phone calls anymore and didn’t think about our phone plan when my husband called his friend in France last week - and it’s been a while since he made any overseas calls. We got a notice the next day from AT&T that we had a $200 plus bill for that phone call! So I got on chat and asked how we could eliminate that bill. When you have pay per use, it is $3.00/minute! He said if we signed up for the $15/month advantage plan, he would eliminate the bill. I’m sure they want to keep us as customers after many years. With the advantage plan you get all the calls for free, but pay $15/month. If we made a lot of phone calls that might be a good option, but not for us. The value plan is $5/month with a much lower charge per minute based on land line or moble access. That is more tolerable, but not necessary either. I also wanted to explore the cost of Verizon - the service that we already have - but we would need to buy a phone. I didn’t like that either. So I asked if he could also eliminate the other $30 charge to France, I would sign up for the $15/month plan - but only if I could eliminate the service by the next billing cycle. He said I could. So, rather than pay $200+ for two pay per use calls to France, we will pay $15 this month for the advantage plan. This nonsense has given me a major headache. I know there are apps out there that I need to explore, but our friends aren’t really tech savvy or don’t have the same phones we do. So either email or  texts need to do the trick, or we need to remember to sign up for an international plan before we make any more calls. Or, we just wait for our friends to call us - which isn’t practical. I wish I had kept one of our land line phones. That would have solved our problem - sort of. Do you have any better ideas?