I believe that some good alternatives would be Google Voice and/or Google Hangouts.
Google Hangouts works on pretty much all computers and smartphones, is completely free, and you can have group messages in text (and pictures) as well as video.
Google Voice is only available in the U.S., but it allows you to make conference calls and such with ordinary numbers and/or other Google Voice users. U.S. calls are free, and to make international calls it usually costs about $0.02 per minute.
These work through Google Accounts, which shouldn't be much of a problem to set up, especially if you already have a Gmail or YouTube account, or any Google account in general (it works off of those same accounts). Google Hangouts works through Google+.
These are just some suggestions, an I'm sorry that I couldn't suggest it sooner. But you might could also find some sort of app or something that allows you to make free conference calls.