Since Tropo launched last spring developers have enjoyed completely free accounts for development and testing.

While some companies provide you with a few measly dollars in credit for your testing, or make you start paying after a month, ready or not, Tropo feels that you shouldn’t have to pay for development and that the best person to decide if you’re ready for production is you.

Our commitment to free development has always included US phone numbers and no-cost phone calls to any number in the United States. Today we’re expanding that support to the international community.

Starting now, local phone numbers are available for free in 41 countries around the world. Just pick your location and we’ll assign you an available number in your home country. This makes testing Tropo applications easier than ever — it’s just a local call.

Need to test an app that makes calls? Those have been 100% free in development for calls to US numbers. We’re expanding that support internationally as well. In addition to the free calls to US mobiles and landlines that you’ve always had, our developer program now supports free calling to landlines in 17 other countries.

Tropo’s goal is to make it easy for developers to create, test and deploy voice, SMS, and instant messaging applications no matter where you live. Now you can build a truly global communications application. And until you move to production, it won’t cost you a dime.

What about SMS? For now, SMS is only available on US numbers. You can certainly send and receive worldwide, but you’ll have to use a Tropo number from the US to do it.

Here’s the countries where Tropo is offering free phone numbers to developers: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US

Make outbound phone calls to landlines for free in Belgium, Canada (mobiles, too), Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US (mobiles, too).

And remember, Tropo supports speech recognition and text to speech in lots of languages: Dutch, English (both UK and US varieties), French (French and Canadian), German, Italian, Spanish (Castilian or Mexican), and Polish.