If you've ever tried to get a straight price on a business phone system, you know how this goes. You fill out a form, someone calls you, they ask about your "needs," and three conversations later you still don't have a number.
Here's the honest breakdown — what things actually cost, what drives the price up, and what you should actually be comparing.
The three main options (and their real costs)
Traditional on-premise PBX
This is the hardware-in-a-closet approach that most businesses used before cloud systems existed. A physical PBX box, desk phones, and wiring throughout your office.
Upfront cost: $500–$2,000+ per user, depending on the system and how much installation labor is involved. A 5-person office might spend $5,000–$15,000 before anyone picks up a phone.
Monthly cost: SIP trunks or analog lines, usually $20–$50/month per active line.
Hidden costs: Maintenance contracts, hardware failures, IT time to manage it, and the fact that adding a user means buying more hardware.
For most small businesses, this is the wrong answer in 2026. You're paying for infrastructure that's increasingly hard to support and that doesn't travel with your team.
Hosted PBX / legacy business VoIP
These are the older-generation cloud phone services — names like RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage Business. They moved the hardware off-site but kept a lot of the pricing complexity.
Typical cost: $25–$65 per user per month, billed annually. Some plans are cheaper but limit features you'll actually need.
Watch for: Annual contract requirements, per-user pricing that adds up fast, and features like SMS or call recording locked behind higher tiers. A 5-person team at $40/user is $200/month before you've added anything.
Modern cloud phone systems
This is where the value is for small businesses. Purpose-built for teams that don't want to manage hardware, don't need enterprise complexity, and want everything included — VoIP, SMS, eFax, transcriptions — without building a feature stack out of separate services.
Typical cost: $50–$150/month for most small business team sizes, depending on users and DIDs.
What's usually included: Multiple phone numbers (DIDs), voicemail to email, call routing, business SMS, web portal access, WebRTC (call from your browser), SIP phone support.
What actually drives the cost up
The base monthly fee is rarely the whole story. Here's what inflates bills:
- Per-user pricing. At $30–$65/user, a 10-person team gets expensive fast. Look for account-level pricing instead.
- Add-on fees for standard features. SMS, call recording, and auto-attendants are sometimes sold as add-ons. They should be included.
- Annual contract lock-in. Some providers offer lower monthly rates but require a 1- or 2-year commitment. That's risk you're absorbing.
- Per-minute overage charges. If you have busy periods, pay attention to minute limits and what overages cost.
- Number porting fees. Bringing your existing number over shouldn't cost much, but some providers charge for it.
- Setup fees. Legitimate cloud systems generally don't charge setup fees. If you see one, ask why.
What a reasonable price actually looks like
For a small business — one to five users, a couple of phone numbers, reasonable call volume — you should be paying somewhere in the range of $50–$150/month total for a full-featured cloud phone system.
If you're paying more than that and you're a small team, it's worth asking whether you're paying for features you actually use. A lot of SMBs are on enterprise plans they grew into by accident.
If you're paying less than that, double-check what's actually included. Cheap VoIP services often exclude SMS, charge per minute, or have reliability issues that cost you more in lost calls than the savings are worth.
The comparison you should actually make
Don't compare monthly fees in isolation. Compare the total cost of what you actually need:
- How many users need phone access?
- Do you need business SMS? (Most businesses do.)
- Do you send or receive faxes? (More industries than you'd think still do.)
- Do you need call recording or transcriptions?
- How many phone numbers (DIDs) do you need?
When you add up SMS service, eFax service, and a VoIP plan from separate providers, the total often comes out to $150–$200/month for a one-person business. A unified platform that bundles all of it is usually a better deal — and a lot less hassle.
ShoutDial starts at $50/month for a single user — VoIP, WebRTC, business SMS, eFax, AI transcriptions, and voicemail to email included. The multi-user plan covers up to 5 users for $150/month. No annual contracts, no surprise add-ons. If you want to see exactly what you'd get, check the pricing page or get in touch and we'll walk you through it.