If your office still has a PBX in a closet, a maintenance contract with a local installer, and a phone bill from a regional carrier, you are paying for three things that hosted PBX collapses into one. A hosted PBX is the same call routing, voicemail, auto-attendant, and extension dialing you already use - delivered as a monthly service over the internet instead of a box you bought in 2014.
We run a hosted PBX out of our Ocoee, FL data center for customers across the US. Here is the straightforward version of what it is and what it costs.
What a hosted PBX actually does
Calls come in over the internet (SIP) to our platform. We route them to the right extension based on rules you set - time of day, who is on call, who picked up first, what the caller pressed. Your team answers on a desk phone, a softphone on their laptop, or a mobile app. The PBX itself never lives in your office.
Standard features in any modern hosted PBX:
- Auto-attendant (the "press 1 for sales" menu)
- Hunt groups and ring groups
- Voicemail to email (transcription is a paid add-on at VoIP International)
- Call recording, call queues, call parking
- Extension-to-extension dialing across locations
- Mobile and desktop apps so people can work from anywhere
- Presence indicators so you can see who is on a call before you transfer
- Business hours and after-hours routing per extension
- Conference bridges for multi-party calls without a third-party meeting tool
- Music and announcements on hold, customizable per queue
How it differs from your old PBX
The features look familiar because most modern PBXes - on-prem or hosted - share the same DNA. Where hosted differs is in three places. First, the appliance is gone. No closet box to back up, patch, or replace when it fails. Second, the carrier and the platform are the same provider. With on-prem, you had a PBX vendor and a separate phone carrier - two contracts, two support numbers. Third, the user identity is portable. The same extension rings the desk phone, the laptop softphone, the mobile app, or all three. That is hard to set up on an old PBX, and trivial on a hosted one.
What it costs
Two pricing models exist and they suit different businesses.
- Per-Minute Phone Service - $15/user/mo + $0.025/min. Best for low-volume users: back-office, owners who delegate calls, occasional users. If a user talks 200 minutes a month, that is $20 total.
- All-Inclusive Phone Service - $32/user/mo. Unlimited US calling, all PBX features. Best for anyone whose job involves a phone - sales, support, reception, dispatchers.
Both tiers include the auto-attendant, hunt groups, mobile and desktop apps, and the admin portal. See full pricing on our pricing page.
Real add-on costs we do not hide:
- Voicemail transcription: paid add-on
- Number porting: $15 per number, one time
- E911 misdial: $150 (federal carrier passthrough - we do not mark it up)
- Desk phones: pay per device, no required lease
- AI Receptionist (if you want one): $99 to $299 per month, plus $49 for the HIPAA-compliant tier
- vFAX (if you still need fax): $25 to $49 per month depending on volume
How to size your seat count
Customers often overpay because they pick the wrong tier on the wrong users. The simple rule: if a user's job is talking on the phone, put them on All-Inclusive. If a user might pick up two calls a week, put them on Per-Minute. A 30-person office often shakes out as 15 to 20 All-Inclusive users and 10 to 15 Per-Minute users, not 30 of the same SKU. The math: 20 x $32 + 10 x $15 = $790, versus 30 x $32 = $960. Same calling experience, $170 a month saved by mixing tiers.
What hosted PBX replaces
If you are coming from an on-prem PBX (Avaya, Mitel, NEC, old Cisco CallManager), the things going away:
- The PBX appliance itself and its maintenance contract
- PRI or analog trunks from your local carrier
- A separate phone vendor for moves, adds, and changes
- The "who do I call when it breaks" problem - one provider owns the whole stack
- The yearly software license you keep paying to a vendor that may have stopped innovating in 2017
- Battery backup and UPS units that died years ago and never got replaced
If you are coming from a key system or POTS lines, you also gain things you did not have: extensions across locations, real auto-attendant routing, integrated voicemail, and apps that ride on the same phone number when your team is out of the office.
What it does not replace
Honest caveat: a hosted PBX is not a one-for-one swap for every piece of phone-adjacent infrastructure you have. Things it does not solve on its own:
- Door buzzers and intercoms. Many old systems used analog ports for door entry. You either keep an analog adapter or replace the buzzer with a SIP intercom.
- Fax machines. If you still need fax, vFAX from $25 to $49 per month delivers and sends fax over email. Real analog fax over VoIP is unreliable - we will not pretend otherwise.
- Alarm panels and elevator phones. These need POTS lines or certified POTS replacement services. Confirm with your alarm vendor before you cancel your last copper line.
- Bad internet. Hosted PBX will not fix a flaky connection. Voice traffic is sensitive to jitter and packet loss. We tell you up front what your network needs.
- Cordless DECT range. If your old cordless phones had base stations placed for coverage across a warehouse, a single hosted PBX does not magically extend range. You still need DECT bases like the W73P or compatible repeaters.
- Power outages. If the office loses power, desk phones go dead. Mobile apps and Pro Mobile lines keep working. Plan for power-out scenarios with mobile fallback in your hunt groups.
What to ask before you sign
Hosted PBX is a commodity until it is not. The differences are in the operator, not the feature list.
- Where is the support team? Ours is in Ocoee, FL. If you want a human on a US number when something is wrong, ask before you sign.
- Is the provider an operator or a reseller? Resellers wrap somebody else's platform and pass the support buck. We run our own switch.
- What is the contract length? We offer month-to-month with no termination penalty. A lot of carriers do not.
- Number porting included? Ours is $15 per number. Some providers charge $50+. Some bury it as "setup."
- What integrations actually work? Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, AppFolio, Buildium, Clio, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, Follow Up Boss, GoHighLevel, Rent Manager. Our list is on the integrations page.
- What happens during a network outage? Good answer: calls reroute to mobile apps and Pro Mobile lines automatically. Bad answer: "the system goes down."
- How are upgrades handled? Hosted means upgrades land in the platform, not in your closet. Confirm there are no scheduled maintenance windows that affect business hours.
- Do you sign a BAA for healthcare? If you handle PHI, this is non-negotiable. We do. Some providers do not.
- What does the admin portal look like? If you cannot add a user or change a hunt group yourself in under five minutes, you will pay every time you need a change.
Common mistakes when moving to hosted PBX
- Buying user counts for peak. If you have 30 employees but only 18 are ever on the phone at once, you do not pay for 30 lines. You pay for 30 users on the platform. There is no "per call path" charge on our service.
- Forgetting about emergency dialing. Every phone needs an E911 address registered. If someone dials 911 from an extension with no valid address, the $150 misdial fee applies. Audit your addresses before cutover.
- Skipping internet upgrades. A 25-seat office on a 25 Mbps connection will sound bad. Plan for 100 Mbps minimum and put QoS on the router.
- Not training the receptionist. The most critical user in the building is whoever answers the main line. Half an hour of training on the new auto-attendant and transfer flow prevents a week of confused customers.
- Cancelling old service too early. Run the new system in parallel for two weeks. Cancel old PRIs and POTS only after the port lands and inbound is confirmed clean.
- Rebuilding the call flow from memory. Document what you have today before turning it off. Mirror it. Improve later, after stable operation.
- Letting the receptionist set business hours wrong. A common one. Daylight Saving, holiday calendars, lunch hours - the auto-attendant will route exactly the way you configure it. Garbage in, garbage out.
If your team works from phones, not desks
For sales reps, field crews, and anyone who lives on a mobile, hosted PBX alone is not the answer. Look at Pro Mobile ($42 to $62 per user/mo) - it puts a real business line on the employee's phone with full PBX integration. No second device, no personal number on the customer's caller ID. The hosted PBX handles routing; Pro Mobile handles delivery on a mobile.
If you want calls answered when no one is in
Pair the hosted PBX with our AI Receptionist at $99, $199, or $299 per month. It handles after-hours, overflow, and routine intake calls so your team is not paying voicemail tag. The HIPAA add-on at $49 covers clinical and other regulated workflows.
Who picks hosted PBX and why
The pattern is consistent. Hosted PBX is the right fit when:
- You have 5 to 500 users across one or more locations
- You want one provider for service, hardware, and support
- You want to stop maintaining a closet appliance
- You want your team to work from anywhere with the same phone identity
- You want predictable per-user pricing instead of usage-based surprises
- You want to standardize phone features across multiple offices
- You are tired of paying for moves, adds, and changes by the hour
Industries we land in often: property management on our property management page, healthcare practices, dental, wellness, legal, real estate, field service. Each industry page covers the workflow specifics.
Where it is not the right fit
Hosted PBX is not for every situation. We will tell you when:
- You have a high-volume contact center with 50+ simultaneous agents on inbound queues - you may need a dedicated contact center platform on top of the PBX.
- You operate in an area with unreliable internet - bonded circuits or a real network upgrade come first.
- You have a legacy integration with an industry-specific system that does not speak SIP - we can usually adapt, but ask.
- You are bound by a long-term carrier contract that has not yet expired - sometimes waiting six months is cheaper than paying the early-termination fee.
A realistic migration example
A 35-person professional services firm we moved last year ran an aging Avaya IP Office. Maintenance contract was $480/month. PRI service from the local carrier was $360/month. Voicemail-to-email needed a third-party module the vendor wanted $2,200 to add. The system did not handle remote workers cleanly - everyone forwarded to cells. The migration looked like this: 20 users on All-Inclusive at $32, 10 users on Per-Minute at $15, 5 Pro Mobile lines at $48 for the senior partners and account managers who travel. Total: about $1,030/month. The hardware refresh - 18 owned desk phones plus a conference phone - was $5,200 one-time. Payback against the previous run-rate landed around month 6. The flexibility - remote workers, mobile apps, hunt groups they could change themselves - paid off the day they cut over.
Where to start
Tell us how many users, how many locations, and what you are running today. We will tell you what it would cost on our platform and whether porting your numbers is straightforward or messy. Start at get started or compare us against the usual names on our comparison page. If you want to read about specific industries, the multi-location and healthcare pages cover the most common patterns.