Every VoIP provider on the internet promises to save you money. Most of them are vague about how. We are going to put numbers on the page. We are VoIP International, an Ocoee, Florida operator. We sell phone service direct, not through a reseller chain. Here is where the money actually goes on a landline bill and what it looks like when you move to us.
What you are paying for on a landline
Pull the last invoice from your phone company and you will find some version of these line items:
- Line rental. $30-$60 per line, per month. A 10-person office with a PRI is paying $250-$400 for the trunk alone before anyone dials.
- Long distance and toll charges. Per-minute billing on anything outside your local rate area. A sales team making out-of-state calls can rack up $100-$300/mo.
- Maintenance contract. If you have a physical PBX in a closet, you are paying a vendor $75-$200/mo to keep it alive.
- Regulatory fees, FCC fees, USF surcharges. 12-18% added to the bill. Not optional on landline.
- The analog fax line. $40-$60/mo for one number you keep because the insurance company will not email.
- Adds, moves, and changes. Every time you add an extension or move a phone, the carrier charges $75-$150 for a truck roll.
Add it up. A 10-person office on a traditional setup usually lands between $500 and $900/mo, often more once you fold in the cell phone allowance line items hidden in HR.
What you pay us
Two phone service tiers cover almost everyone: $15/user/mo for the standard plan and $32/user/mo for the upgraded plan with CRM integrations and advanced call routing. Unlimited calling to the US and Canada is included. No per-minute long distance, no PRI rental, no maintenance contract on a dying PBX. The price on the page is the price you pay, with the FCC and regulatory fees folded in honestly.
The 10-person office above moves from $500-$900/mo to $150-$320/mo depending on tier. The analog fax line goes away, replaced by vFAX at $25 to $49/mo. If anyone needs a business cell line, Pro Mobile at $42-$62/user replaces both the personal phone allowance and a desk extension. If you need an after-hours receptionist without hiring a human, the AI Receptionist at $99-$299/mo handles call screening, routing, and appointment booking, with a $49 HIPAA add-on for medical practices.
The savings most people forget to count
Sticker price is the easy part. The other savings:
- No hardware refresh cycle. A traditional PBX costs $5,000-$25,000 to install and another $5,000 to upgrade every few years. VoIP runs on handsets that cost $125-$289 each. See hardware.
- Porting is cheap. $15/number to bring your existing lines over. You do not change your business number.
- Adds and moves are free. Adding a new employee takes five minutes in the portal, not a $150 truck roll from the phone company.
- Replace the cell phone allowance. Most companies hand out $50-$100/mo per employee for a personal cell. Pro Mobile is cheaper and the number stays with the business when the employee leaves. Details at replace cell phone allowance.
- No more sunk-cost maintenance. The annual maintenance contract on the PBX goes to zero. So does the cost of training a new admin on a dead vendor's interface.
- Office moves cost nothing. Pack the phones in a box, plug them in at the new address, update E911. No carrier work order, no truck roll fee, no downtime.
Three real-world bill comparisons
The 6-person law firm
Existing setup: four analog lines, hosted PBX from a regional carrier, one fax line, three attorneys with $75/mo cell allowance. Pre-switch bill: $682/mo. Switched to six $32 phone service users for the integration with Clio, $35 vFAX tier, and three Pro Mobile users at $48/mo. Total: $371/mo. Net savings: $311/mo, $3,732/year, with case logging now happening automatically inside Clio. Billable time captured on inbound and outbound calls increased by an average of 4 hours per attorney per month, which is itself worth more than the phone savings.
The 20-person property management office
Existing setup: PRI with 12 channels, on-prem PBX with annual maintenance, two analog fax lines, no mobile integration. Pre-switch bill: $1,420/mo. Switched to 20 phone service users (mix of $15 and $32 tiers depending on role) plus AppFolio integration, the $49 vFAX tier, and three Pro Mobile users for the maintenance team. Total: $568/mo. Net savings: $852/mo, $10,224/year. PBX decommissioned at the next quarter-end. After-hours maintenance calls now route through an AI Receptionist tier and a roll-to-tech rotation, eliminating the missed-call problem that used to cost them tenants every quarter.
The 4-person specialty clinic
Existing setup: two analog lines, one fax line, no integration with the EHR, voicemail boxes nobody checked. Pre-switch bill: $260/mo. Switched to four $32 phone service users with HIPAA configuration at $49/mo, plus the $25 vFAX tier. Total: $202/mo. Smaller dollar savings, but every fax now routes to the right staffer and missed calls hit the front desk's mobile app instead of dying in voicemail. The clinical team stopped seeing PHI sitting on the fax tray, which is a HIPAA risk reduction that does not appear on the spreadsheet.
The 8-person HVAC contractor
Existing setup: three lines, three cell allowances at $90/mo, one fax for permit submissions. Pre-switch bill: $480/mo plus $270/mo in cell allowances. Switched to two $32 phone service users for dispatch, six Pro Mobile users at $54/mo for the field team, $25 vFAX, and ServiceTitan integration. Total: $413/mo. Net savings: $337/mo. Tech response time on inbound emergency calls improved measurably because the dispatcher could see the unit history before answering the phone.
What it does not save you on
We are not going to pretend everything gets cheaper. If you currently have a single landline at $40/mo and use it twice a week, VoIP probably costs you about the same after you buy a handset. The wins show up when you have multiple lines, long distance, mobile teams, a fax machine, or a PBX in a closet that nobody wants to touch.
Also: VoIP needs internet. If you are in a building with bad bandwidth, the savings get eaten by an LTE failover or a circuit upgrade. We test your network before we sell you the service, so you know upfront whether the math works.
SIP trunking for businesses that want to keep the PBX
Not every business is ready to retire the on-prem PBX. If you have recent hardware and a setup that works, you can keep the PBX and just swap the trunks. Our SIP trunking runs $15/channel, $0.015/min outbound, $0.005/min inbound. A 12-channel PRI replacement costs $180/mo plus usage instead of $400-$600/mo for the PRI. The savings are real, the cutover is straightforward, and you get a clean path to fully hosted later.
Common bill-reading mistakes
- Counting only the headline number. Carriers split a $700 bill across two PDFs. Pull both before you compare.
- Ignoring the maintenance contract. That separate invoice from the PBX vendor counts toward what you are spending on phones.
- Forgetting the cell phone allowance. A $75/employee/mo allowance across 10 people is $750/mo of phone spend you did not put on the phone-line page.
- Assuming all VoIP providers price the same. Many advertise $14.95 then add fees that bring you to $30. Our prices include FCC fees and USF charges. The number on the page is what you pay.
- Comparing user pricing without counting features. A $10 plan with no CRM integration, no call recording, and no mobile app is more expensive than a $15 plan that includes them, once you account for the add-ons.
- Counting the savings without counting the time. Truck rolls, training calls, and waiting on the carrier all cost staff time. A portal you can edit yourself takes hours back over the course of a year.
What to ask any VoIP provider before signing
- Is the price all-in, or do FCC and regulatory fees get added later?
- Are you the operator, or are you reselling someone else's platform?
- What is the porting fee per number, and how long does porting take?
- Is voicemail transcription included or a paid add-on? (Ours is an add-on. Honest answer.)
- What is the E911 misdial fee if someone calls 911 by mistake during testing? (Ours is $150. Easy to avoid by not pressing 911 while testing.)
- Can I cancel month-to-month, or am I signing a 36-month contract?
- What happens to my numbers if I leave? (They are yours. We do not hold them hostage.)
- Where is your support team, and what is the average response time?
What we do not do
We do not run loss-leader pricing that doubles in month 13. We do not bury fees that show up in month two. We do not sell residential service or family plans. We do not pretend our integrations work when they have not been tested. We do tell you which CRM integrations are production-grade and which are still being built. The honest list is at integrations.
What happens to your business number
Your business number is yours. Porting takes 7-14 business days and costs $15 per number. We do not hold numbers hostage if you decide to leave us in three years. We do not require you to take a new number when you switch to us. The same number that was on your business cards in 1998 stays on your business cards in 2026.
What it costs not to switch
The flip side of the savings math: what is the landline status quo costing you over time? A small office paying $600/mo today pays $7,200/year. Over five years, that is $36,000. The same office on VoIP at $250/mo pays $15,000 over five years. The five-year savings are $21,000. That is real money for a small business, and it does not count the productivity wins from CRM integration and mobility.
The integration savings nobody computes
Integration with your business software is where VoIP starts paying for itself beyond the simple line-item math. A law firm logging billable time on every call captures an extra 4-6 hours of billable activity per attorney per month, because calls that used to be forgotten now get logged. A property manager whose inbound tenant calls pop the unit record handles maintenance triage in a quarter of the time. A real estate brokerage logging inbound lead calls to Follow Up Boss closes more deals because no lead falls through the cracks.
None of these soft savings show up on a comparison spreadsheet. All of them are real and they compound. If we had to put a number on it, the integration value for a typical 10-person professional services firm is probably $1,000-$3,000/mo, depending on industry. The phone savings are just the floor.
What porting actually involves
Porting is the process of moving your existing phone numbers from your current carrier to us. It costs $15 per number and takes 7-14 business days. We submit the port request, your current carrier confirms, and on the scheduled date the number physically moves. During the move there is no downtime if you plan it right. We provision a temporary forwarding rule and run parallel until the cutover completes. Your business number stays your business number. Customers calling the old number reach you on the new service.
What happens to your existing hardware
If you have desk phones from an old hosted VoIP provider, most of them work on our service with reprovisioning. Polycom VVX 4xx series, recent Yealink T-series, and most Cisco SPA models can be reflashed to point at our switches. We tell you whether your existing phones are usable before we sell you new ones. Sometimes the answer is yes and you save $5,000 on hardware. Sometimes the answer is no, the firmware is too old or the device is end-of-life, and we recommend new units.
If you have a working PBX in a closet, you can keep it and switch the trunks to SIP. The maintenance contract eventually catches up with you, but for businesses that just spent $20,000 on a PBX two years ago, SIP trunking is the right call until that capital is depreciated.
Where to start
Send us your current phone bill. We will line-item it against the equivalent on our service and you will know in an afternoon whether it makes sense. See pricing, the SIP trunking option if you want to keep your PBX, or get started. If the math does not work, we will tell you. That is what an operator does. A reseller would just take the order.