costofsoftware.com reads vendors’ own pricing, help and legal pages and publishes what a plan actually costs — minimum seats, billing terms and fixed charges included. Published figures only. We do not score or rate the products, and we do not take payment for placement.
The advertised number is rarely the number you pay. It usually assumes annual billing, a minimum seat count you may not reach, and a bundle that stops short of the feature you came for. Each section below takes one market, reads every vendor’s own published pages, and works the figures back to a single comparable cost per seat.
Enter sites, tracked keywords and users to compare the lowest published plan, monthly equivalent, 12-month total and cost per tracked keyword.
Business phone systems
Every US and UK provider we hold, priced on the same basis: the plan you would actually be put on, the seats you would actually be billed for, over three years.
One table: the advertised price, the effective cost per seat at ten seats, what monthly billing adds, and what each provider says about taxes and fees. Providers that publish no price are shown as such rather than left out.
Put in the number of seats you have. Minimum seat counts change which provider is cheapest below about five seats, so the ranking is not the same for a three-person business as for a fifty-person one.
Taxes, regulatory fees, handsets, number porting and overage sit outside the figure on the pricing card, except where a provider states otherwise. Read this before treating any seat price as a budget.
The term sits in smaller type under the figure, and comparison tables tend to drop it. Which term each plan prints, and what monthly billing costs against the annual rate on the plans that publish both.
What each of them puts in that space instead, and how to turn the quote you get back into the same three-year seat figure used everywhere on this site.
Priced side by side
Comparisons are written where the two plans are genuinely substitutable and the published figures support an answer.
Both are sold per seat in the US on entry plans a few dollars apart. The page works that gap out over three years for a ten-seat business, and says where size changes the ranking.
The same arithmetic for the other pairing people ask about most: published entry prices first, then the three-year cost per seat once the bundle each one puts you on is accounted for.
Seat minimums, discounts that assume a year paid up front, onboarding fees, contact tiers and per-transaction rates all sit between the list price and the invoice. Also: price rises after you sign, seats nobody uses, and what a response-time guarantee is charged for.
Head-to-head comparisons settled on published conditions — seat steps, contact tiers, what each plan includes — rather than impressions of the interface: HubSpot or monday.com, monday.com or Asana. Also where the free plans stop, and the case for buying no CRM at all.
What the software makes you do after the contract is signed: single sign-on that only appears on an upper plan, audit logs kept for a fixed window, where the data is stored, and what an export actually contains.
Below a monthly card-volume threshold the article works out, the plan fee decides the choice, not the processing rate — and the threshold drops if any sales run through a payment provider other than Shopify Payments.
Three years of cost against hours saved and revenue added, read at 6, 12 and 24 months. A decision model built on list prices, not an accounting standard.
Japanese edition, with yen pricing, consumption tax and card fees: 日本語版.
How the figures are produced
Every price is copied from the provider’s own published page with the date it was read. Nothing is estimated and no third-party figure is used. The ordering on every table is one computed number and the formula is published in full. The phone dataset is downloadable as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, and every recorded price change, plan rename and correction is listed in what changed.