What is not in the published seat price

Every figure on this site is a floor. Five costs sit outside the published seat price: taxes and regulatory fees, handsets, number porting, overage, and seats you pay for but do not use.

Only one of the five is published anywhere in this dataset, and it is the smallest.

The seat price is the part of a phone system that is easy to compare, which is why it is the part that gets compared. Everything below is real, recurring for most buyers, and absent from the pricing card.

1. Taxes and regulatory fees

The largest omission and the one nobody quantifies as a percentage. Not one of the 37 providers here publishes what taxes, Universal Service contributions, e911 charges or its own recovery fees add to a US invoice as a percentage. Most say the charges exist without an amount, or say nothing; Talkroute and Microsoft say the opposite, that the price already carries them (the full account, corrected 2026-09-05).

Because no figure is published, no figure is computed here. The full account of that includes what each provider does say, quoted.

2. Handsets

A desk phone is a purchase, not a subscription, and it is usually invisible on the pricing page because most providers now assume a softphone on a laptop.

If your business wants physical handsets, budget for them separately and note that they are frequently sold on a lease that runs longer than the phone contract. That is the one line item in this list capable of outliving the decision that created it.

3. Number porting, in both directions

Porting in is usually free and often advertised. No provider in this dataset prices porting out.

That asymmetry is worth understanding rather than resenting: a provider pays to acquire you and has no commercial reason to publish the cost of leaving. In practice the friction is less the fee than the coordination — numbers on a business card, on a website, on Google, and in customers' phones. The switching cost of a phone system is mostly the number, not the software.

4. Overage and add-ons

Included minutes are usually described in words rather than numbers: "unlimited US/CA" is common; "pay as you go" is common in the UK; and what happens beyond the boundary is rarely on the same page. International calling, toll-free numbers, extra numbers, call recording retention and integrations all appear inside some plans and outside others.

Two plans at the same seat price with different inclusions are not the same product, and the pricing card is not where that difference lives.

On the UK side the bundle is frequently what the ladder is made of, so the cheapest rung and the smallest allowance are the same rung: Voipfone publishes £5.00 for 100 minutes and £20.00 for unlimited on the same page (checked 2026-08-21). The cheapest rung is usually the smallest bundle works through what that does to a comparison.

5. Seats you pay for and do not use

Where a plan states a minimum, our tables bill the minimum: JustCall bills at least two seats, so a one-person business pays for two. Only four plans in this dataset publish a minimum above one seat, and all four are JustCall's — three priced plans at two seats and the quote-only Business plan at ten (checked 2026-08-21).

That number is suspiciously low, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than presenting the data as more complete than it is. Several providers most likely to impose minimums are among the ones whose pricing pages we could not read — so their minimums are not visible to us either. The three reasons a price can be missing explains where that boundary sits.

So how wrong is the number?

Only ever wrong in one direction: your invoice will be higher than our figure, never lower.

Take the cheapest published US plan in these tables and add the US tax stack, whatever it is at your address. Add a handset if you want one. Add porting coordination time, which costs you rather than the provider. The gap is real and we cannot size it for you without inventing numbers, so the site publishes what it can source and marks the rest as missing.

This is why the tables here rank rather than quote. Every row carries the same five omissions, so the ordering survives them. The absolute figure is a floor, and every page says so.

What that means for a shortlist

  1. Use the ranking to get to three or four providers, which is what a computed floor is good for.
  2. Ask each one, in writing, what taxes and fees add as a percentage of the invoice at your address.
  3. Ask whether the plan has a minimum seat count and what the monthly-billing rate is if you will not sign annually.
  4. Decide about handsets separately, and treat any lease term longer than the phone contract as its own decision.
  5. Then compare, on your own numbers.

Step 1 is the part that is tedious across 37 providers. Steps 2 to 4 are quick once the list is short, and they are the steps nobody can do for you from published data.

Who this is not for

If you want one number to put in a budget line, this page will disappoint you and so will the rest of the site. We publish a floor and call it a floor. Anyone offering a precise all-in figure for business telephony is estimating the parts nobody publishes.

It is also not for people whose decision is not about money. Call quality, support and the migration path are all reasonable grounds to pay more, and none of them appear anywhere in our arithmetic.

Questions people ask

Why not estimate the tax uplift? Because the figure would be indistinguishable, on the page, from figures that carry a URL and a date. The reason to trust anything here is that every number can be checked against a source; one invented number costs more than it adds.

Do any providers publish an all-in price? Two of the 37 say their price already carries the taxes and fees: Talkroute states that it adds no separate telecom taxes, USF or regulatory fees, and Microsoft states that its Teams Phone calling plans "include communication taxes and fees" (both checked 2026-09-05). Neither publishes what those charges would have been, so there is still no percentage anywhere in the dataset; the rest publish a clear seat price, which is the part they control, and stop at the tax line. *Corrected 2026-09-05: this answer previously said none of the 37 did.*

Is the effective seat cost still worth comparing on? Yes, because the omissions are common to every row, so the ordering holds even where the absolute number does not. That is exactly why the site ranks by it and refuses to call it a quote.

Sources

Written by Kaz (pen name). Figures are copied from providers' published pricing pages on the dates shown. We have not used these products. Corrections: contact form.