Why UK and US business phone prices are not comparable

US and UK plans never appear in the same ranking on this site. Two reasons: converting currencies would print a figure no provider published, and UK providers do not agree on whether their prices include VAT.

Of the 25 UK plans here, six state ex-VAT, one states inc-VAT, and eighteen say nothing on the pricing page.

This is a page about presentation rather than product, which sounds like the least important thing on the site and is quietly why most cross-market comparisons in this category are wrong.

The VAT problem

£10 ex-VAT and £10 inc-VAT are two different prices. The second one costs £8.33 before tax; the first costs £12 after it.

Sort a UK table by a column that mixes the two and you are not ranking providers. You are ranking how each one decided to present a number to a different audience — business buyers who reclaim VAT and prefer ex-VAT display, or the smallest firms who simply pay it.

The spread this creates, 20 percent, is larger than the gap between many of the providers in the table.

Who states what

Checked 2026-08-21 on each provider's own pages. Full rows in data.json.
Basis statedPlansExamples
Ex-VAT6bOnline, Vonage UK
Inc-VAT1Voipfone (one plan)
Not stated on the pricing page18most of the rest

Eighteen is the number worth staring at. It is not that these providers are hiding the basis; it is that a VAT toggle, or a line of small print elsewhere on the site, does not travel with the figure. We record what the page states next to the price and nothing more, so plans in that group carry a "VAT basis not stated" label everywhere they appear.

Why we do not convert

Converting is one multiplication and we still will not do it.

The moment a table prints £12 where the provider printed £10, the reader loses the ability to check the figure against its source. Every number on this site can be verified by opening the linked page and looking, and that property is worth more than a tidy column. The same rule stops us converting pounds to dollars anywhere.

What we do instead: print the published figure, put the basis beside it where the provider states one, and warn on any table that mixes the two. The method page sets this out as a rule rather than a preference.

The currency problem is worse

Currency conversion has all the same objections plus two more: the rate moves daily, and providers do not price by converting anyway.

Vonage's UK plans run £10, £15 and £25 a seat. Its US plans run $13.99, $20.99 and $27.99. Those are not the same plans converted — they are separate commercial decisions for separate markets, with different included minutes and different regulatory environments behind them. Reading across at any exchange rate produces a number that describes nothing.

So the two markets are kept apart everywhere: every ranking page is one market; every head-to-head is one market; and the calculator makes you pick before it will rank anything.

The UK side of this dataset is small, and that is worth saying

Three UK providers currently publish a per-seat price we could read: bOnline, Voipfone and Vonage UK. Ten plans between them.

That is thin, and the reason is the subject of the page about who publishes rather than a judgment about British telecoms. Several UK providers put a "speak to an expert" button where the price would be — BT Cloud Voice, Babble and 4Com among them — and others publish figures our tooling could not read. Rather than pad the UK tables with numbers from review sites, the tables stay short and say why.

If you are buying in the UK, treat this side of the site as a starting list rather than a survey, and read the notes column on every row.

What differs beyond the price

Two things, both of which make cross-market reading worse.

Included calling. US plans typically bundle unlimited domestic calling into the seat price. Several UK plans price the seat and the minutes separately — Voipfone's plans are named after bundles of minutes — so a UK seat price and a US seat price are not buying the same thing. Across the three UK providers that publish a full ladder, the unlimited rung costs between 1.99 and 4.00 times the entry rung (checked 2026-08-21), which is the size of the error in reading a UK entry price as though it were a US one. The cheapest rung is usually the smallest bundle has the ladders.

The tax stack. US invoices carry federal and state charges that no provider quantifies as a percentage before you buy (two say their price already carries them); UK invoices carry VAT at a published statutory rate. A stated rate you can apply is a better position than an unstated fee you cannot, even though the UK presentation problem is more annoying to read. Nobody publishes what the US fees add is the other half of this.

What this means for a shortlist

  1. Decide which market you are actually buying in — usually where you are billed rather than where the servers are.
  2. Compare inside that market only.
  3. On UK plans, check the VAT basis on the provider's own page before you compare two figures, and add 20 percent to anything stated ex-VAT if you cannot reclaim it.
  4. Check what calling is included, because a cheap UK seat may not include minutes.
  5. Never convert in your head. The plans are usually not equivalent anyway.

Who this is not for

If you are buying in the US, only the last point applies to you and the rest is somebody else's tax problem.

If you are a UK business that reclaims VAT, the ex-VAT figure is the one that matters to you and the inc-VAT providers are the ones displaying an inconvenient number. The argument here is not that one basis is right. It is that a table which mixes them without saying so is not comparing prices.

Questions people ask

Why do some providers not state the basis? No single reason. Some use a toggle whose state does not survive being read as text; some simply do not say. Where we cannot tell, the plan is labeled rather than assumed.

Could you show both figures? Only by computing one of them, which is what this page argues against. Where a provider publishes both, both go in the notes column exactly as published.

Will the UK list grow? Only when more UK providers publish figures we can source, or when we can read the ones that already do. Either way the change will be visible in the check dates on the provider list.

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.