Why is the cheapest business phone plan so cheap?

Because on the providers here that publish more than one price, the cheapest rung is usually the smallest bundle of calling minutes (checked 2026-08-21). Voipfone's £5.00 seat is its 100-minute plan; the unlimited plan on the same page is £20.00, four times as much.

Twenty-one of the 78 plans in this dataset state what calling they include. The other 57 say nothing on the pricing page.

The seat price answers the question "what does a license cost". It does not answer "what does a call cost", and on one side of this dataset those are almost the same question.

The ladder inside one provider

Three UK providers publish a full ladder, which makes the pattern legible without comparing across brands.

Prices as published on each provider's own page, checked 2026-08-21. Gradwell's figures are marked by the provider as starting points. Source URLs are in data.json.
ProviderEntry rungTop rung publishedMultiple
Voipfone£5.00, 100 minutes£20.00, unlimited UK landline and mobile4.00x
Gradwell (Wave)£7.90, 100 minutes£15.90, 3,000 minutes2.01x
bOnline£7.00, 100 outbound minutes with unlimited inbound£13.95, unlimited UK landline and mobile1.99x

The arithmetic that matters is the one you do against your own call volume rather than against the entry price:

Voipfone at 10 seats, 100-minute plan: £5.00 x 10 = £50.00 a month, 1,000 minutes Voipfone at 10 seats, unlimited plan: £20.00 x 10 = £200.00 a month, no cap Break-even against pay-as-you-go depends on your per-minute rate, which is published separately from the seat price and is not in this dataset.

A ten-person team that makes outbound calls all day will pass 100 minutes each in the first week. A ten-person team where two people call out and eight take internal calls may never approach it. The same provider is cheap or expensive depending on which of those you are, and the seat price alone cannot tell you which figure applies to you.

Is unlimited always the right rung?

No. Unlimited is insurance against a volume you have not measured, and it is priced accordingly: on these three providers it costs between 1.99 and 4.00 times the entry rung. If you know your outbound volume, the middle rungs are frequently the cheaper answer. Voipfone's 500-minute plan at £10.00 and 1,000-minute plan at £15.00 sit between the two extremes above for exactly this reason.

The honest caution is that most buyers do not know their volume before they buy, and finding out costs a month of running on a plan you may have to change. That is a real argument for the unlimited rung, and it is an argument about your information rather than about the product.

What the US side does instead

Unlimited domestic calling is the default on most US plans here, which is why the minutes column is mostly empty on that side. Two exceptions are worth naming.

JustCall and CallHippo both cap at 1,000 minutes per user per month on the tiers where they state a number, which is a cap rather than an unlimited plan wearing a different label. Microsoft sells the calling separately: Teams Phone Standard is $10.00 a seat on annual billing with no calling plan attached, Teams Phone with Calling Plan is $17.00 and includes 3,000 domestic minutes, and the domestic and international tier is $34.00. The calling adds $7.00 to a $10.00 seat, or 70 percent, and a comparison that takes the $10.00 figure has compared a phone system against a license to use a phone system.

What this does to the ordering on this site

The tables here rank by the effective cost of the cheapest computable plan per provider over three years, which means the entry rung is what usually gets ranked. That is a deliberate choice and it has a cost: it flatters providers whose entry rung is a small bundle and does nothing for providers whose only plan is unlimited.

We keep it because the alternative is worse. Choosing "the plan most businesses buy" for each provider would mean guessing at 37 different distributions we cannot see, and the guess would be invisible in the output. The rule that produces the ordering is stated in full on the method page, and the full ladder for every provider, rung by rung, is on the list and on each provider page. What the ranking is not is a recommendation of a rung.

Where this argument is weak

Three providers is a small base for a claim about a market, and all three are UK. The US side of this dataset genuinely does sell unlimited domestic calling as standard, so the pattern described here is partly a fact about British telephony rather than about business phone pricing in general, which is one of several reasons the two markets are never ranked together.

Bundle sizes also do not convert cleanly into money. A 100-minute bundle plus overage may cost less than an unlimited plan or more, and the per-minute overage rates that would settle it are published on separate pages, in different formats, and are not recorded here. This page describes the shape of the ladder, not the point at which it pays to climb it.

Who this is not for

If you are on a US plan with unlimited domestic calling and you do not call internationally, none of this changes your bill, and what is not in the published price is the page that will. If you are buying at fifty seats, your call volume will be part of the negotiation rather than a rung you pick off a page.

What to do next

Find your current outbound minutes before you compare anything. Any incumbent provider's invoice or portal will have the figure, and it converts every price ladder above from a guess into arithmetic.

Then price the rung that covers your volume, not the rung at the top of the page, and run it at your own seat count in the calculator.

If your volume is genuinely unknown, take the entry rung on a provider that publishes the whole ladder, measure for a month, and move up. The providers in the table above all publish the rungs, which is what makes that approach possible; a provider that publishes one figure and calls it "from" does not, and that case is covered on the page about starting-point prices.

Questions people ask

Do 100 minutes go anywhere? 100 minutes is between three and four minutes of outbound calling a day across a working month. For a shared reception line it is plausible. For anyone doing outbound sales or support it is gone in a fortnight.

Is unlimited really unlimited? Almost never without a fair-use clause, which sits in the terms rather than on the pricing page. None of the providers here publishes the threshold, which puts it in the same category as taxes and regulatory fees, described on the page about fee disclosure.

Why do only 21 plans state minutes? Because the US majority treats domestic calling as included and does not describe it on the pricing card, and several UK providers describe their bundles in a separate tariff document rather than beside the price. Both are absences of publication rather than absences of a cap.

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.