The same monthly price can cost you double

Why do two quotes with the same price cost different amounts?

Because a phone system has at least four prices, and providers are free to move weight between them.

There is what you pay to start, what you pay each month, what you pay for each call, and what you pay for things you assumed were included. Two honest providers can land on an identical headline figure and bill you very differently, because one put the weight in setup and the other in the monthly rate, or one bills per second and the other rounds up to the minute.

This guide covers the structure of a quote rather than its level. For what a South African business phone system costs in rands, see our business phone system cost guide. For the line items that never reach the quote, see hidden VoIP costs. To run two real quotes through the arithmetic below, use the phone system cost calculator. New to VoIP? Start with what VoIP is and how it works.

When does a setup fee make a quote cheaper?

When you have enough users, for long enough, to repay it from the lower monthly rate.

Take an illustrative pair. Option A charges R1,000 once-off plus R99 per user a month. Option B charges nothing to start and R110 per user a month. Most buyers compare R99 against R110 and pick A, or see “free setup” and pick B. Both shortcuts are wrong about half the time.

The monthly difference is R11 a user. R1,000 divided by R11 is 91 user-months: that is how much use it takes for the lower rate to repay the fee. Over a 24-month term, this is what taking the setup fee saves or costs at each team size:

Read the 24-month column. A three-person business should take the free setup; a five-person business should take the fee. Same two quotes, opposite decisions, and the only thing that changed was two extra people.

Real setup fees in South Africa are not small, and providers place them very differently:

None of these is a trick. Euphoria Telecom front-loads; Switch Telecom charges nothing to start but sells in blocks; United Telecoms steps its fee at thresholds. Which suits you is arithmetic, not opinion.

What do your calls really cost per minute?

Usually more than the advertised rate, and how much more depends on how long your calls are.

A published call rate is a price per minute. It is almost never the price of the minutes you use, because providers round. The rounding rule is the billing increment, and it is the most overlooked number in a telecoms quote. Three things define it: the smallest unit you are billed in, the minimum charge per call, and whether the clock starts at the first second.

Switch Telecom publishes two packages that differ on exactly this: Package 1 bills in 30-second increments with a 60-second minimum; Package 2 bills per second from the first second. Same provider, same rate card. Here is what that does to a call:

Long calls barely notice the increment. Short calls are punished hard. A reception desk that answers, greets and transfers in twenty seconds pays triple on a 60-second minimum; a sales team holding three-minute conversations pays about a seventh more. The same package is a good deal for one business and a bad one for the other.

So the question for a provider is not “what is your per-minute rate”. It is “what is your billing increment, and is there a minimum call charge?” Then check it against your own average call length, which most phone systems report.

Per-second billing is available in this market. ECN publishes per-second billing from the first second on all call types with no minimum call charge, and Innovo Networks quotes per minute but bills per second. Others do not publish an increment at all: we could not find one for Telkom’s out-of-bundle business rate anywhere on its public catalogue.

What is the smallest amount you are allowed to buy?

A per-user price only means what you think if you can buy exactly the number of users you have.

Price your real shape, not your headcount: the seats you must buy, the seats you will use, and the calls you need to run at once. Ask for the quote at today’s size and at the size you expect in a year. If the second one jumps, you have found a step.

Which costs outside the quote change the answer?

Porting, hardware and the SLA. Buyers under-price all three.

Porting is not a fixed market rate. Moving the same twenty numbers, at each provider’s published price:

That is a fourfold spread for the same outcome, and within Switch Telecom alone, asking for a managed range rather than twenty individual ports more than halves the price. Wanatel also notes that 086 and 087 numbers cannot currently be ported, so check which of your numbers can move before you count on keeping them.

Renting hardware is a financing decision. An entry-level Grandstream GRP2601P desk phone was R590 at retail in September 2026, and a Yealink SIP-T31P R870. Before accepting a handset rental, multiply the monthly rental by the full term and compare it with the retail price. If the total is higher and you own nothing at the end, you are paying for credit, not convenience. Many hosted systems also run on a softphone, so you may not need desk phones at all.

An uptime SLA is a downtime budget. MetroFibre‘s basic business SLA promises a minimum of 95% uptime a year with a maximum 24-business-hour repair time. 95% permits 438 hours of downtime, more than 18 days. 99.9% permits under nine hours. One percentage point of fine print is a fiftyfold difference in what you have been promised.

How do you compare two phone system quotes?

Five checks, in this order. Each one can change which quote is cheaper.

The phone system cost calculator does all five for two quotes at once, including the billing-increment effect and the break-even point.

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