Business phone system with auto attendant: pricing

The cheapest business phone system with an auto attendant costs $15 per user per month, and four different providers charge exactly that: Dialpad Connect Standard, Nextiva Core, Phone.com Basic and Ringover TALK. That four-way tie falls apart the moment you look at what you have to sign to get it. One of those four will not sell to a single person at all, and the month-to-month rates behind the same $15 headline run from $18 to $27. If you are buying a phone menu for one or two people without committing to a year, the real cheapest is Phone.com at $18 a month, and the $15 you keep reading about is not available to you.

Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page, most of them within the last few days, and the capture dates are named. Roundups in this category tend to quote a range like "$15 to $40 per user" and send you off to check the vendors yourself. The point of this page is to do that part.

Which plan carries the auto attendant at each provider

An auto attendant, also called a virtual receptionist or a phone menu, is the recorded greeting that offers callers options and routes them. It is usually the single feature that makes a business stop forwarding calls to a personal mobile and buy a system. Almost every provider uses it as the gate between the entry plan and the next one up, so the plan that carries it is the plan you are actually buying.

Prices are per user per month. Phone.com, Nextiva, Dialpad, Ringover, RingCentral, Quo and Aircall figures were read at each vendor's pricing page between August 26 and September 3, 2026. Ooma was read September 4, 2026 and Google Voice September 2, 2026. Grasshopper publishes a phone menu but does not state which of its three plans carries it, so we have left it out of the table rather than guess. Zoom Phone was re-read at source on September 4, 2026 and includes an auto attendant on every plan, the cheapest being US and Canada Unlimited at $16 billed annually; Zoom does not publish a month-to-month rate on that page, so we leave that cell blank. Taxes and the federal universal service pass-through are extra everywhere.

The $15 tie is not a tie

Four providers land on $15 and they are not offering the same deal. Ringover is the one to strike first: TALK is $15 per user, but Ringover requires a minimum of three users and a twelve-month commitment, so the smallest invoice it will write is $45 a month on a year's contract. A solo operator or a two-person business cannot buy the $15 plan at all. Aircall has the same shape further up the range, with a three-license minimum that turns $30 per seat into a $90 floor.

Dialpad Connect Standard is genuinely $15 with no seat minimum, and its multi-level auto attendant sits on all three tiers, which is unusually generous. The catch is what surrounds it: Standard is capped at one office, caps ring groups at three, and has no hold queue at all. If callers wait in a line rather than ringing a group, Standard cannot do it and you are pricing Pro at $25, which does carry a three-seat minimum and therefore a $75 floor.

Nextiva Core includes the auto attendant at $15, but call recording is a paid add-on on that tier rather than an included feature, and its own plan comparison, re-read on September 6, 2026, shows Core carries no free toll-free minutes at all and treats the toll-free number itself as an add-on. Nine features on that $15 plan are marked as add-ons rather than included. Phone.com Basic at $15 is the plainest of the four: the IVR is on the entry tier, there is no seat minimum, and it also lets you put different users on different plans, which is genuinely useful when two people need everything and four people need a mailbox.

What the cheapest auto attendant costs if you will not sign for a year

This is where the ranking reorders, and it is the version most small buyers actually need. Annual billing is how every one of these vendors advertises, but a business that is not certain it will exist in the same shape next year should be pricing the walk-away rate.

Google Voice is left out of that ranking because it does not work the same way. It bills monthly with no annual contract anywhere, so its $20 Standard tier is already the walk-away rate, but every business tier also requires a Google Workspace subscription billed separately, from $7 per user. That puts the real cost of the cheapest Google Voice plan with an auto attendant at $27 per user, which is more than Ooma charges for a plan that includes one and more than double the $10 figure most articles quote. We work through that in detail in the Google Voice vs Ooma comparison, where the two products swap places depending on which feature you are actually buying.

Ooma is the interesting row here. It is not the cheapest on annual billing, but it charges the same $19.95 whether you commit or not, so it moves from fifth place to second the moment you stop signing contracts. Dialpad does the opposite: the best annual price in the table becomes the fifth-best monthly price, because its no-commitment premium is 80 percent, the steepest of the group.

Is a $15 auto attendant good enough for a real business?

Often, yes, and the honest answer is that most small businesses overbuy here. A single-level menu with four options, each routing to a person or a mailbox, covers the great majority of companies under twenty people. Every plan in the first table can do that. The things that push you upward are specific and worth naming, because a vendor will happily upsell you on vague ones.

You need more than an entry plan when callers must wait in a queue rather than ring out to voicemail, when the menu needs to branch more than one level deep, when routing has to change by time of day or by holiday calendar, or when more than a handful of people need to be reachable as a group. Hold queues in particular are the most common reason a business discovers its cheap plan will not do: Dialpad puts them above Standard, and Ooma puts call queuing on Pro Plus at $29.95 rather than on the $19.95 plan that carries the virtual receptionist.

One more practical point that rarely appears in comparisons. If you publish a different number on each campaign so you can tell which advertising is generating calls, the menu is where those numbers converge, and the call counts only mean something next to the spend that produced them. Most teams end up wanting those figures in the same place as their other channel numbers rather than in a phone portal nobody logs into, which is a reporting problem to solve in a marketing dashboard rather than a reason to buy a more expensive phone plan.

How much does an auto attendant cost to set up?

On every cloud system in this table, nothing. The auto attendant is configured in a web console, you record or type the greeting, you point each keypad option at a person or a group, and it is live in under an hour. There is no hardware, no installation visit and no professional services fee at this end of the market. That is the real change from the legacy PBX world, where an auto attendant was a licensed module and a technician's afternoon.

The costs that do appear are elsewhere. Voice talent for a recorded greeting runs from nothing, if you record it yourself, to a couple of hundred dollars for a professional read. Additional published numbers are billed separately almost everywhere, commonly $5 per number per month, and Grasshopper charges $9. If you want a toll-free number behind the menu, check whether it is included: Ooma includes one with 500 inbound minutes a month on every plan, while Google Voice does not sell toll-free numbers at any price. Our business phone system cost breakdown prices thirteen providers with those extras included, and the IVR system guide covers how the menus themselves are built and what a multi-level tree actually involves.

Where Phoner fits, and where it does not

We are the second most expensive option in the first table for this specific feature, and there is no point pretending otherwise. If your only requirement is a recorded menu that routes four options, Phone.com at $15, or $18 without a commitment, does that job and costs less than we do. Buy it.

Phoner Team at $29 per user is worth comparing when the menu is not the only thing you need. It includes a visual IVR builder where you can see and inspect the whole call flow before you pay, ring groups written as rules in plain language rather than a cap you discover after signing, business texting, voicemail to text, and call recording with consent announcements, on a plan that is month to month at every tier with no seat minimum and no office cap. The gap we are aimed at is the one between a $15 plan that routes calls and a $25 to $35 plan that makes you commit for a year and buy three seats to get a queue.

How to decide in ten minutes

Write down three numbers before you open any pricing page: how many people must be reachable through the menu, how many published numbers you need, and whether you are willing to sign for twelve months. Those three answers eliminate most of this table without you reading a feature list.

If you are one or two people who will not commit, it is Phone.com at $18 or Ooma at $19.95, and Ooma wins if you want a toll-free number included or you need fax. If you will commit for a year and want the lowest possible number, it is $15 at Phone.com, Nextiva or Dialpad, with Ringover excluded unless you have three people. If callers will ever wait in a queue, skip every entry plan in this table and price the tier above, because that is the feature that breaks the cheap plan for most businesses. And whichever you choose, ask the vendor two questions their pricing page will not answer: what does the menu cost to change once it is live, and will you port every one of my numbers rather than only the main one. Under FCC number portability rules a carrier cannot refuse to release your number over an unpaid balance, but it is far easier to get exit terms in writing while somebody is still selling to you.