Softphone cost for a small business

A softphone app on its own costs between nothing and about $11. A softphone that can actually place a business call costs from about $15 per user per month, because the second price includes the phone number and the calling and the first one does not. Almost every confusing softphone price comparison on the internet is comparing those two numbers as though they were the same product. They are not, and this walks through what a small business really pays on each route, with pricing read from the vendors' own pages in August 2026.

The question usually arrives in a specific shape. Somebody has been told that a softphone will cut the phone bill, they search for one, and the first page of results offers free downloads next to products at $20 a seat. The gap looks like a scam in one direction or the other. It is neither. It is two different purchases wearing the same word.

The two things called a softphone

A softphone is any app that makes phone calls over the internet instead of over a phone line. That definition covers two product categories that share almost nothing commercially.

The first is a SIP client. It is a dialer and nothing else. You install it, then you type in credentials from a SIP account you bought somewhere else, or from a PBX your company runs. Zoiper, MicroSIP, Bria, and Linphone are the well known ones. They are cheap because they are one component.

The second is a bundled softphone, which is the app that comes with a business phone service. The number, the calling, the voicemail, and the routing are the product, and the app is how you touch it. Phoner, Quo, RingCentral, Nextiva, Dialpad and Ooma all work this way.

If you already own a phone system, you want the first kind and this article will save you money by telling you to stop reading and go download MicroSIP. If you do not own a phone system, the first kind is not cheaper than the second kind. It is incomplete.

What a SIP client actually costs

These are the current published prices, read on August 20, 2026.

So the app costs somewhere between zero and $11.11 one time, or under $5 a month if you want it supported. That is the number people quote when they say a softphone is nearly free, and as far as it goes it is true.

The line item nobody prices

None of the five products above will complete a single phone call after you install them. Each one needs a SIP account, which is a separate purchase from a VoIP provider, or a PBX you build and maintain yourself.

We are deliberately not going to put a dollar figure in that gap. SIP trunk pricing depends on how many concurrent channels you buy and how many minutes you use, the rate cards move, and we have not verified a current one. What can be said with confidence is that it is not zero, that it is larger than the app, and that it comes with a second vendor relationship, a second bill, and a second support number to call when the audio breaks. For a business with nobody whose job is telephony, that is the real cost and it is not denominated in dollars.

There is also a number to buy. A phone system without a phone number is a dialer pointed at nothing, and a business number in your own area code, or a toll-free one, has to come from somewhere in every version of this plan.

What a bundled softphone costs

Here the app, the number, and the calling arrive together. These are published entry prices per user per month, each read from the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown.

Two things in that table are worth more than the numbers themselves.

The first is that the yearly column and the monthly column are different products for budgeting purposes. Nextiva Core is 53 percent more expensive month to month than its advertised rate, and Dialpad Connect is 80 percent more. Ooma does not sell an annual plan at all, which makes its $19.95 look expensive next to a column of $15s that are all twelve month commitments. Priced the same way, month to month, Ooma is one of the cheaper options on the list.

The second is that an entry plan is not the plan most teams end up on. On nearly every product in this category, the moment a second person needs to answer the same published number, you move up a tier. On Phoner, ring groups, a phone menu, shared numbers, texting and call recording are on the Team plan at $29 per user per month. It is worth pricing the seat by what it has to do rather than by the cheapest row on the page.

Three people, one year, both routes

Take a three person business that needs one published number everybody can answer.

On the bundled route, three Team seats at $29 is $87 a month, or $1,044 for the year, month to month with nothing else to buy. If one published number ringing one person is genuinely enough, three Starter seats at $15 is $45 a month and $540 a year.

On the SIP client route, three Bria Solo licenses are $8.85 a month, or $106.20 a year. Then you add the SIP service, the number, the concurrent channels, and whoever configures it. The app is nine percent of the bundled price. It is not nine percent of the job.

The free tier that is not free for you

This is the trap worth knowing about before an audit rather than after one. Zoiper 5 publishes a free tier, it is well reviewed, and it appears near the top of most searches for a free softphone. That free tier is licensed for non-commercial use only.

Installing it on the office computers and running the company phones through it is outside that license. The fix is inexpensive, because the paid Zoiper tiers are $11.11 for the desktop Premium version, $4.99 on iOS and 7.99 euro on Android, so this is a compliance detail rather than a budget problem. But it is the single most common way a small business ends up unintentionally out of license on software, and no comparison article seems to mention it.

The costs that are not on any pricing page

Headsets. Budget $40 to $80 per person and treat it as part of the phone system rather than an accessory. A laptop's built-in microphone picks up the whole room, and the difference a decent USB headset makes to how you sound on a call is bigger than the difference between any two softphone apps.

The network. A softphone is only as good as the connection under it. A single call needs roughly 100 kbps in each direction, so raw bandwidth is almost never the issue on a modern connection. Choppy audio is nearly always jitter or packet loss from congested Wi-Fi, which is why a call can break up on a line that streams video perfectly. If one desk holds long calls all day, put a wire in it.

Seats you only need for part of the year. This is where per user month to month pricing quietly pays for itself. An accounting firm that staffs up for tax season adds seats in January and drops them in May, and on an annual contract it cannot. The same logic applies when the new hire works fully remote: there is no desk to wire, no handset to ship, and no reason for the seat to outlive the role.

Emergency calling. Not a dollar cost, but a real obligation that desk phones do not carry the same way. Because a softphone travels with the laptop, the address registered on each user's account is what an emergency dispatcher receives. Under the RAY BAUM Act the dispatchable location requirement reached non-fixed and off-premises devices on January 6, 2022, and a softphone in somebody's apartment is exactly that case. Kari's Law separately requires that 911 can be dialed directly, without pressing 9 first.

When the cheap route is the right one

All of this argues one way, so it is worth being clear about the other. If you run a PBX that works, whether that is FreePBX, a hosted PBX, or an on-premises switch, and the only thing you want is a better client for it, buying a phone service to get one would be an expensive mistake. Download MicroSIP if everybody is on Windows, or pay for Bria if there are Macs and phones to cover, point it at what you already have, and you are done for a few dollars.

The same is true if keeping the client and the carrier independent matters to your IT team. That is a legitimate architecture, some organizations have good reasons for it, and a bundled product cannot give it to you. Phoner does not sell SIP trunks and will not feed a PBX you plan to keep, so in that situation we are the wrong vendor and a trunk provider is the right one.

What does not work is the middle position: buying a free SIP client because it is free, when there is no phone system behind it, and then discovering that the actual purchase was never the app.

How much does a softphone cost for a small business?

For a business with no existing phone system, expect $15 to $29 per user per month, which includes the app, a business number, and unlimited US and Canada calling. For a business that already runs a PBX, expect zero to $11.11 for the app itself, with the phone service billed separately by whoever supplies your SIP account. The two figures are not alternatives to each other.

Is a softphone cheaper than a desk phone?

Yes on the hardware and no automatically on the service. A softphone removes $80 to $200 per handset and the cost of getting a network drop to each desk, which is the bulk of what makes a traditional phone install expensive. The monthly service is priced per user either way, so the saving is a one time capital saving plus the ongoing flexibility of adding and removing seats without touching anything physical.

Where to go from here

If you want the full picture of what a softphone is, which platforms each option runs on, and how the bundled and BYO SIP routes compare feature by feature, the softphone page carries the whole comparison table. To price the phone system rather than the app, business phone system cost works through a full year for a real team, and VoIP phone service covers the service layer underneath. If the number itself is the open question, start with getting a business phone number, and if you are bringing an existing line across, number porting is free and your current carrier cannot hold the number over an unpaid balance.