How we stack up — including where we lose

Google Voice

It's free, and it works. If you want one extra number and don't mind whose server it lives on, stop reading — go and get it.

And it beats us on texting, outright. Unlimited US texts, free, no allowance and nothing per message — cheaper than us and cheaper than RingCentral. We're not going to pretend otherwise.

Where it runs out: you get one number, and that's the ceiling. It's tied to your Google account, so it can be suspended with nobody to call. Google can read what goes through it. Group texts cap at eight people and there's no international texting. And it's meant for personal conversation — there's no business texting registration behind it, so using it to run a company is both against the grain of the product and a good way to get messages quietly filtered.

iPlum & Quo (was OpenPhone)

The closest thing to what we do, and both are good at it. These two get praised more than anyone in this category for being quick to set up and easy to run afterwards. If you want one number and nothing to maintain, buy one of them and don't think about it again.

It's the second number where it turns. Both price by the seat with one number included, so several numbers means paying several times over: Quo adds $5 a month for each extra number, and on iPlum an extra number is an extra line at the full plan price — from $8.99 a month, each. Five numbers for one person works out around $35 a month on Quo and around $45 on iPlum. The same five here are about $23, and not because we're being generous: only the software is ours to charge for, and the numbers cost about $2 each from your own carrier — roughly $1.10 for the number, $0.40 for caller-name lookup, and the rest light use.

There's a quieter difference in how the numbers actually behave. On iPlum the extra lines forward into your main one, and you work out which of your numbers was dialled by checking the caller ID once it's already ringing. That's a perfectly reasonable way to build it. It isn't how we built it: here each number is its own line with its own ringtone, so you know which business is calling before you decide whether to pick up — which is the entire reason this app exists.

RingCentral & friends

Proper business phone systems. If you need call queues, desk phones on every desk, or video meetings built in, buy one of these.

They've also cut their prices, and we're not going to pretend otherwise: $20 per person per month on their entry plan, up to $35 — with one number included per person, $5 a month for each one after that, and the numbers and message history sitting with them rather than with you.

The texting is the part worth reading twice. Their plans include 25 texts per person per month at the $20 tier — 100 at $25, 200 at $35 — and received messages count against it too. A single back-and-forth with one customer can eat a month's allowance. After that it's about a cent a message, or you move up a tier. Nothing about that is a technical limit; texts cost fractions of a cent to carry. It's simply where the plan is designed to push you.

There's also the day-to-day of it. These are enterprise products, and it shows: settings are spread across several different admin consoles, and finding the one you want is its own skill. Plenty of people who've used it for years still can't. That's not a knock on the engineering — it's what happens when one product has to serve a ten-person shop and a ten-thousand-seat call centre. You're carrying the complexity either way.