SIP Trunk Prices: Your Guide to Getting the Best Price for Your Business

Every smart business owner looks for practical ways to cut costs. Of course, there is good cost-cutting and bad cost cutting.

Bad cost cutting impairs the business in some way. Good cost cutting hones financial efficiency. One way you can hone your financial efficiency is by taking a pass on traditional phone service.

Traditional phone services often come at a high price without delivering a solid return on investment. Worse still, phone companies often look for ways to nickel-and-dime you to death.

SIP trunking provides a cost-effective alternative that routinely offers more features. Before we get into how you get the best SIP trunk prices, though, let’s take a quick look at SIP trunking itself.

What Is SIP Trunking?

Ever hear of VoIP? That’s Voice over Internet Protocol. It’s a way of directing voice calls over the internet using broadband Internet access.

If you take VoIP and amp it up, you get SIP trunking. The big difference is that SIP trunking doesn’t just direct one call over the Internet.

SIP trunking effectively replaces a traditional private branch exchange. A PBX is the big, expensive chunk of hardware that a phone company installs to direct calls in a building. For example, that’s what lets one extension call another or lets an outside caller reach an extension.

SIP trunking accomplishes the same thing using computer hardware and software.

Shop Around

As with most services, you should make a point to shop around. There are many SIP trunking service providers.

The total cost for SIP trunking services often proves hard to pin down. Some companies let you pick the individual services you want and charge a rate per service. Other companies offer a service bundle at a flat rate.

You can get a gross comparison of price by checking their pricing pages. Pricing pages don’t always tell the whole story. For example, some companies charge a fee for setup and some don’t.

In most cases, though, you must contact the company and discuss the particulars of what you want to get a final price per month.

Of course, there is one major caveat you should observe here. Price isn’t the only consideration. Tech companies fold all the time and you don’t want your phone service disappearing with it.

Look for companies that got founded at least a few years ago and preferably more than five years ago. Most startup companies that go under because of internal problems do it in the first five years.

Poke around on customer review sites. If the company has been around a while, you should find at least some customer reviews. If the reviews trend positive, there’s a good chance the business is on solid ground.

Consider Only Essential Features

SIP trunk services can come with all kinds of bells and whistles. Some of the extra services you can potentially get include:

• Denial of service protection
• Volume-based call routing
• Call encryption
• 911 call routing
• Call forwarding from cell phones

All of these extras can prove useful, but only to the right businesses.

A company dealing in high security or classified materials might need call encryption. A company that runs an internal call center might need volume-based routing. However, Many of the available extras don’t add value for many businesses.

You can often get a less expensive suite of services that don’t include these bells and whistles. If a company offers services a la carte, you can opt out of expensive extras you don’t need or want and save some money.

Take some time and really think through which services you need. Then, look for a company that offers just those services in a bundle. The SIP trunk prices for the stripped-down service offerings should come in a bit lower.

Negotiate

Most people walk onto a car lot and expect they will negotiate about the price. It’s an accepted and expected part of the car buying experience. With almost all other purchases, though, people get quoted a price and assume that’s the end of the story.

It’s not or, at least, it doesn’t need to be.

You can negotiate the price of almost any service if you come at it the right way. You might not talk them down on price for a standard service package. So, make it about something non-standard.

Many companies that provide SIP trunks offer flat rates for set packages of services on a monthly basis. So, change the game.

Say that you want a full year of service, but you want a discount. Odds are good that you’ll get transferred to someone with some discretionary power.

Say that you’ll pay for a full year of service, right now, for 10% off. The worst that can happen is they won’t agree. If they do agree, you just saved some money.

Confident your business will still exist two years from now? Take it to the next level and say you want a two-year service agreement, but for 20% off.

They might go for it or counter with some smaller number like 15% off. No matter what, though, you still get the best price.

You can even pit companies against each other. Get one to agree to a two-year service plan at 15% off. You can probably negotiate 20% off from another company.

Parting Thoughts on Getting the Best SIP Trunk Prices for Your Business

Getting the best SIP trunk prices for your business is like getting the best price for any other service.

You must decide ahead of time what features you need from the service. This lets you avoid paying extra for features you don’t need.

You should shop around. You can find numerous SIP trunking service providers. Just understand that the pricing pages often don’t reflect the true final cost.

You’ll need a conversation with the service provider for that number.

Finally, don’t be afraid to negotiate. In the worst case scenario, you just pay their quoted price. In the best case scenario, you get a discount.

SIPTRUNK specializes in SIP trunking services for resellers. For more information about our services or questions about SIP trunk reselling, contact SIPTRUNK today.