I was flattered to see the CEO of Packet8, Bryan, has taken the time to evaluate our service, opening two accounts and then doing a side-by-side price comparison on his blog. When we started our company 5 years ago, Packet8 was a pioneer in our industry, setting a benchmark for business VoIP service. I can only imagine Bryan is a very busy CEO of a public company with hundreds of employees. I am honored that he was able to take the time to thoroughly evaluate our service.
I appreciate his thorough attempt to clear up any confusion about our pricing details. However, in the same spirit as his post, to clear up any factual errors, I feel it is necessary to present the correct pricing for OnSIP. Bryan’s analysis assumes a single user purchases an OnSIP package intended for at least 5 users, which is wrong. More appropriately, the correct analysis below assumes a company of 10 employees, not a company of 1 employee with an appropriate OnSIP package.
I personally have not tested Packet8 nor have I done an in depth analysis of the pricing for their hosted pbx service. I present Bryan’s prices for Packet8 from his blog post on Friday, December 5, 2008. His prices are based on the recently announced “December Sale”. The sale price requires a purchase of phones from Packet8 and an annual commitment. The regular price is 2x the sale price at $49.99 per user.
As Andy Abramson pointed out on VoIP Watch, OnSIP’s Always Available Pricing is still cheaper than Packet8’s half price sale by about 35% in the first year including startup costs:
In year two, OnSIP is still cheaper by about 30% even if the half price sale continues:
Bryan’s analysis misses the key point: We do not have a per user charge. We only charge for what our customers use.
Bryan also stated that we recommend a “low-end” Polycom 301 phone and we sell an Aastra 53i phone. Lots of false statements here. We don’t sell phones. We don’t require you use any particular phone, only ones that support SIP, the industry standard on which Polycom, Cisco, Linksys, Aastra, and other leading vendors have committed to. My understanding is Packet8’s delivery platform is proprietary and standards-based SIP phones will not work with their service.
We do not recommend “low-end” phones. In fact, we attempt to dissuade customers from purchasing low-end phones as we conduct extensive testing and want to ensure a positive user experience for every customer.
Polycom phones are some of the highest quality IP phones available. About half of our customers use them and are extremely satisfied. And these customers self selected the phones; we don’t sell them at all. The Junction Networks team members use Polycom phones in our offices and our home offices.
Bryan does point out that our service does not include emergency services. This is a very important feature for our customers and we are currently testing our solution, which will be made available to customers in Q2, 2009. As with any other feature we deploy, we diligently work as hard as possible to ensure that when a feature is live, our customers can rely on it to work without exception.
Bryan also points out that everything we do is pre-billed. This will be changing shortly in response to some customer requests. We look forward to delivering on their requests and continued service.
And, as if we haven’t said this enough times, our always available pricing includes a free monthly trial, no commitments of any kind, no contracts, etc. You don’t need to talk to anyone to get any special pricing or fees waived from us. It’s always available and it’s always low. You don’t need to buy phones from us to get special pricing. You can use any standards based IP phone.
I hope this clears up any confusion about our pricing.