Most managed 3CX quotes are designed not to be compared. They bundle licensing, hosting, SIP, and support into one or two opaque lines, attach an aspirational tier name (“Enterprise”), and price against your perception of value rather than what’s actually moving in the back end. Buyers sign because the headline number feels reasonable. They don’t realise they’re paying 3× over wholesale for at least one of the components inside the bundle.
Here’s what each line in an honest 3CX quote should contain, and what to ask if it doesn’t.
The five real cost components
A 3CX deployment has five distinct cost components. Any quote covering all of them is at least transparent about what you’re paying for, even if the unit prices are still negotiable.
- 3CX licence. Sized by Simultaneous Calls (SC), not users. Published prices on 3cx.com. At 24 SC: BASIC £685/yr, PRO £910/yr, AI £1,245/yr. PRO is the right tier for most SMEs — it includes call recording, queues, CRM integration, and mobile/softphone apps. AI adds outbound automation and call-transcript analytics; Enterprise+ adds skills-based routing and standby/failover. Most quotes you’ll see are PRO masquerading as Enterprise.
- Hosting. 3CX’s own hosted product at 24 SC is £830/yr — that’s £69/month, self-service, no partner involved. Some providers self-host on their own infrastructure (cheaper for them, but no margin difference for you unless they actually charge wholesale-plus). The £830/yr cost should appear on the quote either way.
- SIP trunks. Wholesale rate from Gamma at Gold partner tier is roughly £2.50–£3.50 per channel per month. Retail rate is typically £7–£10. The number of channels you need is usually about a third of your user count — 35 users genuinely runs on 8 channels, not 24.
- Handsets. Yealink T46U at trade is around £85–£90. Retail is around £103. The markup is small (~15%) and broadly expected. Don’t fight this line; it’s the smallest margin opportunity in the deal.
- Setup labour. Install, training, number porting. A 35-user job is one engineer day on-site plus a few hours of porting paperwork. £500–£800 covers it honestly. Anything over £1,000 should come with a breakdown.
If your quote has fewer than five lines, the missing components are hidden in the surviving ones.
The opaque-bundle trick
The most common margin lever in UK managed-3CX is bundling licence and hosting as a single line. A real quote from a top-tier 3CX partner in February 2026 read:
24 SC 3CX “Enterprise” Licence + Cloud Hosting — £150/month
Working backwards from 3CX’s published prices at 24 SC: PRO licence (£910/yr) + 3CX hosted (£830/yr) = £1,740/yr = £145/month. The £150 figure is PRO + hosted at list price plus £5 of round-numbering. The “Enterprise” label is doing the work of making PRO feel premium.
There’s nothing wrong with bundling — it can simplify the invoice. There’s plenty wrong with bundling, applying an aspirational tier name, and quoting list pricing as if you’d negotiated it. A Titanium-tier 3CX partner gets the licence at ~25–30% off list. None of that discount reaches the customer unless the partner volunteers a breakdown.
Where over-spec hides
This is the single biggest cost-inflator in 3CX quotes, and it’s almost invisible to buyers because 3CX prices in SC instead of users.
The same February quote licensed a 35-user accountancy firm with 8 SIP channels at 24 SC. The 24-SC band costs £910/yr (PRO). The 8-SC band costs £330/yr. A 35-user business with 8 SIP channels needs at most 8 SC. The licence was over-spec’d by 3× on a basis the customer can’t easily check.
Ask one question: “How many SC are you licensing me at, and what’s the corresponding band cost?” If the answer is materially bigger than your SIP-channel count plus a small margin, ask why.
What “premium support” usually means
Roughly one in two managed-3CX quotes includes a per-user line called “Premium Support”, “Co-located Backup”, “Managed Support”, or similar — usually £1–£3 per user per month. On 35 users that’s £35–£105/month, £840–£2,520 over a 24-month term.
The marginal cost of this line to the provider is approximately zero. The monitoring, backups, and support staff are running anyway. It exists because £1/user/month is small enough not to negotiate but scales linearly with seats. It’s near-pure margin disguised as a per-seat charge.
It’s not necessarily wrong to charge for support — but be sure you know what’s underneath it. A defensible line describes specific deliverables (guaranteed response time, on-site engineer SLA, hourly rate cap). A non-defensible one just says “premium”.
What to ask before you sign
Five questions. None of them are unreasonable. A provider who won’t answer any of them is telling you something.
- How many SC are you licensing me at, and why that number? Should be roughly your peak SIP-channel need plus 1–2 for headroom. Not 3× your user count.
- What 3CX tier is this, on 3cx.com’s current pricing page? Cross-check the label on the quote against 3cx.com/pricing. “Enterprise” usually means PRO in disguise.
- What’s the per-channel cost of the SIP trunks, separate from the licence? Should be £4–£10 per channel. If it’s not broken out, it’s bundled into another line.
- Is the hosting your own infrastructure or 3CX-hosted? What does 3CX’s own hosted product cost at this SC band? £830/yr at 24 SC. £245/yr at 8 SC. Their published price is your benchmark.
- What’s the term, and what happens at the end of it? 24-month is common but not mandatory. Auto-renewal clauses are where most lock-ins hide.
What we do differently
At Port Phones, the quote you get is the five-line breakdown above. We price each component separately, source SC at the band you actually need, and pass through 3CX-hosted’s published price (or own-infra at clearly lower cost) rather than bundling and marking up. We publish the full line-by-line cost stack so you can see where every pound goes.
We do this because the structural cost of bundling is what makes UK SMEs distrust telecoms providers. We’d rather compete on transparency than on the size of the bundled number.
If you’re looking at a quote and want a second opinion, book a free audit. 30 minutes, no commitment. We’ll read it with you, line by line.