For prospects with an existing provider
Each one is on the invoice somewhere. None of them are illegal or rare; they're the industry-standard ways managed-PBX margin gets inflated. If you spot two or more on your bill, you're probably overpaying by 30–50%.
3CX charges per Simultaneous Call (SC), not per user. A 25-user office almost always runs cleanly on 8 SC PRO at £330 per year list. Many incumbents quote 24 SC PRO at £910 per year, charge for “Enterprise tier” even when PRO is what's installed, and pocket the difference. SC is not a number most customers understand, which is why this pattern works.
Our approach: we size SC to your actual peak concurrency. If your office answers 6 calls at once at worst, you pay for 8 SC, not 24.
3CX-hosted is a checkout product on 3cx.com. You can buy it yourself in 5 minutes. Many incumbents bundle it under labels like “Cloud Hosting”, “Managed Cloud Infrastructure”, or just roll it into the licence line so you can't see it. The framing makes it sound like specialist work. It isn't.
Our approach: hosting is itemised on the quote. You see the £69/month line. We're not hiding it; we're managing it for you, which is what you're paying us for.
Pre-rebrand, 3CX's tiers were Standard / PRO / Enterprise. Post-rebrand, “Enterprise” became “AI”, and Enterprise Plus is the new top SKU. Some incumbents still print “Enterprise” on order forms because it sounds more substantial, even when PRO is what's licensed. The price difference between PRO and AI at 24 SC is ~£335 per year — not catastrophic, but real, and pure margin.
Our approach: the tier on your quote matches the tier on your licence. If you don't need MS Teams Direct Routing, skills-based routing, or AI transcription, PRO is the right answer and we sell PRO.
£1 per user per month sounds small. On a 35-user firm it's £420 per year. On a 60-user firm it's £720 per year. The marginal cost of providing it is approximately zero — you'd run the same monitoring and answer the same support emails either way. Calling it “premium” or “co-located backup” or “extended support” doesn't change that.
Our approach: support is the service. You don't buy a managed phone service and then buy “support” separately on top.
The 24-month lock-in is standard practice across the UK managed-PBX industry. The justification is “we amortise setup costs over the term”, which is partly true and partly cover. The practical effect is that customers stay through years of slow service quality decline because the cost of getting out is high. Renewals are auto-rolled to another 24 months unless you actively notice and decline.
Our approach: 12-month initial term, then month-to-month. If we're not earning the relationship, you leave on 30 days notice and we port your numbers out for free.
Gamma wholesale (Gold partner) lands at ~£3 per channel per month. Gamma retail is ~£4. Many incumbents bill SIP at £8–10 per channel per month and bury it in a bundled “licence + hosting + SIP” line so you can't compare. On 8 channels that's £500 of annual margin that looks like “infrastructure cost”.
Our approach: SIP channels are itemised, charged at a modest markup over our partner rate, and the breakdown is on the quote. You can verify it against Gamma's public retail pricing yourself.
All six patterns are sourced from a real signed UK Titanium-partner order form (Feb 2026), public 3cx.com list prices, Gamma's published retail rates, and Yealink authorised-distributor pricing. The full line-by-line decomposition lives at our honest-pricing page.
If you decide to move, the migration is unspectacular by design. We've done it dozens of times. The shape:
Sometimes the right answer is “your current provider is fine, here's why.” If your bill is below £5 per user per month for everything-included managed 3CX, you're already getting a decent deal and the switching friction probably costs you more than the saving. We'll tell you that at the audit. It happens.
If your current provider charges fairly but you hate the service relationship — tickets going days without response, escalation chains that lead nowhere, “please log into the portal” when you just want someone on the phone — that's a different problem. Pricing audit won't fix it; switching might. One phone number. A senior engineer picks up.
The audit costs you nothing and produces a written, line-item-decomposed quote you can compare directly to what you pay today. You take the quote to your current provider for leverage; you take it to us for a switch; you take it to your CFO either way.
+44 7909 338388
sales@portphones.co.uk
31-33 Commercial Road, Poole, Dorset BH14 0HU
The patterns on this page are standard industry practice, not bad-faith pricing by any single provider. We're describing how the UK managed-PBX market works structurally. Most incumbents would acknowledge most of these patterns if asked directly; they exist because they work and because customers don't generally check. The wedge is transparency, not accusation.