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by gomox 1969 days ago
Ring Central seems appallingly expensive to me with their per-seat pricing (we are a software company, I need people to receive calls with a professional sounding IVR, route them to the right individual, local numbers for customers to call on, that's it).

Can you recommend any specific provider?
1 comments
notyourday 1969 days ago
> Ring Central seems appallingly expensive to me with their per-seat pricing

This is exactly the attitude of the customers for this service. They want equivalent of enterprise features for pennies on a dollar.

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gomox 1969 days ago
I'm not sure what exactly is "enterprise" about having an IVR with 3 options and "bring your own number".

RingCentral wants ~15K a year for this service, and they think "video" is a worthwhile value add (whoever their customer segment is, it's certainly not me).

I can obtain the feature set I desire with a 1 week investment into setting up Asterisk on AWS, and running costs of $100/mo, plus a ton of headaches. It seems to me like there is room for a more reasonably priced vendor to exist in the market. I would happily pay, say, $300-500/mo for the convenience of a SaaS solution, but ~20K/yr is what I pay for things that actually serve a meaningful purpose for the business.

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notyourday 1969 days ago
> RingCentral wants ~15K a year for this service, and they think "video" is a worthwhile value add (whoever their customer segment is, it's certainly not me).

Exactly. $1.5k/mo if sounds like a good price for what it needs to do with a decent margin. A company could probably get a few hundred customers the first year and tap out at a few thousand within 5-6 years.

> I would happily pay, say, $300-500/mo for the convenience of a SaaS solution, but ~20K/yr is what I pay for things that actually serve a meaningful purpose for the business.

At this price point it would require too many customers. All of these customers will think that the cost of dealing with their headache is only worth ~$400 - $100/mo. These are terrible customers to base a business on.

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gomox 1968 days ago
Based on my experience with Asterisk this should be as close to a set and forget service as I can think of. Meaning I literally will not even reach out to support on any normal year. For that, $400/mo should be plenty of margin. But I might be missing some unknown technical hurdle I have never bumped into.
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notyourday 1968 days ago
In order for a company to get $100k/mo of revenue it needs to get 250 customers each at $400/mo. Each of these customers is likely to compare it against running their own Asterisk in a cloud for $100/mo and headaches. It is a horrible pool of clients to have because members of this pool think $1.5k/mo for what supposedly is a critical service for a company ( voice + text ) to interact with its "old school" clients is too much money and every two days they are looking at integrating with voip.ms so they can build dropbox using FTP.
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