RingCentral pricing: Hidden fees + 5 other things to know

RingCentral has been a major player in the VoIP space since the 1990s — but its pricing isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

With five different offers, 12 add-ons, and sneaky hidden fees, you might end up paying more than you expected.

Before you commit, let’s break down RingCentral’s pricing, fine print, and whether it’s truly worth it — or if there’s a better alternative for your business.

RingCentral business phone plans and pricing

There are three separate RingEX plans to choose from. Here are the main differences:

RingEX Core plan

Pricing: $20 per user per month (paid annually) or $30 per user per month (paid monthly)

The Core plan includes basic VoIP features and unlimited calls in the US and Canada.

Keep in mind that calling is one of the only ‘unlimited’ features you’ll find on this tier. Texts and toll-free minutes come with tight limits — 25 texts per user per month and 100 pooled toll-free minutes. You also won’t get unlimited storage for call recordings and conversation histories.

RingEX Advanced plan

Pricing: $25 per user per month (paid annually) or $35 per user per month (paid monthly)

The Advanced plan unlocks higher limits for texts and toll-free minutes and access to advanced features such as call queues and call monitoring.

But the Advanced plan doesn’t offer unlimited storage for files, messaging, and recordings. Plus, many of its advanced features require add-ons to maximize their value. For example, there’s no way to join third-party video meetings in a conference room without purchasing the Rooms add-on ($49 per room per month).

RingEX Ultra plan

Pricing: $35 per user per month (paid annually) or $45 per user per month (paid monthly)

RingCentral’s Ultra plan unlocks unlimited storage, video meetings with up to 200 participants, and device analytics.

However, you should know the ‘unlimited’ storage doesn’t include video meetings, and all your files are subject to time-based deletion policies (more on this later). Plus, there are limits on SMS and toll-free minutes. This could get frustrating as your business grows.

RingCentral plans add-ons

RingCentral offers a dozen separate add-ons for RingEx plans.

They include:

• Additional vanity phone numbers: $30 one-time fee plus $4.99 per month
• Additional international numbers: $5.99 per user per month
• Additional toll-free or local numbers: $4.99 per month
• Additional international toll-free numbers: $14.99 per user per month plus a $25 one-time fee
• High Volume SMS: $0.01 per message sent and received
• RingCentral Room Connector license: $49 per month per concurrent endpoint or $468 per year
• RingCentral Rooms license: $49 per room per month or $468 per year
• RingCentral Webinar™: $40 per organizer per month
• RingSense for Sales: $60 per user
• Push to Talk license: $5 per user per month
• RingCentral Events: Starts at $1,490 per license per year
• RingCX AI Contact Center: $65 per user

RingCentral Contact Center pricing

If you need a more advanced business phone system, you may want a RingCentral Contact Center plan:

RingCX plan

Pricing: $65 per agent per month

The RingCX plan includes core phone features, integrations, AI capabilities, and workforce engagement tools.

Here’s a closer look at what you get:

• Call recording
• Predictive dialer
• AI summaries
• HubSpot integration
• Screen recording
• Speech analytics

Enterprise plan

Pricing: Contact sales for a custom quote

The RingCentral Contact Center plan unlocks advanced features, virtual agents, AI, and workforce engagement tools, including:

• IVA for voice and digital
• CRM integrations (including Salesforce)
• Advanced real-time AI agent assist
• 30+ digital channels
• Journey analytics
• Real-time reports

RingCentral Video pricing

If all you need are video conferencing tools, RingCentral offers the following plans:

Video Pro free plan

Video Pro is a free plan that unlocks 50-minute video meetings for up to 100 participants on your plan. Keep in mind you have limited storage unless you purchase a RingCentral business communications plan.

Key features include:

• Unlimited 50-minute video meetings for up to 100 participants
• Five hours or seven days of video recordings
• Breakout rooms
• Collaborative notes
• AI noise cancellation
• AI live transcriptions

Video Pro+ plan

Pricing: $10 per user per month (paid annually) or $15 per user per month (paid monthly)

Video Pro+ unlocks additional meeting participants and meeting time limit, but you’re still subject to limited storage space unless you purchase a full VoIP plan.

Key features include:

• 24-hour video meetings for up to 200 participants
• Business app integrations
• Advanced analytics
• User management
• Developer APIs
• Delegate scheduling
• Call Me/Call Out (500 included minutes only)

Webinar plan

Pricing: $30 per organizer per month (paid annually) or $54 per user per month (paid monthly)

RingCentral allows you to host webinars for your business with the Webinar add-on. This is available on any RingCentral video plan, and its features include:

• AI webinar writing generator
• Registration and branding tools
• Post-event reporting
• Salesforce and Marketo integrations
• Private ‘backstage’ room
• Polling and Q&A tools

Rooms add-on

Pricing: $39 per room per month (paid annually) or $49 per room per month (paid monthly) 

RingCentral’s Rooms add-on allows you to set up a conference room solution for your existing video plan. Just keep in mind it requires the Video Pro+ plan to unlock and the Rooms Connector add-on if you’re using legacy desk phone hardware (which costs $49 per month per concurrent endpoint).

Key features include:

• Wireless proximity sharing
• Rooms as a phone system
• Join third-party meetings
• Mobile-to-room conference calls
• Voice-activated control
• Digital signage solutions

RingCentral Events pricing

Starting price: $1,490 per license per year

Thinking about holding events for your business? RingCentral’s Events license allows you to hold virtual, onsite, or hybrid events with 100 attendees per event. If you need more bandwidth, you can contact the sales team.

Key features include:

• Attendee engagement tools
• Registration and branding platforms
• Event management
• Onsite event capabilities (such as badge printing)
• Analytics dashboard
• 45+ integrations

RingCentral Revenue Intelligence pricing

Revenue Intelligence is essentially RingCentral’s AI platform.

There’s only one plan to choose:

RingSense for Sales pricing

Pricing: $60 per user per month

RingSense for Sales unlocks AI-driven revenue intelligence features that include conversation intelligence and personalized reporting tools.

Here’s a closer look at what you get:

• Multi-level reporting
• Advanced search
• Deal and call scoring
• Auto summaries and highlights
• Intelligent trackers
• CRM integrations

Hidden fees to know about RingCentral pricing

Here are some additional fees to consider before signing on the dotted line for RingCentral:

• Texting limits: No plan offers unlimited texts. The Core plan is limited to 25 texts per user per month, the Advanced plan offers 100 texts, and the Ultra plan comes with only 200 texts (with more available at an additional cost of $0.01 per message).
• Toll-free calling limits: Like texting, no RingCentral plan comes with unlimited toll-free minutes. The Core plan gives you 100 minutes pooled across the entire account, followed by the Advanced plan at 1,000 minutes and the Ultra plan at 10,000 minutes. 
• Toll-free SMS charges: You can send up to 40 messages per minute and will be charged $0.007 per message sent or received by your toll-free number.
• Advanced business analytics: You only have access to basic analytics unless you upgrade to the Advanced plan ($25 per user per month).
• Directory assistance (411): If you need access to National Local Directory Assistance, be prepared to pay $1 per call.
• Number setup fee: Every toll-free (1-800 number) and vanity number requires a one-time setup fee of $30.
• International calling and SMS: While RingCentral lists its international call rates online, international SMS rates are only available in the Admin portal. This means there’s no way to know how much you’ll pay for international texts until you sign up for a plan to take the free trial.

5 things to keep in mind before committing to RingCentral

Here are a few more reasons to consider RingCentral alternatives:

1. No shared numbers for texting

You can use RingCentral to set up shared phone numbers for calling, allowing your team to split responsibility for answering the phone. But there’s no way to share responsibility for incoming texts, which impacts how much your team can collaborate.

You also won’t find many texting automation tools with RingCentral — at least not out of the box. You may need to hire a developer to use RingCentral Automator or upgrade your plan to access third-party integrations.

2. US texting registration is complicated

If your business plans to send texts through RingCentral, be prepared for a lengthy registration process. Like most providers, RingCentral requires businesses to register with The Campaign Registry (TCR) to comply with carrier regulations. While the $19 one-time TCR fee is standard, the approval timeline is much longer than many competitors.

According to RingCentral’s TCR registration page, the process takes 20-30 business days — but many users report waiting months to get approved. To make matters worse, support is reportedly unhelpful when issues arise.

In contrast, OpenPhone has received some approvals in as little as 5-7 business days, making it a much smoother option for businesses that rely on texting.

3. Conversations are stored in separate folders

Every call, text, and voicemail in RingCentral lives in separate inboxes. There’s no way to see all these touchpoints in the same location, which could significantly increase the time it takes to get up to speed on a conversation.

To make matters worse, there’s no single contact thread to house your customer conversations. You may have to jump between tabs or message your teammates if you want the full picture of a customer’s history.

4. Limited storage for recordings, files, and more

By far, the biggest drawback of how RingCentral works is its lack of unlimited storage. All three plans (even with the ‘unlimited’ storage add-on) come with a strict data cap on:

• Automatic and on-demand call recordings (90-day expiration)
• Faxes (30-day expiration)
• Call logs (12-month expiration)

You also need to worry about limitations, including the number of files you can store on your account. For example:

• You can only store 5,000 SMS/MMS messages per user per account.
• After 200 unheard voicemails, new messages begin saving over old files.
• You can only have 200 on-demand call recordings per voicemail inbox per user.

Considering most VoIPs don’t impose these limitations, RingCentral’s lack of unlimited storage is a deal breaker for growing brands.

5. Complicated user-interface

RingCentral’s interface is clunky and outdated, which makes it frustrating and time-consuming to customize to your liking.

Let’s go back to our auto-replies example. Setting them up requires using the Automator app and then writing message templates for your team to use. It’s similar to how you might create templates in Gmail — and just as clunky and frustrating as you’d think.

Most business platforms, including OpenPhone, make it simple and intuitive to navigate your VoIP phone number. Setting up snippets takes a few minutes or less, and you don’t need to learn how to code or dig through YouTube tutorials to do so.

OpenPhone: A better alternative to RingCentral plans

If you have deep pockets (or plenty of patience), you might be able to make RingCentral work for you. However, if you hate the idea of limitations and don’t have the budget for constant add-ons, upgrades, and fees, RingCentral will be more of a liability than a reliable business phone system.

This isn’t just a RingCentral problem — dozens of VoIP service providers don’t make the cut for small business owners. That’s why so many of them turn to a more efficient business phone service — including OpenPhone, the #1 small business phone service on G2.

Take a closer look at OpenPhone vs RingCentral:

1. Transparent pricing 

As you can see on our pricing page, OpenPhone starts at $15 per user per month, and every plan comes with one free local US or Canadian number (or North American toll-free number) per user.

As your company grows, you can tap into our Business plan to access group calling, call transfers, CRM integrations, phone menus, and more. When you’re ready for more, our Scale plan can help you keep growing with AI call tags, dedicated onboarding, and priority chat and email support.

There’s no need to buy before you try — we offer a seven-day free trial you can start at any time. Our free trial has no number restrictions, texting limits, or calling caps, so you can sign up today and test our whole platform with your team.

2. Unlimited text messages and toll-free minutes

You need a phone plan that grows alongside you — not one that restricts your ability to scale. That’s why every plan with OpenPhone comes with unlimited text messages and toll-free minutes. And did we mention you can store conversations indefinitely? 

All call recordings and conversations live in our app for as long as you’re a customer. Need to cancel your plan? We’ll store your conversation histories for a few weeks, in case you need them.

3. Shared numbers for calling and texting

OpenPhone makes it a breeze to collaborate with your team. Using shared phone numbers, you can split responsibility for incoming calls and texts. This helps your team share the workload and prevents critical conversations from falling through the cracks.

Shared phone numbers ensure there’s always someone around to pick up the phone or transfer a call to the right team member. You can also create a better customer experience by improving response times.

4. Easy to catch up on conversations with a unified inbox

UUnlike RingCentral (and many other VoIP apps), OpenPhone offers a unified inbox for calls, messages, and voicemails. Every touchpoint appears directly under the contact’s thread, and you can add internal comments and contact notes to keep track of context.

Need to get up to speed as quickly as possible? You can find call transcriptions and summaries in the same efficient thread.

5. Speed up workflows effortlessly

The bigger your business, the less time you’ll have for hands-on tasks. That’s why OpenPhone offers simple workflow automations so you can put repetitive tasks on autopilot.

We make it easy to tap into Zapier from our base plan (unlike RingCentral, where you have to upgrade to the Advanced plan). From here, you can set up automations that push data to critical apps and create simple workflows, such as sending a text once someone fills out a form on your website.

Need to start automating other necessary tasks? OpenPhone can help with AI functionality, such as:

• AI message responses that help you brainstorm the best answer(s) to tricky questions or comments
• AI contact threads that suggest missing contacts based on your call summaries and voicemails
• AI call summaries and transcripts that automatically transcribe your phone calls and create a list of action items

What are the pros and cons of RingCentral?

RingCentral might work for solopreneurs or established businesses with physical locations, but it lacks the flexibility most small businesses need to scale. Here are some of the pros and cons of RingCentral:

Pros

• Web, desktop and mobile apps (iOS and Android)
• Offers VoIP calls, business texts, and video conferencing
• Team messaging and file-sharing tools are built into every plan

Cons

• Limited business SMS (25 texts per user per month on the base plan)
• Limited toll-free minutes (10,000 pooled minutes per month max)
• Limited storage (even ‘unlimited’ comes with time and account-based retention limits)

See why OpenPhone is the best virtual phone service provider

RingCentral is a decent example of what a VoIP could be — but it’s not a great example of a transparent, accessible, and scalable platform. The good news is that OpenPhone picks up where RingCentral leaves off. Each plan comes with clear prices, scalable features, responsive customer support, and a flexible platform designed to grow alongside you.

Curious to see how OpenPhone does things differently? Try OpenPhone today with our seven-day free trial.

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