The GoHighLevel phone system

Carrier fees are the line people forget, and they are not small relative to the base rate. A segment to a Verizon number costs $0.00747 plus $0.0045, which is $0.01197, so the carrier fee is roughly 60% again on top. Quote a client on the headline segment price and you have underpriced the work by more than a third.

Email is metered from the same wallet at $0.675 per 1,000 emails, on every plan, which is cheap enough that it rarely drives a decision, but it is not zero and it is not in the plan price either.

Rates per segment are hard to feel. Here is a single sub-account running ordinary activity for a month, with carrier fees included at the Verizon rate and no transcription.

This is the single most expensive thing to learn late. The $97 plan is sold as the starting point for an agency, it includes three sub-accounts, and it is the obvious first purchase. But three sub-accounts of real client activity generate real usage, and on that plan the usage is yours to absorb. Three clients at the volume worked above is $197.67 a month, which almost exactly cancels the $200 you saved by not being on the $297 tier.

The arithmetic that decides it is simple. If your clients will together generate more than roughly $200 a month in phone and email usage, the $297 plan is cheaper than the $97 plan, because rebilling at cost removes an expense you would otherwise eat. That is an unusual sentence to write about a plan that costs three times more, and it is the reason this page exists.

Markup, and therefore usage as a profit line rather than a cost line, only arrives at $497 as part of SaaS mode. We cover what else that tier buys on SaaS mode and the plan comparison.

While checking these numbers, two HighLevel help articles published on the same platform gave different base rates on the same day. Neither is marked as superseded or historic.

The carrier fees are published twice as well, and they do not match either.

Compared with buying a phone system separately, yes. These rates track Twilio's, the numbers are cheaper than most hosted providers charge, and having calls, texts and the CRM in one place is worth something on its own.

Compared with the expectation people arrive with, no. The platform is marketed as all-in-one at $97, and the phone system is the clearest example of something that is included as a feature but billed as a utility. Nobody is being deceived, the rates are published, but a wallet that auto-recharges your card is a very different experience from a flat monthly bill, and it is worth understanding before your first busy month rather than after it.

Before you send anything at volume, note that US carriers require A2P 10DLC registration, which has its own one-off and monthly fees on top of everything here. Those are on the A2P registration page.

If you are a trade rather than an agency, the feature these rates pay for is missed call text back, and what it costs per message is worked through on the missed call text back page.

Email is billed from the same wallet, at the rate on the email marketing page.