What a business phone seat actually costs in Florida, line by line

Twenty-seven dollars a seat a month, plus Florida taxes and fees — under thirty dollars a seat all told, anywhere in Florida. This is what it buys, what it does not buy, and what a real month looks like on the invoice.

Every number below was read from the rate card on 8 September 2026. That page is generated from the same rows the invoice run reads, which is the only reason I am willing to write prices into a blog post at all.

What you pay for one seat

Each seat is two separately priced services: business phone service at $15.00 a month and the Hey Quad platform software at $12.00. Florida charges a communications services tax on phone service — combined state and local rates run from 7.74% to 15.14% depending on your service address — and a 911 fee of forty cents per phone number. Both are added to the phone service, and each is its own line on the invoice. Software is not subject to the communications services tax.

For one seat with one number at a Tampa address, the invoice reads:

In prose: fifteen dollars of phone service and twelve of software, plus a dollar twelve of state communications tax, ninety cents of Tampa's local tax and forty cents of 911 fee, which comes to twenty-nine forty-two. The local rate depends on your service address, so across Florida the same seat comes to between $28.57 and $29.68. Your quote shows the exact lines for your address before you sign. The tax page shows the arithmetic against a real advertised competitor figure.

What is not on the invoice: no regulatory recovery fee and no administrative cost recovery fee. Those charges are not invented — they are real costs and the providers who itemise them are being honest about it. We do not charge them.

Line by line, for one seat

One seat is one person with a phone, not one device. The same seat covers them at the desk, on the laptop and on the mobile at once. Here is what is in it:

• A local phone number — 813, 727, or any Florida area code. One comes with the account, and your quote says how many more are included; each extra number beyond that is a dollar a month.
• 911 address registration on that number. The Florida 911 fee for the number is its own line on the invoice, as above.
• 3,000 calling minutes, pooled across the whole team.
• 250 outbound text segments, also pooled. Texts people send you are free and unlimited, and always will be.
• A desk phone, shipped pre-configured, or the softphone in your browser, on your computer and on your mobile. Or both.
• Voicemail with transcripts and AI summaries, in the app and delivered to email with the audio attached.
• Call flows — menus, business hours, ring groups, hold music, after-hours routing.
• One price on either term. A 12- or 24-month agreement, the same seat price on both, and the rate holds for the term.

Pooled is the word doing the work in that list. A four-seat shop has one 12,000-minute pool and one 1,000-segment pool, and it does not matter which seat spends them. The owner who is on the phone all day is covered by the two people who are not.

The charges outside the seat price

Five things can add to that bill. I would rather name all five here than have you meet one on an invoice.

Carrier texting registration. US carriers require any business texting from a normal ten-digit number to register the business and the kind of messages it sends. It costs $20 once — $5 to register the business, $15 for the campaign review — and then $2 a month on the low-volume registration, which is what almost every small business needs. Higher-volume use cases are $10.50 a month instead. That is carrier cost plus a small fee for running the registration for you, and it sits outside the seat price because the carriers charge it, every provider in the country pays it, and you only owe it if you decide to text. If a campaign is rejected, resubmitting is a new $15 review, which is why the wizard is fussy about getting the legal name and the sample messages right the first time. Nothing is charged until you choose to register, and phone service works perfectly well if you never do.

The AI receptionist. It is a separate add-on with its own pool of minutes, in three tiers: Starter at $49 a month with 200 AI minutes and 45 cents a minute past them, Growth at $149 with 400 minutes and 40 cents, Pro at $349 with 1,000 minutes and 35 cents. AI minutes never come out of your calling pool and calling minutes never come out of the AI pool. The phone system underneath it is still a seat, so the receptionist is an addition to the bill, not a replacement for part of it.

Usage past the pools. Calling past your pooled minutes is 3 cents a minute. Texts past your pooled segments are 2 cents a segment. These are rates, any tax that applies is added to them as its own line, and the running total is visible in your account on any day of the month rather than at the end of it.

Extra phone numbers. A local number comes with your account, and your quote says how many are included. Each number beyond that is $1 a month.

International calling. Off by default. Turn it on and every international minute is one flat rate anywhere, 15 cents a minute, billed separately from the first minute rather than out of your US and Canada pool.

The block on the left is one seat for one month. Everything listed in it comes with the seat price, and the Florida taxes and the 911 fee are added on top, each as its own line on the invoice. The two boxes on the right are the charges a small business is most likely to add: the carrier texting registration, which the carriers set and every provider pays, and the AI receptionist, which is its own tier with its own pool of minutes.

A worked month, for a three-seat shop

Three seats is a common shape: an owner, an office manager and one more phone. That account has a 9,000-minute pool, a 750-segment pool, and the one phone number that comes with it. At a Tampa address the invoice reads:

In prose, because the audio player skips tables: forty-five dollars of phone service and thirty-six of software, plus three thirty-four of state communications tax, two seventy-one of Tampa's local tax and forty cents of 911 fee, comes to eighty-seven forty-five. If the shop stays inside its pools, that is the entire invoice. There is no number rental and no recovery fee.

Now the same shop decides to text customers and turns on the entry AI tier:

Again in prose: forty-five dollars of phone service, thirty-six of software, forty-nine for the Starter AI tier and two for the monthly texting campaign, plus three forty-nine of state communications tax, two eighty-three of Tampa's local tax and forty cents of 911 fee, comes to a hundred and thirty-eight seventy-two a month. The texting fees are billed as communications charges, so the tax applies to them too; the AI tier is software and carries none. The one-time twenty-dollar registration in the first month carries its tax as well. If that shop then sent nine hundred texts in a month, it would be a hundred and fifty past its pool at two cents each, which is three dollars.

One tax note on that table: usage past your pool is billed the same way, at the listed rate plus any tax that applies to it, each on its own line.

What moves this bill, and what does not

The bill moves when your seat count changes, when you change AI tier, when you go past a pool, when you add a number beyond the allowance, when you turn on international, or when you register for texting. Six things, all of them decisions you make rather than things that happen to you.

The bill does not move because you took a lot of calls inside the pool, because customers sent you a lot of texts, or because you used the desk phone instead of the app. The seat price is one published figure and it is the same everywhere in the state; what differs by address is the local tax added to the phone service.

Where this stops being tidy

Two limits worth stating. The pools are a fair-use allowance rather than an unlimited plan, so a business that genuinely makes thousands of minutes of outbound calls per seat is going to see overage, and should ask me for the arithmetic before signing rather than after. And the tables above are what the rate card said on the day this was written. Prices move. The page is generated from the billing rows, so the rate card is right even when this post has gone stale — if the two ever disagree, believe the rate card.

Check any of it yourself

The pricing page reads the same rows as your invoice, so nothing on it can quote a figure the bill would contradict. The mechanics have their own articles: what counts as a seat, how minutes work, and how texting is billed. Inside the product, your Billing page shows live meters for the calling pool, the text pool and the AI pool, so you can see where you are standing in the middle of the month rather than at the end of it.

If you want the version of this with your own seat count in it, that is a half-hour conversation with me and there is nothing to quote at the end of it. Book a time.

Got a topic you want covered? Email [email protected].