I've been spending the afternoon looking at some VOIP solutions for a client of mine (a small church with about 6 employees). At this point in my research, the main thing that has struck me is that these plans are much more expensive than I would have thought.

The church currently has PBX system (from Comcast, I believe) that has broken and doesn't seem to be fixable. So now they're looking into VOIP solutions before they talk to other traditional phone service providers. Their current monthly phone bill is around $520, which I thought sounded like a lot, and like a figure we could easily beat with a number of VOIP services...until I looked into them.

One of the current hot names is ringcentral.com. They charge a minimum of $25/user/month. At first you might think that's only $150/month for this number of users, plus maybe $10 for each phone number they use. The problem is that the church currently has phones scattered around the campus. Some are used in classrooms and are mostly there in case of emergency situations. I've been told that they want to keep these phones in use. That would bring the total number of phones up to at least 20, making it at least as expensive as the current system, and that's before adding the phone numbers in or any other features, and it's also for the least expensive plan that doesn't have as many features or talk minutes.

Vonage appears to be even more expensive at $40/month, and other services seem to go up from there.

The only service I've found that would save money no matter which way you cut it is Ooma Business. But the more I look into what they offer, the less confident I am in their product. First of all, much of the setup relies on DECT between the hub and the phones. I have to create this unwieldy system of four hubs to even support 20 physical phones, which is the maximum the entire system can handle. There are other concerns I have but I won't go on.

What do you folks recommend for an operation of this size? Do you know of anyplace that gives discounts to 501c3 non-profits?