Relay vs OpenPhone: where does your money actually go?
Both give you a business number, calls and texts in the browser. The difference: who pockets the markup on your telecom, and what the next seat costs.
Honestly: OpenPhone has a real native mobile app and zero-friction onboarding. If you want fully turnkey, it’s a good pick. Relay wins on real cost, owning your Twilio account, and BYOK AI.
Public pricing, June 2026 — re-verify before publishing.
OpenPhone’s hidden costs.
The second person who doubles the bill
~$18 per user per month. A growing team sees its bill climb with every hire.
What the bill never shows
OpenPhone bundles minutes and texts into its price, and the markup shows up on no line item. At Relay, telecom goes through your own account at your provider’s rate: you see the exact figure.
Who owns the number
At OpenPhone, the number is in their name. At Relay it lives on your Twilio account, in yours. We keep you with the product, not the contract.
The other options, with their real strengths.
Nobody switches business phone systems on the strength of a single page. Here are the serious options on the Canadian market, what each one does better than us, and what to watch for. Relay is our product: we say so, rather than ranking ourselves first without mentioning it.
How this table was built
The listed prices come from each provider's public pricing page, in US dollars where that is how they bill. They move: check with them before signing. We publish no score out of ten, no stars and no reviews, because we have not run each product for six months and inventing a rating would be faster than earning one.
What can be compared honestly is the structure: who bills per seat, who resells the minute, who charges extra for artificial intelligence, and who owns the number at the end. That is the column that matters as a team grows, because that is the one that multiplies.
What switching providers actually costs you
There is a real cost, and it is not on the invoice. It is the time to port the number, reconfigure forwarding and business hours, and get a team used to a different interface. Budget a few business days for porting and an hour of setup. Any page telling you it is instant is selling you something.
There is also what you give up on the product side. A provider that has been around ten years has more native integrations, a native mobile app, and round-the-clock support teams. We run in the browser, with an app you install from the browser and forwarding to your mobile. If that difference is what stops you, it is real and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What we put against it: the telecom account carries your name, so the minute costs you its real price and the number stays yours. On a growing team, that is the only line in the comparison that compounds over time.
Five questions to ask your current provider
Asking these five questions beats reading ten comparison pages, ours included. The answers are verifiable, they come from your provider rather than from us, and they will keep you from switching only to land on the same model under a different name.
01Is the number in my name or yours?
This is the one question whose answer cannot be fixed later. If the telecom account belongs to the provider, so does the number, and recovering a number you do not own gets negotiated rather than requested.
02What does the minute cost, exactly?
Many plans advertise unlimited minutes then apply a fair-use policy. Ask for the per-minute rate beyond the plan, by destination. If the answer is slow to come, that is already an answer.
03What does the sixth team member cost?
The advertised price is almost always the first seat. Have them quote the bill for the team you will have in two years, not today's. That is where the models genuinely diverge.
04Is artificial intelligence included or an add-on?
Call summaries and transcription often arrive as a paid module, sometimes at the same price as the base plan. Ask for the total cost with AI switched on for the whole team.
05What is the notice period to leave?
Annual commitment, thirty days' notice, termination fees: read this before signing, not on the day you want to switch. A provider confident in its product does not need a long contract.
How to read a business phone pricing page
A phone pricing page reads across three columns that are never displayed together. The first is software, billed per seat or per team. The second is telecom, meaning minutes and texts, sometimes included, sometimes resold with an invisible margin. The third is everything that arrives as an add-on: artificial intelligence, recording, extra numbers, integrations.
The test that settles it is simple: ask for the total cost for your actual team, at your actual call volume, over twelve months. A provider billing per seat with the telecom margin baked in will quote something comfortable for three people and painful for twelve. A model that separates the two gives a duller number to explain, and a steadier one as the team grows.
One last habit: check which currency you are billed in. Many providers show US dollars to Canadian customers, which adds the exchange rate and its swings to an already monthly bill. That does not show on the pricing page, only on the statement.