07/07/2024
In maintaining our commitment to keeping our costs low so we can provide more to our community members, we recently completed a comprehensive expense audit. During our audit, our greatest expense turned out to be our current phone system under Spectrum and RingCentral.
Over the past six years, we have added many services to our in-house systems—publishing, web hosting, cloud services, and even our continuing education system. After some intensive research, we discovered we could self-host our phone system on an old Dell Intel i5 desktop we had lying around for a fraction of what we currently pay using open-source software and VoIP.ms.
Therefore, in the next few weeks, we will implement yet another in-house service as we move away from RingCentral - our phone system. Unfortunately, this means we will be changing the office phone number.
After doing lots of research and speaking with PBX professionals, we have already set up our new system and are in the process of configuring it - which so far is much easier than RingCentral. It can even grow with us should we finally be able to expand to a wellness and retreat center.
After the change, just for the phones, our estimated monthly cost will be less than $4.00. The cost difference is astounding - we will pay less per year than we currently pay per month - yes, you read that right (we currently pay around $65/month with RingCentral, and we will end up paying about $48.00/year for the same service - web apps, VM to email, fax on the same line, SMS, etc...).
Now - let's see what we can do about the internet service... Maybe it's time to see if AT&T has fiber optic in our area for less than Spectrum.
I'll post the new number as soon as we finish the configs.
