A RingCentral alternative for Florida small businesses

Side by side

Hey Quad compared with RingCentral RingEX Core, read at RingCentral’s own pages on September 8, 2026.

What is being compared		RingCentral RingEX Core
Seat price	$30Per seat per month, Florida communications services tax included. That is the invoice, not the starting point.	Not published on their pricing page.
Billing term required	Month-to-month. No contract, no setup fee, no per-line activation.	"Save up to 33% by paying annually." Phone rental available only with multi-year contract. Fourteen-day free trial, up to 20 lines; SMS is not available during the trial.
Taxes and fees	Florida communications services tax is inside the seat price, and the invoice itemizes it as the law requires. Usage past your pool is billed at the listed rate plus applicable tax.	Other taxes and fees such as the Federal Universal Service Recovery Fee, E911 Service Fee, Compliance and Administrative Cost Recovery Fee, 911 Fee, and State and Local Taxes, may apply.
Phone numbers	One local number per seat, pooled across the org — five seats means five numbers. Beyond that, $1 a month each. E911 is included per number.	Additional local or toll-free numbers $4.99 a month. Vanity numbers $30 one-time plus $4.99 a month. Additional international numbers from $5.99 per user a month.
Calling minutes	3,000 minutes per seat a month, pooled across the team, then 3¢ a minute. International is one flat 15¢ a minute wherever you call.	Unlimited domestic calling on every RingEX tier. Toll-free minutes are capped by tier at 100, 1,000 and 10,000.
Texting	250 outbound texts per seat a month, pooled across the team, then 2¢ each. Inbound texts are free and unlimited.	25, 100 or 200 SMS per user a month by tier. A shared SMS inbox with templates and compliance tools is the Business SMS Booster add-on at $25 per user a month. High-volume SMS is separately metered from $0.0119 per message sent or received.
Text registration fees	$5 to register your business and $15 for the carrier review, once each, then $2 a month to stay registered — carrier cost plus a small fee. We fill in the paperwork.	Not published on their pricing page.
AI receptionist	Optional add-on from $49 a month, with its own pool of 200 AI minutes that does not eat your calling allowance. Priced by tier, not metered per call.	AI Receptionist (AIR) is an add-on that starts at $39 a month. Conversational Intelligence starts at $60.
Desk phones	We ship desk phones pre-configured, and they stay ours — cancel and we send a prepaid box. Or use the softphone on your computer and mobile, or both at once on one seat.	Desk phones can be bought or rented, but the page states that phone rental is available only with a multi-year contract.
Setup	The founder sets it up with you, on a call, in your own time zone.	Self-serve trial or a sales-led implementation. The pricing page routes every tier to "Contact sales".
Support	A person in Eastern time who answers the phone, not a ticket queue. It is the same person who builds it.	Sales line (888) 697-8311. Support tiers are not priced on the page.
Florida presence	Tampa Bay. We sell only in Florida, which is why we can quote a Florida price.	None specific to Florida. RingCentral is based in Belmont, California.

We cannot show you this arithmetic for RingCentral, because RingCentral does not publish a seat price to run it on. Every tier on their plans page says “Contact us for pricing”. What they do publish is the fee side: their own footnote names a Federal Universal Service Recovery Fee, an E911 Service Fee, a Compliance and Administrative Cost Recovery Fee, a 911 Fee and state and local taxes, all of which “may apply” — to a base number you have to get on a call to learn.

For a Florida business, that means the quote you eventually get is a pre-tax quote. Tampa’s combined communications services tax rate is 13.46%, so whatever figure lands on the call, add that, add $0.40 a month per phone number, and then add two fee lines nobody will size for you in advance. Our price is the invoice.

Statutory figures from the Florida Department of Revenue, the FCC and Fla. Stat. § 365.172, read September 8, 2026. The workings are on the Florida phone tax page.

Where RingCentral is better

RingCentral is the most capable platform on this list by a wide margin, and if you are going to outgrow a small phone system it is the one to outgrow into. The integration catalogue is enormous, the contact-centre product is real, they publish a 99.999% availability commitment, and they operate at a scale where somebody has already solved whatever unusual thing your business needs. If you have multiple sites, a compliance department, or a Salesforce deployment that has to be the centre of everything, that is a genuinely different product from ours and the right one for you.

We would rather you read that here than find it out in month two. If it describes your business, buy theirs.

Questions people ask

Is Hey Quad cheaper than RingCentral?

It depends on your address, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. RingCentral advertises a price before Florida communications services tax, which runs 7.74% to 15.14% depending on your jurisdiction, and before the federal Universal Service charge and their own fee lines. Our seat price already includes the Florida tax. Compare the number on the invoice, not the number on the pricing page — the arithmetic is on this page and on our Florida phone tax page.

Do you serve businesses outside Florida?

Not yet. Selling phone service in a state means dealing with that state’s communications tax properly, and we do one state well rather than five badly. Tell us where you are and we will let you know when we open your state.

Can I keep my number if I move from RingCentral?

Yes. Your number is yours, and porting it to us is free. We handle the paperwork with the losing carrier and schedule the switch so your phones do not go quiet in the middle of a workday.

How much does RingCentral cost per user?

Their own plans page does not say. We rendered it in a browser on 8 September 2026 and every RingEX tier — Core, Advanced, Ultra and the Customer Engagement Bundle — shows "Contact us for pricing" with a "Contact sales" button. Third-party sites publish figures, but we will not repeat a price we could not read at the source.

Does RingCentral charge extra for business texting?

The base tiers include a small SMS allowance: 25 messages per user a month on Core, 100 on Advanced, 200 on Ultra. The shared SMS inbox with templates and compliance tools is the Business SMS Booster, a $25 per user per month add-on. High-volume messaging is metered separately from $0.0119 per message sent or received.

What fees does RingCentral add?

Their pricing page footnotes it: "Other taxes and fees such as the Federal Universal Service Recovery Fee, E911 Service Fee, Compliance and Administrative Cost Recovery Fee, 911 Fee, and State and Local Taxes, may apply." Five named lines, no amounts, on top of a base price that is also not published. In Florida the state and local part alone runs 7.74% to 15.14%.

Can I rent desk phones from RingCentral?

Their page states that phone rental is available only with a multi-year contract. Ours are included with the seat and stay ours — if you cancel, we send a prepaid box.

Is Hey Quad a good RingCentral alternative?

For a Florida business of roughly two to twenty people, yes, and for a specific reason: you get one published price with the Florida communications services tax already in it, pooled minutes and texts on every seat, and setup done by the person who built the product. For a multi-site company with a formal contact centre and a Salesforce deployment at the middle of everything, no — that is what RingCentral is for, and we say so on this page rather than letting you find out later.