TL;DR: Most people searching for Grasshopper alternatives are not unhappy with the calls. They are unhappy with the meter. Grasshopper’s own pricing page, checked October 28, 2026, charges for numbers and extensions, not for people: True Solo is $14 a month for 1 user, 1 phone number and 1 extension, Solo Plus is $25 for unlimited users, 1 number and 3 extensions, and Small Business is $55 for unlimited users, 4 numbers and unlimited extensions, with extra numbers at $9 a month each on annual billing and extra extensions at $3. Unlimited users is the tell. A product that does not charge per person is not counting what people do, because the calls forward out to phones you already own. That is a reachability product and a good one. It is not an outbound product, and no plan upgrade turns it into one. So the question is which problem you actually have. If the pain is inbound routing, fix the routing and keep the flat bill. If reps need to work a list and leave a record on every account, you are trading a number meter for a seat meter and the bill starts growing with headcount. Three routes cover almost everybody, and you price them on your real rep count rather than the starting plan. One more thing nobody checks before they move: once calls stop being a forward to a cell phone and start coming out of a softphone, 47 CFR 9.11 puts a Registered Location obligation on the service and requires a way for the user to keep it current, so find out where your 911 address lives before you port anything.
Here is the part that gets skipped. People shop for Grasshopper alternatives by lining up feature grids, and the feature grids all look similar, because most business phone products do most of the same things. The grid will not tell you why the current setup stopped working. The pricing page will.
One note before the rest of this is useful: this covers Grasshopper the business phone service. There is an unrelated parametric design tool with the same name, and it shares the search results. If you landed here looking for that, nothing below applies.
What Grasshopper actually meters
Start with the bill, because the bill is where the product tells you what it believes it is for.
Grasshopper counts three things: users, phone numbers and extensions. On two of its three plans, users are unlimited and free. The vendor’s own plan card for Solo Plus says it directly, that you add unlimited users to your account at no additional cost. Numbers and extensions are what cost money, and they cost money one at a time.
Sit with that for a second. A phone product that charges nothing for the fifth person you hire is a product that does not care how many calls that person makes. It cannot care. It is not placing the calls. The True Solo tooltip on the same page spells out the mechanism in plain language: the plan enables call forwarding to a single number of your choosing. On the larger plans, forwarding goes to multiple numbers per extension. The system answers, routes, and hands the call to a phone that already belongs to somebody.
That is the architecture, and it explains every complaint that eventually sends a team looking for Grasshopper alternatives. Nobody is mad about call quality. They are mad that there is no list to work, no record of the attempt sitting on the account, and no way for a manager to see what happened after the call connected. None of that is a defect. The product was never metering it.
Grasshopper’s pricing page tells you which problem it solves
Checked on October 28, 2026, grasshopper.com/pricing publishes three plans and prices them for annual billing. True Solo is $14 a month and includes 1 user, 1 phone number and 1 extension, and the vendor subtitles it as the starter plan for the single person business. Solo Plus is $25 a month with unlimited users, 1 phone number and 3 extensions. Small Business is $55 a month with unlimited users, 4 phone numbers and unlimited extensions, subtitled as the plan for flexibility and customization for small businesses.
The add-ons follow the same logic. Additional phone numbers are $9 a month each on annual billing and $10 a month each billed monthly. Additional extensions are $3 a month each on annual billing and $5 billed monthly. Business texting requires registration and carries a $19.50 one-time registration fee plus a $1.50 monthly messaging fee, and the page breaks that one-time charge into $4.50 to register the company with The Campaign Registry and $15 for carriers to review the campaign. A professionally recorded greeting through Voice Studio runs up to 250 words for a one-time $75. There is a 7 day free trial with no credit card required.
Read the three plans as a sequence and the product’s idea of growth becomes obvious. Growth is more numbers and more extensions. It is not more conversations per rep. Between the $25 plan and the $55 plan the thing that changes is that you get four numbers instead of one and stop paying three dollars a head for extensions. Nothing in that ladder is about outbound volume, because outbound volume is not what is being sold.
So when the sales team says the phone system is holding them back, they are usually right and usually describing a different product category. Which is the whole decision.
Three routes out of Grasshopper, and who each one is for
Almost every team shopping Grasshopper alternatives lands on one of three routes. They cost different amounts and they solve different problems, and picking the wrong one is how a company ends up paying per seat for a feature set nobody uses.
Route 1: Keep a number-metered phone and fix the routing
Take this one if the complaints are inbound. Calls ring the wrong person. The after-hours greeting is wrong. Three people answer the same call. A customer calls back and nobody knows who they spoke to last time.
Those are routing problems, and routing problems are solvable inside a reachability product. More extensions, a cleaner menu, business hours set properly, a real IVR auto attendant instead of a voicemail box. If that is the actual pain, moving to a per-seat system does not fix it faster, it just fixes it more expensively. The flat bill is a real asset and you should not give it up to solve a problem you could have solved with a menu tree.
Failure mode to watch: a team takes Route 1, the inbound gets better, and six weeks later the pipeline complaint comes back unchanged. That means the inbound problem was real but it was not the problem the revenue number was about.
Route 2: Move the selling onto a sales phone system
Take this one when the unit of work is a list. Reps have 200 accounts, the job is to get ahold of them, and the current workflow is a human reading a number off a screen and typing it into a phone.
That is the job a sales phone system is built for, and it is where Kixie sits honestly. Kixie is business calling and texting for revenue teams, and its plans are structured around the dialing motion rather than around numbers: a Professional plan with business phone service, CRM integration, automations, click to call and click to text, SMS templates, Voicemail Drop and live call coaching; a Single-Line PowerDialer plan that adds the dialer and calling session management; and a Multi-Line PowerDialer plan that dials up to 4 lines at once. AI Human Voice Detection, ConnectionBoost and Conversation Intelligence are premium add-ons rather than base features. All plans include unlimited minutes in the US and Canada and a 7 day free trial with no credit card. The head to head detail lives on the Kixie vs Grasshopper comparison page.
Here is the honest fit statement, because it decides the money. This route is worth it when reps dial enough that the dialer pays for itself in recovered time, and when somebody downstream needs the call record: a manager coaching, a second rep picking up the account, a renewal conversation six months later. If your team makes twelve calls a day and every one of them is a scheduled callback to a known customer, you are buying a dialer you will not use. Say so out loud before you sign.
Route 3: Split it, and let the numbers stay where they are
This is the route people forget, and for a certain shape of company it is the right one.
The main line, the toll free number, the department extensions and the after hours greeting stay on the reachability product. The four reps who spend their day on a list move onto a sales phone system with their own numbers. Nothing ports. Nothing breaks. The receptionist workflow that took a year to get right keeps working, and the sales motion gets what it needed without dragging the entire company through a phone migration.
The tradeoff is two systems and two bills, and somebody has to own where a given call is supposed to land. That is a real cost. It is usually smaller than the cost of moving a whole business’s inbound presence to solve a four person problem.
Do the meter math before you move the numbers
This is the step that gets hand waved, and it is the one that decides whether anybody regrets the switch in month four.
Grasshopper’s number is flat and public. Small Business is $55 a month and does not move when you hire. A per-seat system moves every time you hire. Those two curves cross somewhere, and where they cross depends entirely on how many people actually need the seat, which is almost never everybody.
So build the comparison this way. Count the people who genuinely need to place outbound calls from a list and have the outcome land on a record. Not the whole company. Not everyone who answers a phone. Multiply that count by the quoted per-seat price, then add the parts that do not show up on the headline: any premium add-ons you plan to turn on, number charges, and messaging registration where it applies. Then put the current bill next to it, including the extensions and extra numbers you have been adding one at a time.
Two numbers usually surprise people. The first is how small the real seat count is, because half the extension list is people who receive calls and never place them. The second is how much the current bill has drifted from the plan price, because extensions at three dollars and numbers at nine dollars accumulate quietly and nobody re-reads the invoice.
Run both numbers before the demo, not after. A quote lands differently when you already know your own break-even.
What changes about 911 when the phone stops being a forward
Here is the part of a phone migration that nobody puts on the evaluation grid, and it is worth ten minutes because it is genuinely different after you switch.
When the business number forwards to your cell, the 911 story belongs to the cell carrier. When reps start calling from a softphone on a laptop, it does not. The service placing the call now carries the obligation, and the federal rule is specific about what that means.
47 CFR 9.11 governs E911 service for interconnected VoIP providers. The scope paragraph bounds it: the requirements apply to providers of interconnected VoIP services, and only to 911 calls placed where the caller’s dispatchable location sits in an area served by a Wireline E911 Network. Within that scope, the rule splits on whether the service is fixed or not. For fixed interconnected VoIP, the provider must supply automated dispatchable location with each 911 call. For non-fixed service, meaning service capable of being used from more than one location, which is every softphone your reps carry, the provider must supply automated dispatchable location if technically feasible, and otherwise must fall back to one of several options.
The fallback that matters operationally is Registered Location. Under 9.11(b)(4)(ii)(B), the provider has to obtain the Registered Location from the customer before service starts, give end users at least one way to update that location using only the equipment needed to access the service, allow updates at will and in a timely manner, and identify when 911 is being dialed from somewhere other than the Registered Location, then either prompt the customer for a new one or update it automatically.
Read that as a checklist and it turns into demo questions. Where does the address live. Who can change it. Can a rep change it from the app, or does it take a support ticket. What happens when the rep is at a customer site.
The notification paragraph is just as practical. Under 9.11(b)(5), an interconnected VoIP provider has to advise every subscriber, new and existing, prominently and in plain language, about the circumstances where E911 service may be unavailable or limited compared with traditional E911, and the rule lists examples: relocation of the customer’s equipment, use by the end user of a non-native telephone number, broadband connection failure, loss of electrical power, and delays in making a dispatchable location available. The provider also has to obtain and keep a record that each subscriber acknowledged receiving that advisory, and either ship warning labels or notify subscribers by other conspicuous means.
Non-native telephone number is the phrase to notice. That is exactly the setup a lot of teams run on purpose, a number in one area code sitting on a phone somewhere else. The rule names it as a known limitation, which means a vendor who cannot answer a question about it has not read its own obligations.
For contrast, 47 CFR 9.8 is a single sentence: providers of fixed telephony services have had to provide automated dispatchable location with 911 calls since January 6, 2021. Fixed service got the stricter, simpler rule. Moving a sales team onto softphones moves you out of that simple case and into the one with configuration in it.
One honest boundary. These sections bind interconnected VoIP providers, not you, and whether a given product is classified that way is the vendor’s answer to give. So ask, and get the answer in writing with the address and the update path named. Then stop thinking about it.
What to test in a Grasshopper alternatives trial
Trials are usually wasted. Somebody logs in, makes two calls to a colleague, confirms the audio works, and calls it validated. Audio was never the risk.
Test these five instead, because each one is a thing that breaks after the contract rather than during the demo.
One, load a real list and work it. Not five numbers you typed in. Import a list the size a rep actually gets, and watch what a rep does between calls. The gap between calls is the product. If the rep is still choosing the next record by hand, nothing structural changed.
Two, hang up and go look at the CRM. Did the call log itself. Did the outcome land on the right record. Did the recording attach. Does the next task exist without somebody typing it. Define a tool by what the rep stopped doing manually, because that is the only part that survives a busy Tuesday.
Three, call from a number nobody has called from before. Watch whether it gets answered and whether it starts getting flagged after a few hundred dials. Connect rate is the number that pays for the system, and it has nothing to do with the feature list.
Four, make the manager review it. Have somebody who was not on the call find it, listen to it, and say what they would coach. If finding the call takes four clicks and a filter nobody remembers, the coaching will not happen.
Five, port one number, not all of them. Move a single low traffic number first and keep the existing service live until that one is proven in production. Porting is the step with the longest tail of surprises, and it is much cheaper to be surprised once.
If you are earlier than this and still deciding what kind of product you want, the longer walkthrough of choosing a virtual phone number provider covers the number side of the question in more depth.
Grasshopper alternatives FAQ
What are the best Grasshopper alternatives for a sales team
The best Grasshopper alternatives for a sales team are sales phone systems, not other virtual number products. The distinction is whether the system places calls from a list and writes the outcome to a record, or whether it answers a number and forwards the call onward. If reps work a list, you want the first kind. Kixie is one option in that category and the fit test is simple: enough dials per rep that a dialer pays for itself, and somebody downstream who needs the call record.
Is there a free Grasshopper alternative
Not in any form worth building a sales team on. Grasshopper itself runs a 7 day free trial with no credit card, and most business phone products offer something similar, so you can evaluate several without paying. Free tiers that persist tend to cap the thing you most need, which is usually minutes, numbers or the ability to connect to a CRM. Price the trial period, not the free tier.
Why do teams look for Grasshopper alternatives
Usually because the work changed shape rather than because the service failed. Grasshopper meters numbers and extensions and leaves users unlimited, which is the right design for staying reachable while you are out. Teams leave when the job becomes outbound volume and call history, because those are not what the plan is counting.
Can I keep my number if I switch
Number portability is standard, but treat it as a project rather than a checkbox. Confirm portability for each specific number before committing, keep the existing service active until the port completes and has been tested in production, and move one number first. If you are planning a larger migration, the walkthrough of what to test before you port covers the porting rules and the timelines in more detail.
Does moving off Grasshopper change anything about 911
It can, and it is worth asking directly. Once calls originate from a softphone rather than forwarding to a cell phone, 47 CFR 9.11 puts location obligations on an interconnected VoIP provider, including the Registered Location requirements and a customer advisory about when E911 may be limited. Ask the vendor where the registered address lives, who can update it and how quickly, and get the answer before you port.
How many users do I actually need to pay for
Fewer than your extension list suggests. Count only the people who place outbound calls from a list and need the outcome recorded. Everyone who exclusively receives calls can usually stay on the reachability product, which is what makes Route 3 cheaper than it looks.
Sources
- 47 CFR 9.11, E911 Service, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Paragraph (b)(1) limits the requirements of paragraphs (b)(1) through (5) to providers of interconnected VoIP services, and applies them only to 911 calls placed by users whose dispatchable location is in a geographic area served by a Wireline E911 Network. Paragraph (b)(2) requires interconnected VoIP providers to supply E911 service as a condition of providing service, and to transmit all 911 calls, ANI, and the location information described in paragraph (b)(4) to the PSAP, designated statewide default answering point, or appropriate local emergency authority serving the caller’s dispatchable location. Paragraph (b)(4)(i) requires providers of fixed interconnected VoIP services to provide automated dispatchable location with each 911 call. Paragraph (b)(4)(ii) addresses non-fixed interconnected VoIP service, defined as service capable of being used from more than one location, and requires automated dispatchable location if technically feasible, failing which the provider must provide Registered Location information, provide Alternative Location Information, or route the caller to a national emergency call center. Paragraph (b)(4)(ii)(B) requires that the provider obtain the Registered Location from the customer prior to the initiation of service, provide end users one or more methods of updating the Registered Location including at least one option requiring only the customer premises equipment necessary to access the service, allow updates at will and in a timely manner, and identify whether the service is being used to call 911 from a different location than the Registered Location and either prompt the customer for a new Registered Location or update it without additional customer action. Paragraph (b)(5)(i) requires each provider to advise every subscriber, both new and existing, prominently and in plain language, of the circumstances under which E911 service may not be available or may be limited by comparison to traditional E911 service, and names relocation of the end user’s IP-compatible customer premises equipment, use by the end user of a non-native telephone number, broadband connection failure, loss of electrical power, and delays in making a dispatchable location available as examples. Paragraph (b)(5)(ii) requires the provider to obtain and keep a record of affirmative acknowledgement by every subscriber of having received and understood that advisory, and paragraph (b)(5)(iii) requires the provider either to distribute warning stickers or labels or to notify subscribers by other conspicuous means. The dates in paragraph (b) are January 6, 2021 for fixed services and January 6, 2022 for non-fixed services. Reviewed October 28, 2026.
- 47 CFR 9.8, Obligation of fixed telephony providers to convey dispatchable location, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Paragraph (a) provides that providers of fixed telephony services shall provide automated dispatchable location with 911 calls beginning January 6, 2021. Paragraph (b) is reserved. Reviewed October 28, 2026.
- Grasshopper, Sign Up for Grasshopper, Pricing Starting at $14/month (grasshopper.com pricing page, vendor’s own current pricing page, not linked). Three plans are published with annual billing prices: True Solo at $14 per month including 1 user, 1 phone number and 1 extension, subtitled as the starter plan for the single person business; Solo Plus at $25 per month including unlimited users, 1 phone number and 3 extensions, subtitled that unlimited users are added at no additional cost; and Small Business at $55 per month including unlimited users, 4 phone numbers and unlimited extensions, subtitled as the best plan for flexibility and customization for small businesses. Add-on pricing on the same page lists additional phone numbers at $9 per month each on annual billing and $10 per month each billed monthly, and additional extensions at $3 per month each on annual billing and $5 per month each billed monthly. Business texting is marked as requiring registration and carries a $19.50 one-time registration fee and a $1.50 per month messaging fee, with the one-time fee described as $4.50 to register the company with The Campaign Registry and $15 for carriers to review the campaign. The page states a 7 day free trial with no credit card required, offers professionally recorded greetings of up to 250 words through Voice Studio for a one-time fee of $75, and describes the product as a virtual phone system providing entrepreneurs and small businesses with a dedicated phone number. The True Solo plan tooltip describes enabling call forwarding to a single number of your choosing, and the larger plans describe call forwarding to multiple phone numbers per extension. Reviewed October 28, 2026.
- Kixie Plans, kixie.com. The page publishes a Professional plan described as suited to individual sales professionals and including business phone service, CRM integration, automations, click to call and click to text, SMS templates, Voicemail Drop and live call coaching; a Single-Line PowerDialer plan adding the single-line PowerDialer and calling session management; and a Multi-Line PowerDialer plan that PowerDials up to 4 lines simultaneously. AI Human Voice Detection, ConnectionBoost and Conversation Intelligence are listed as premium add-ons. All plans are described as including unlimited minutes covering calls in the US and Canada, core business phone service, CRM integration and US-based support, with a 7 day free trial and no credit card required. Reviewed October 28, 2026.
Sources verified by the Kixie Research Team on October 28, 2026.
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