Cloud fax is priced by volume, not by seat, which is why "how much does it cost" is usually the wrong first question. The useful first question is how many pages you send and receive in a month, because that number selects the plan and almost everything else follows from it.
This page sets out what drives the cost, what LABUSA charges, and how to budget without guessing.
What drives the cost
Page volume, in both directions
Fax plans are sold in pages per month, counted separately for incoming and outgoing. This is the primary cost driver and the one organizations most often estimate badly. A practice that describes itself as "barely faxing" can be receiving several hundred pages a month of returned forms, insurance correspondence and referrals without anyone counting.
Before you compare anything, get the real number. If you are on physical machines, the transmission log or the line bill will tell you. If you are on an existing service, the provider's reporting will.
Storage and retention
Cloud fax turns every fax into a stored document. That is useful until it becomes an obligation: if a retention policy says seven years, storage is not an incidental line item. Plans bundle storage with page volume, and it can be extended.
Users who send in their own name
Receiving is a property of a number; sending is usually a property of a user. Count the people who need to send under their own identity, which is normally fewer than the people who currently walk to the machine.
Numbers, and whether they have to be the same numbers
A number printed on forms, referral pads or a license has to port rather than be replaced. Porting is a scheduling exercise with the losing carrier. A toll-free number is a separate decision with its own cost.
Where the documents have to end up
Email delivery is included in the price of every plan. Delivery into a records system, case management tool or line-of-business application is an integration, and integrations are scoped rather than listed.
What LABUSA eFaaS costs
These are the published plans. Page allowances are per month, counted separately for incoming and outgoing.
| Plan | Monthly | Incoming / outgoing pages | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| FAX 200 | $22 | 200 / 200 | 20 GB |
| FAX 300 | $25 | 300 / 300 | 30 GB |
| FAX 400 | $35 | 400 / 400 | 40 GB |
| FAX 500 | $40 | 500 / 500 | 50 GB |
| FAX 600 | $50 | 600 / 600 | 60 GB |
| FAX 700 | $55 | 700 / 700 | 70 GB |
And the options on top of a plan:
| Option | Cost |
|---|---|
| Toll-free number upgrade | $2 / month |
| Additional 10 GB storage | $2 / month |
| Additional user, with 5 GB storage | $5 / month |
| Custom application integration or collaboration portal | Contact us for rates |
| Vanity fax numbers and number porting | Contact us for availability |
The current plans and options are always on the pricing page; if anything here disagrees with it, that page is correct.
What the ladder tells you
The page allowance rises faster than the price. FAX 200 gives 200 pages each way for $22; FAX 700 gives three and a half times the allowance for two and a half times the price. In practical terms the cost per page of headroom falls as you move up the ladder, so the plan just above your real volume is usually better value than the plan just below it plus the anxiety.
The two $2 options are worth noticing for a different reason: they let you adjust storage and add a toll-free number without moving plan, so the plan choice can stay driven by page volume rather than by a storage cliff.
What you stop paying for
The honest comparison is not the plan price against zero. It is the plan price against what the current arrangement costs, which is usually spread across several budgets and therefore invisible.
Moving off physical fax removes the dedicated analog line, the machine and its replacement cycle, consumables, and the maintenance call when it stops working. On most sites the line rental is the largest of these and the easiest to check. It is on a bill somebody already receives.
There is also a cost that will not appear on any invoice: the time spent on faxes that failed and nobody noticed, and on documents that sat on a machine until somebody walked past. We are not going to put a number on that for your organization, because we would be making it up. It is worth asking your own team what it is.
How to budget
Start from measured volume, not an estimate. Two months of actual page counts, inbound and outbound separately.
Size to your busy month, not your average. Fax volumes are seasonal in most sectors: open enrollment, term start, year end. A plan chosen on the average will be wrong exactly when the work matters.
Count sending users, not headcount.
Decide retention before you decide storage. Storage is cheap to extend and awkward to plan retrospectively; the policy question comes first.
Scope integrations separately. If faxes must land somewhere other than email, get that specified and priced as its own piece of work rather than assuming it into a monthly figure.
List the numbers that must port. Early, because porting has a lead time and the date is not entirely in your gift.
The cheapest option is not always available
One constraint overrides price. If you handle protected health information, cardholder data or personal data of people in the EU, the choice is narrowed before cost enters it: the HIPAA Security Rule sets requirements for safeguarding electronic protected health information, and where a provider handles PHI on your behalf a Business Associate Agreement is the instrument that makes the arrangement accountable. A cheaper service that will not sign one is not a cheaper option; it is a different, unusable one.
The same applies to the protocol. Keeping a fax machine on an ordinary VoIP line looks free and frequently is not: fax was designed for analog lines, and carrying it over IP properly is what ITU-T Recommendation T.38 exists to define. Intermittent failures on long documents are a real cost, just not a billed one.
Where to go next
What to Look For in Electronic Fax covers what to ask a provider once the budget is roughly known. Guide to Electronic Fax is the broader picture, and What Is Electronic Fax? defines the terms.
If you would rather not estimate: send us your page volumes and we will tell you which plan fits and what, if anything, sits outside it.
Sources
- LABUSA eFaaS pricing: the authoritative source for every figure on this page.
- 45 CFR Part 164, Subpart C: HIPAA Security Rule, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations.
- ITU-T Recommendation T.38: real-time Group 3 facsimile over IP networks.