Grasshopper Reviews: 4.1/5 — Solid Choice

Grasshopper publishes three prices and bills on about a dozen. The plan tiers are refreshingly simple — $14, $25 and $55 a month on annual billing — and the annual discount is exactly what the page claims it is, which is rarer than it should be. But the fee schedule sitting under those numbers is deeper than the comparison table shows. Turn on business texting and Grasshopper’s own billing system carries three different recurring rates, only one of which appears on the pricing page. Take the professional greeting the table ticks on every plan and it costs $75. None of this is hidden, exactly; it is just not on the page you use to decide.

• What it is: A virtual phone system — business numbers, extensions and texting that ring through to phones you already own.
• Best for: Solo operators and small teams who want a business line without a desk phone or a PBX.
• Pricing: $14–$55/month billed annually, $18–$70 month-to-month. Verified August 2026.
• The honest catch: The 10DLC texting fee shown is $1.50/month; the billing system also holds a $10/month rate.

What Is Grasshopper?

Grasshopper is a virtual phone system, not a VoIP handset platform. There is no hardware, no SIP provisioning and no desk phone. You buy a business number — local, toll-free or vanity — and Grasshopper routes calls to the mobile and desktop devices your team already carries. It has been doing this since 2003 and is now part of GoTo.

That positioning matters, because it puts Grasshopper in an odd spot on a VoIP comparison list. Against Nextiva, RingCentral or GoTo Connect it will look thin: no full contact-centre stack, no per-seat enterprise telephony. Against a personal mobile number written on a van, it is a transformation. Grasshopper is competing with not having a business line at all, and most of its 400,000-plus customers are on that side of the line.

The feature set is deliberately narrow and mostly consistent across tiers: unlimited domestic calling minutes, unlimited business texting, voicemail with transcription, custom greetings, business hours routing, a virtual receptionist, virtual fax, mobile and desktop apps, and 24/7 support. On Findstack it carries 146 user reviews, which is a substantial base for a product this specific.

How Grasshopper Works

You pick a number during signup, then configure extensions and routing rules in the account afterwards. Calls to the business number ring your chosen devices; outbound calls placed through the Grasshopper app show the business number rather than your personal one. That is the whole product, and its simplicity is the point.

The tiers differ on how many numbers, users and extensions you get, and on a handful of call-handling features:

Two things stand out. True Solo is genuinely a single-line product — one user, one number, one extension, and no call recording, IVR, simultaneous handling or AI summaries. It is a business number, not a phone system. If two people need to answer the same line, you are on Solo Plus.

And Small Business is the only plan where the number count changes. Four included numbers at $9/month each is $432 a year of value against Solo Plus, which is most of the $360 price gap on its own — a rare case where the top tier is arithmetically the better deal if you actually need the numbers.

(One inconsistency worth naming: the comparison table marks call forwarding “Not Available” on True Solo while the same page’s underlying plan data lists it as supported on all three tiers, and does the same for AI voicemail sentiment. If either matters to you, confirm before you buy — the page contradicts itself.)

Grasshopper Pricing

Grasshopper claims “annual savings over 20%” and all three plans clear it. That sounds like faint praise until you have checked as many rate cards as this series has; vendors routinely round a 17% discount up to “save 20%”, or quietly cut an allowance to fund it. Grasshopper does neither. The prices are the prices, the arithmetic works, and the seven-day trial takes no card. Credit where it is due.

The $4.50 brand registration and $15 campaign vetting fees footnoted on the pricing table are also exactly right — the billing system charges $4.50 and $15, and the table’s “$19.50 one-time” is their sum. A vendor that footnotes its own fees checkably is a vendor worth trusting on the things you cannot check.

What actually decides your cost

The plan price is the smallest decision you will make here. Four other things move the bill:

1. Which 10DLC rate you land on. US carriers require businesses to register before sending application-to-person texts, and Grasshopper passes that cost through. The comparison table shows a messaging fee of $1.50/month and nothing else. The billing system behind the signup flow carries three recurring 10DLC rates: $1.50/month, $2/month labelled “Sole Proprietor”, and $10/month. Nothing on the pricing page says which one applies to you. At $10/month, a Solo Plus line costs $439.50 in year one against a $300 sticker — a 46% gap decided by a field you never see. Ask before you sign up, not after.

2. Extra numbers, and how many you started with. Additional numbers are $9/month each on annual billing, $10/month month-to-month — identical on all three plans. This is what makes Small Business worth modelling properly. Solo Plus plus three extra numbers is $300 + $324 = $624 a year; Small Business with those four numbers included is $660. For $36 more you also get unlimited extensions, and the extension maths tells the same story: three extra extensions on Solo Plus is $108 a year, on Small Business they are free.

3. Voice Studio. The comparison table shows Professional Voice Studio ticked on all three plans, which reads as included. It is not. The plan data flags Voice Studio as not included on any tier, and Grasshopper’s own FAQ prices it plainly: $75 one-time for up to 250 words. The tick means available, not free — and the pricing table does not distinguish between the two anywhere.

4. International calling. “Unlimited minutes” means unlimited domestic minutes. Grasshopper’s FAQ says so directly: “International calls are not included at this time. International and off-shore calls are billed at per minute rates based on location.” International calling also has to be switched on by support before it works at all. If your customers are outside the US and Canada, unlimited is the wrong word for what you are buying.

Beyond those, the one-time fee schedule includes a $75 initial Canadian number fee and $50 for each additional one, $25 for media file upload, $15 each for background music and an on-hold commercial, $175 for concierge setup, and a $25 reactivation fee if you let the account lapse. Toll-free, vanity and number-transfer fees are all $0.

Who Should Use Grasshopper

Grasshopper is for people who need a business number, not a phone system. That distinction decides everything.

A good fit if you are:

• A sole trader, consultant or tradesperson who wants to stop giving out a personal mobile number. True Solo at $14/month is the cheapest credible answer to that problem, and the seven-day no-card trial makes trying it free.
• A two-to-five person team sharing one main line, where Solo Plus’s unlimited users and three extensions cover the whole company.
• A business that wants a toll-free or vanity number — both carry no setup fee here, which is not universal.
• Anyone who wants to avoid hardware entirely. There is nothing to install, provision or mount on a wall.

A poor fit if you are:

• Running a contact centre or a sales floor. No queues, no dialler, no CRM-grade telephony. Aircall, CloudTalk or Nextiva are the right shelf.
• Calling internationally at volume. Per-minute rates and a support ticket to enable it.
• Outside the US and Canada — Grasshopper is not sold anywhere else, and the site will tell you so.
• Texting heavily on a tight budget without first confirming your 10DLC rate.

Honest Pros and Cons

Pros

• The annual discount is real. 22.2%, 21.9% and 21.4% against a claim of “over 20%”, with no allowance cut hiding behind it.
• Genuinely simple. Three plans, one page, no seat-count calculator, no quote form.
• No setup fee, no contract, $0 for toll-free, vanity and number transfers, and a seven-day trial that takes no card.
• Fees are footnoted checkably where they are shown — the $19.50 registration figure reconciles to the cent.
• Unlimited users on Solo Plus. Most competitors charge per seat; Grasshopper charges per line.
• Small Business is honestly priced if you need four numbers — it undercuts building the same thing on Solo Plus once extensions are counted.

Cons

• The published 10DLC fee is the cheapest of three. A $10/month rate exists in the billing system and appears nowhere on the pricing page.
• Voice Studio is ticked on every plan and costs $75. The table draws no line between included and available.
• “Unlimited minutes” is domestic only, and you have to open the FAQ accordion to learn it.
• True Solo is thinner than the price suggests — no call recording, IVR, simultaneous handling or AI summaries.
• The comparison table contradicts its own plan data on call forwarding and AI voicemail sentiment.
• US and Canada only. No path for anyone else.
• Not a phone system. If you outgrow a single main line, you outgrow Grasshopper.

Grasshopper Alternatives and How It Compares

Grasshopper sits at the bottom of the VoIP category on price and complexity both, which makes most comparisons unfair in one direction or the other.

• Nextiva — a full unified-communications platform with video, team messaging and contact-centre features. More capable and more expensive; the right choice when you have staff on phones all day rather than a number that needs answering.
• RingCentral MVP — the enterprise default, priced per seat. Grasshopper’s unlimited-users-per-line model is dramatically cheaper for small teams; RingCentral wins the moment you need per-user provisioning, compliance controls or deep integrations.
• GoTo Connect — Grasshopper’s sibling under the same parent. The natural upgrade path if you start here and grow into needing a real PBX.
• Aircall and CloudTalk — sales and support call centres with CRM integration and analytics at their core. Different job entirely.
• 800.com — the closest like-for-like on the toll-free number use case, worth pricing against Grasshopper directly if a memorable number is the main thing you want.

The honest framing: if you are comparing Grasshopper to RingCentral, one of the two is wrong for you and it is usually obvious which. Grasshopper’s real competition is a second mobile phone.

The Verdict

Grasshopper does the thing it says it does, at a price it states accurately, and then bills you for several things it did not put on the page.

The headline pricing is clean. Three tiers, a discount that survives a calculator, no setup fee and a trial with no card. In a category where “contact sales” is the default and 20% discounts routinely turn out to be 14%, that is worth something, and the review should say so plainly.

What lets it down is the second layer. The comparison table is where buyers decide, and that table shows one 10DLC rate out of three, ticks a $75 add-on as though it were included, calls domestic minutes “unlimited” without the word domestic, and disagrees with the site’s own plan data in two places. None of it is deceptive in a way that would survive a complaint — the FAQ answers are honest, the fee footnotes reconcile, the international caveat is written down. It is just all one click further away than the number that made you click.

Buy it if you need a business number and Solo Plus at $25/month covers your team — and confirm your 10DLC rate before you enable texting.

Model Small Business properly if you need more than one number. At four included numbers it is better value than it looks.

Look elsewhere if you need queues, diallers, international calling or anything that resembles a switchboard. Grasshopper is not trying to be that, and it does not pretend otherwise.

FAQ

How much does Grasshopper cost? Three plans: True Solo at $14/month, Solo Plus at $25/month and Small Business at $55/month, all billed annually at $168, $300 and $660 respectively. Month-to-month the same plans are $18, $32 and $70. There is no setup fee and a seven-day free trial that does not require a card.

Is the annual discount actually 20%? Yes. True Solo saves 22.2%, Solo Plus 21.9% and Small Business 21.4% against twelve months of month-to-month billing. The allowances do not change between the two billing terms, so the discount is not funded by taking something away — which is more than can be said for several vendors in this series.

What does business texting really cost on Grasshopper? Registration is $19.50 one-time ($4.50 brand registration plus $15 campaign vetting), and that figure is footnoted correctly on the pricing page. The recurring fee is where it gets murky: the table shows $1.50/month, but Grasshopper’s billing system also carries a $2/month “Sole Proprietor” rate and a $10/month rate. Which one you get is not explained anywhere on the pricing page, so ask support before you enable texting.

Are Grasshopper’s unlimited minutes really unlimited? For domestic US and Canada calling, yes. International and off-shore calls are excluded and billed per minute at location-based rates, and international calling has to be enabled by support before it works at all. Grasshopper states this in its pricing FAQ but not on the comparison table, where the row simply reads “Unlimited”.

Is True Solo enough for a one-person business? If all you need is a business number that rings your phone, yes — it is one user, one number, one extension, with unlimited domestic calling and texting, voicemail transcription and a virtual receptionist. What it does not include is call recording, IVR, simultaneous call handling, call summaries or AI call sentiment. Those start at Solo Plus, $11/month more.