For example, Voip.com offers different prices for monthly and yearly packages. The unlimited monthly package is $19.95 per month, offering unlimited free calls to anywhere in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, low rates on international calls, mostly less than 2 cents per minute, a free phone adapter and softphone, which connects to your computer, and all the different VoIP features. If you subscribe to Voip.com’s unlimited yearly package, you get all of the above at a cheaper rate that will turn out as low as $16.58 a month. Now, if you don’t make as much calls to justify these unlimited rates, you can also sign up for their 200-minutes-per-month plan, priced at $9.95 a month, with 3.9 cents added for each additional minutes.

Meanwhile, Packet8’s Residential VoIP services are a bit on the pricey side, but understandably – their Freedom Unlimited Global charges you $29.99 a month to make unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and in forty countries worldwide, without per-minute charging per country. It also has the nifty Freedom Choice 500, which gives you 500 minutes of outgoing calls for $14.99 a month and unlimited incoming calls.

Now, these plans more or less offer the same benefits and features, although there are variants per company. Most packages will get you premium features such as call waiting, caller ID, three-way conferencing, call forwarding, last call return, call blocking, voice mail and message notification, at no extra cost. Vonage adds to these features, the Do Not Disturb function and other customizable call blocking, call hunting, Bandwidth Saver, and Vonage Me to its unlimited residential plan, which goes for $24.99, allowing free calls to select foreign countries. Vonage’s unlimited plan for small businesses is much more expensive at $44.99 a month, with slightly more advanced features and a dedicated line for sending and receiving faxes.

Business plans tend to be more expensive, but they do offer better benefits due to the demand of the workplace. Bandwidth.com’s Basic plan is as low as $34.99 a month, allowing for web and video conferencing and call holding and transferring. The more advanced plans, for a higher charge, includes benefits as unifying voicemail to email, customer portal and access to mobile phones.

Look up the different packages carefully, you don’t want to be paying for “additional services” that you won’t be using anyway. Whichever provider or plan to decide on, VoIP will turn out a lot cheaper than what you pay on your current phone bill.