If you are shopping for someone to answer your business phone, you will find that almost everyone bills in whole minutes. A call lasting two minutes and ten seconds uses three minutes of your plan.
We do that too. It is worth explaining why, and then explaining the thing we think you should actually be comparing.
Why rounding is nearly universal
Because it is how the carriers bill us. Twilio charges a full minute for a 42-second call, and so does most of the industry. An answering service that billed you by the second while being billed by the minute is absorbing that gap out of margin on every single call.
The gap is not trivial either. Across every call on our own account, the average call runs about 1.8 minutes, which lands just past a minute boundary, in the worst possible place. Rounding each call up consumes roughly 19% more allowance than the seconds actually spoken.
That 19% is a real cost and it has to sit somewhere. We put it in the rounding, disclosed, where you can do the arithmetic on it yourself.
⭐ The question that actually matters
Rounding is a known, disclosed cost you can do arithmetic on (the same arithmetic works for what your missed calls cost). Spam is not.
Your business number gets robocalls, warranty scams and silent hangups like everyone else's. If your answering service bills for those, you are paying for other people's junk, and unlike your real calls, you have no idea how many there were.
Calls we identify as spam are filtered and are not billed to you at all, however long they ran. Not discounted. Excluded. None of their seconds reach your plan.
That is the carve-out that makes the rounding defensible. Take it away and rounding up a twenty-second robocall into a full billed minute would be indefensible, and we would not be writing this post.
What to ask whoever answers your phone
Three questions settle most of it:
- What is the billing increment? Nearly everyone rounds. If they say per second, ask where the difference went.
- What happens to spam calls? Billed, discounted, or excluded entirely? This is the one with the most money in it and the least disclosure.
- Do unused minutes roll over? Ours do not, and they reset each billing month, that should be stated plainly wherever you are looking.
If the answers are not on the pricing page, check the terms. If they are in neither, that is an answer too.