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You’re shopping around for a new CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) solution, and the first thing you see is the per-agent, per-month licence fee. Sure, this may look simple enough, so the next step is to compare these baseline prices. However, opting for the cheapest option usually results in hidden charges, integration costs, or support fees that your budget didn’t account for.
That price tag you see on the license only tells part of the story, and I’ve seen so many businesses making the mistake of not looking past the price tag. As a CCaaS specialist working with our valued partner, Five9 and other providers, I can assure you that the real costs aren’t always obvious. From telephony charges to scalability challenges, there are layers to CCaaS pricing that vendors don’t always spell out clearly.
This is exactly what I’ll do in this article: break down the CCaaS – Five9 in particular – costs in 2025. We’ll have a look at the hidden fees, growth factors, and value drivers you need to consider, so you can budget confidently, avoid nasty surprises, and make a choice that genuinely improves your customer experience (CX).
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What This Blog Covers:
- Beyond the Licence Fee: What Really Impacts Your CCaaS Budget
- Price vs. Value: What SMBs Often Miss
- Integrations Aren’t Optional — Here’s Why
- Don’t Fall Into the Scalability Trap – Budget Beyond Year One
- The Bottom Line on Five9 Pricing
Beyond the Licence Fee: What Really Impacts Your CCaaS Budget
The costs I’m about to walk you through aren’t just fancy add-ons: they’re crucial to deployment, efficiency and business continuity. And if you don’t plan for them, you won’t unlock the true value of your CCaaS solution. For example, imagine trying to run with a new platform that no one has been trained to use. Or let’s say something breaks and you need immediate assistance, but you opted for the standard support – leaving you with longer wait times, frustrated agents, and worst of all, angry customers.
We all know that once service levels drop, your brand reputation suffers. That’s why I tell clients: budget for the full picture, not just the sticker price.
1. Telephony Charges
This tends to be the first thing that businesses often forget to budget for. It’s easy to forget that while core hosted telephony features are built into most CCaaS platforms, licences don’t cover the cost of actually making and receiving calls. Even domestic call minutes can quickly add up, and international or long-duration calls are billed per minute by most providers.
2. Setup and Onboarding Fees
Implementation, training, and configuration are all crucial to a successful CCaaS solution deployment and therefore need to be budgeted for. However, these upfront costs are rarely included in the licence cost, either. Some vendors charge onboarding fees, admin tool fees, or even extra for training.
3. Integrations
It would be less than ideal – and not to mention a cyber security risk – to have your company and customer data scattered across various platforms. This is why most businesses need their CCaaS platform to integrate with a CRM, ticketing system, or workforce management tool. While Five9 is highly compatible, other platforms may require custom development work – which, of course, comes at an additional fee.
4. Support Tiers
With Five9, you have the option to choose what level of support you need:
- Standard Support: Included with your licence, giving you access to Five9’s knowledge base, online ticketing, and community forums. Response times are typically longer, making it best suited for businesses in less time-sensitive industries.
- Premium & Enterprise Support: These tiers provide faster SLAs, 24/7 coverage, and priority queuing. At higher levels, you also get a dedicated Technical Account Manager and proactive system health checks — essential if downtime could cost you revenue or reputation.
For industries like travel, hospitality, or financial services, where even short outages can disrupt operations, I always recommend budgeting for Premium or Enterprise Support. But even in less time-critical sectors, better support often pays for itself in reduced downtime and smoother scaling.
With that being said, it’s worth mentioning that disaster doesn’t always have to strike for you to need support. Sometimes, you’ll have a question about a particular feature, or be curious about the best way to scale your current setup, and just want to talk to a solution specialist. This is why at Babble, you’re assigned a dedicated account manager who is there with you every step of the way and is readily available to have a chat.
5. Advanced Features
In this article, I spoke about how customers today demand timely and personalised support. Both of which are enabled by add-ons like AI, real-time analytics, or workforce optimisation tools. While they come at an additional cost, they deliver huge value that even the smallest businesses benefit from, such as improving agent efficiency and compliance.
Price vs. Value: What SMBs Often Miss
I get it, when the industry is full of noise and technical jargon, it can be all too easy to simply shop on price alone. This is a trap that a lot of SMBs tend to fall in because the value behind the price isn’t always clear. So let’s break down what’s often missed:
- Uptime & reliability: One hour of downtime can lead to lost revenue and reputational damage, which essentially wipes out any savings you thought you made by choosing a cheaper platform. Five9’s 99.9% uptime is by far one of its biggest strengths.
- Ease of use: An intuitive platform means faster training, quicker agent productivity, shorter call handling times, and less time supervisors spend on troubleshooting.
- AI & automation: This is where the future of CX is headed. Virtual agents can handle routine queries, freeing your team to focus on complex cases. This has proven to be a lifesaver for smaller businesses with limited personnel.
- Compliance & security: In highly regulated industries, like finance, the wrong provider could expose you to fines and reputational damage. Five9 has built-in compliance features like on-screen scripts for agents, helping ensure regulations are followed on every call (with the added benefit of training them in the process).
Integrations Aren’t Optional — Here’s Why
Earlier, I mentioned how the importance of integration is often overlooked or is seen as a non-essential add-on. However, for SMBs with lean IT teams, integrations are a make-or-break factor. There are hidden costs of patching systems together, when you could invest in a CCaaS platform that centralises data and reporting instead.
Without proper integrations, you risk:
- Data silos (customer information scattered across systems)
- Slow agents (dead air while they search multiple screens)
- Inaccurate or fragmented reporting
- Higher security risks from inconsistent data storage
I’ve worked in call centres, and nothing kills a customer interaction faster than an agent fumbling between screens. Instead of making the customer journey as smooth as possible, you find yourself searching all over the place for the records you need to do your job. Integrations aren’t just a cost line item — they’re about agent efficiency and customer experience.
Don’t Fall Into the Scalability Trap – Budget Beyond Year One
I can’t stress enough how important it is to choose a platform that grows with you. This is why Five9’s pricing is linear: if you’re paying £70 per agent per month, adding another agent simply means adding another £70. That makes growth easy to predict and budget for.
But scaling isn’t just about licences. More agents means:
- Higher bandwidth consumption
- More demand on your reporting system
- Greater need for higher-tier support
As your workforce expands – which is usually the case for SMBs – planning for scale is crucial. If you don’t, you’ll be left with two options: either rip out the system and retrain staff (which is certainly going to cost you in downtime), or absorb the rising costs without the right support. Whichever door you choose to walk through will ultimately lead you right into a trap.
This brings me to another big mistake I see SMBs make: not mapping the full lifecycle of CCaaS costs. Too often, businesses budget only for the first year. They forget that as their company grows, so does their CCaaS bill. Support, integrations, advanced features — all of these should grow with you.
The solution to avoiding making this mistake is simply working with a transparent partner. At Babble, we don’t just quote a price per agent and leave you to figure it out. We model the full cost — including growth, support, and add-ons — so you know exactly what you’re committing to before you sign the contract.
The Bottom Line on Five9 Pricing
On paper, Five9 may look more expensive than some alternatives, and it can be a bit tricky at first to understand the value of what you’re actually paying for. But once you look beyond the per-agent licence fee and factor in telephony, onboarding, integrations, support, and scalability, you can build a comprehensive budget that allows you to invest with confidence.
The real risk isn’t overpaying on day one: it’s underestimating the true cost of ownership and ending up with hidden fees, downtime, or a platform that can’t scale as your business grows. That’s why I always advise my clients to think about reliability, compliance, AI, and the long-term value of their investment – instead of chasing the cheapest price tag.
As a CCaaS specialist at Babble, I’ve seen too many businesses trip up because they weren’t given the full picture upfront. My goal here has been to help you see the whole cost story and make sure you don’t get caught out.
So before you sign with any vendor, ask yourself:
- What’s really included in the per-agent fee?
- What extras (telephony, AI, support) will I need to budget for?
- How will these costs change as I grow?
- And most importantly, how will this platform improve my customer experience?
If you can answer those questions, you’ll be in a strong position to choose the right solution. But if you’d like a clearer picture, let’s have a chat — I’ll walk you through the numbers, model your growth, and make sure you’re investing in a platform that grows with you.
