The single most useful thing to understand about online fax pricing is that rankings scramble as your volume moves. The service that’s cheapest at 25 pages a month is one of the most expensive at 1,000, and the volume champion charges more than anyone for a light user’s handful of pages. There is no “cheapest fax service” in the abstract — only the cheapest one for your bracket.
This page walks the entire volume curve, from a few pages a year up to 3,000 a month, using the real annual-billing prices for the ten providers we track. Find your bracket, note the plan that wins it, then confirm the fit with the fax price calculator, which does the overage math for you. If you already know your rough monthly volume, skim to the table below and you’re most of the way there.
One ground rule before the numbers: count pages in both directions. Nearly every plan here either pools sent and received pages into one allowance or splits them into two separate buckets. Either way, a fax you receive burns allowance the same as one you send, so your “volume” is send plus receive, cover sheets included.
How providers actually price a page
There’s no line item on your bill that says “$0.02 per page.” Instead you buy a monthly allowance — 60 pages, 500 pages, 3,000 pages — and the real cost per page is simply the plan price divided by how many pages you actually use. Fill the allowance and your effective rate drops to its floor; use half of it and you’ve doubled your real per-page cost.
That’s why oversizing is the most common way people overpay. A $31.63 plan for 3,000 pages is a spectacular 1.1¢ per page — but only if you send 3,000 pages. Run 400 through it and you’ve paid nearly 8¢ each for the privilege of a big number you didn’t need. Size to your realistic average, not your busiest month ever.
The volume brackets
Here’s the cheapest credible plan at each common volume, using annual-billing prices and a single pooled send-plus-receive figure:
| Monthly pages | Best-value plan | Price/mo | Effective ¢/page |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 5 (one-offs) | Dropbox Fax pay-per-fax | $0.99/fax | — |
| Up to 60 | CocoFax Lite | $4.99 | ~8.3¢ |
| Up to 200 | Fax.Plus Basic | $6.99 | ~3.5¢ |
| Up to 500 | Nextiva vFax Essential | $7.95 | ~1.6¢ |
| 500–550 | MetroFax Essential | $9.96 | ~1.8¢ |
| 550–1,050 | MetroFax Best Value | $12.46 | ~1.2¢ |
| 1,050–3,000 | MetroFax Professional | $31.63 | ~1.1¢ |
A few things worth calling out. CocoFax Lite is the cheapest way anywhere to hold a real inbound fax number — a US or Canada line — but its 60-page ceiling evaporates fast and every extra page is a punishing 20¢. Between 200 and 1,000 pages, the fight is almost entirely between Nextiva vFax and MetroFax; the two trade the lead depending on exactly where you land, and both charge a flat 3¢ per overage page, which keeps a bad estimate from becoming a bad bill. See the full grid on the comparison page.
A worked example: 700 pages a month
Say a busy insurance office sends and receives about 700 pages a month combined. Nobody sells a plan at exactly 700, so the decision is which allowance to straddle. Here’s what the same month costs across five plausible options:
- MetroFax Best Value — $12.46 flat (1,050-page allowance, room to spare). Winner.
- Nextiva vFax Professional — $13.95 flat (1,000-page allowance).
- Nextiva vFax Essential — $7.95 + 200 overage pages at 3¢ = $13.95.
- MetroFax Essential — $9.96 + 150 overage pages at 3¢ = $14.46.
- Fax.Plus Premium — $13.99 (500 pages) + 200 pages at 7¢ = $27.99.
- eFax Business — $39.99 (500 pages) + 200 pages at 7¢ = $53.99.
The spread is striking: same 700 pages, from $12.46 to $53.99. MetroFax Best Value wins not because it’s the flashiest product — its portal looks a decade old — but because its 1,050-page tier lands just above this office’s volume with a low sticker price. eFax costs more than four times as much here for the same pages, which is the tax you pay for the brand name and HITRUST certification if you don’t need them.
Overages: the fourth price
Sticker price, allowance, and features get all the attention. The overage rate is the quiet fourth number that decides close calls. When you sit between two of a provider’s tiers, you’re really choosing between paying overage on the smaller plan or buying the bigger one outright.
The rule of thumb: with cheap overages (3¢), buy the tier below your average and let a few spill pages cost pennies. With expensive overages (10–20¢), buy the tier above and never touch them. At 600 pages, MetroFax Essential (550 pages, 3¢ overage) costs you $9.96 plus $1.50 for the last fifty pages — cheaper than upgrading. Run that same 50-page spill on CocoFax Lite’s 20¢ rate and it’s $10 in overage alone, so you’d upgrade instead.
iFax is the exception that proves the rule: it charges no overages at all. That sounds generous, and predictable bills are genuinely nice, but it means the allowance is a hard ceiling. A heavy month doesn’t cost you a few dollars extra; it forces a mid-cycle upgrade to the next tier. Know your ceiling before you pick an iFax plan.
Edge cases and gotchas
Separate send/receive allowances. Most plans pool your pages, but a few split them. MyFax Home Office ($8.25) gives you 100 send and 100 receive — and the two buckets never cover for each other. If your traffic is lopsided (say 150 sent, 40 received), you’ll pay overage on sends while receive pages sit unused. iFax Basic ($12.49) is send-only with no inbound number at all, which is easy to miss.
Inbound junk counts. On separate-allowance plans, incoming spam faxes eat your receive pages. It’s a small tax, but on a 100-page bucket it adds up, and the low-cost pooled providers simply don’t have this problem.
Page counting isn’t always one-for-one. Metering is roughly per minute of transmission, so a dense, fine-resolution scan or a very long page can bill as two. Cover sheets are pages too. Budget a little headroom rather than sizing to an exact count.
Failed faxes. Nextiva vFax doesn’t charge you for faxes that fail to deliver — a real perk when you’re sending to temperamental old machines. Assume most others do count the attempt unless they say otherwise.
Compliance changes the whole table. If you handle PHI, the cheap volume plans above are off the table — MetroFax has no HIPAA option, and CocoFax’s compliance claims are self-attested with no signed BAA. Your real floor becomes SRFax Healthcare Basic ($13.65 for 500 pages with a BAA included) or Documo Solo ($25 for 300). We break that down separately on the HIPAA fax pricing guide.
When to pick which
- You fax a few times a year. Skip subscriptions. Dropbox Fax’s $0.99 pay-per-fax (up to 10 pages) is the cheapest single send we track.
- Light, steady, non-regulated use (under ~200 pages). Fax.Plus Basic at $6.99 gets you a polished app and a real number; CocoFax Lite at $4.99 is cheaper still if 60 pages is enough.
- Real office volume, no compliance needs (200–3,000 pages). It’s Nextiva vFax versus MetroFax, full stop — match the allowance to your bracket and take whichever wins on the table above.
- You need a signed BAA. SRFax for the best price per compliant page; Documo if you want EHR integrations and OCR baked in.
For a broader shortlist beyond price alone, see our roundup of the best cheap online fax services and the dedicated business fax pricing guide.
Bottom line
Cost per page is a moving target, and the honest answer to “which is cheapest” is “it depends on your volume.” For most offices that number lands between 200 and 1,000 pages a month, and in that range MetroFax and Nextiva vFax are simply the two names that matter — roughly 1.5–2¢ per page against 3.5–9.5¢ from the premium brands for identical pages. Light users should look at CocoFax and Fax.Plus; anyone touching medical records starts at SRFax instead. Whatever your bracket, plug your real send-plus-receive count into the calculator before you commit — the overage math is where the surprises hide. For the bigger picture on total cost, our blog breaks down how much online fax really costs.