Nova Wholesale BridgeThere are two honest answers to “should we run our own PBX”, and which one applies to you depends less on your size than on whether you have someone who enjoys this sort of thing.
What you actually get from FreePBX
FreePBX is a management interface on top of Asterisk. Asterisk is a telephony engine that will do essentially anything you can describe. That combination gives you:
- Call flows nobody sells as a product. Conditional routing on time, caller, queue depth, CRM lookup, whatever you can express in a dial plan.
- Integration on your terms. Direct database lookups, custom AGI scripts, local recording with your own retention rules.
- No per-seat license. Adding twenty extensions costs nothing beyond the capacity to carry the calls.
- Data that stays where you put it. Recordings and CDRs on your own storage, which for some regulated businesses is the deciding factor.
- No feature roadmap but your own. Nothing gets deprecated because a vendor changed strategy.
What it actually costs
Not license fees. Attention.
- Someone has to own it. Security patching, version upgrades, certificate renewals. Asterisk is a piece of infrastructure exposed to the internet, and an unmaintained PBX is a well-known route to toll fraud.
- Upgrades are projects. Major version jumps break things. That is a planned piece of work, not a background task.
- The knowledge concentrates in one person. This is the real risk. Plenty of companies run a PBX that exactly one employee understands, and that employee eventually leaves.
- Debugging is yours. When one-way audio appears, you are reading SIP traces. That is a genuine skill and it takes time to build.
Where each one fits
A hosted platform is usually right when:
- You have no in-house telephony skills and no wish to acquire any
- Your requirements are ordinary: extensions, IVR, ring groups, voicemail
- You would rather pay per seat than carry operational risk
- Your team is distributed and you do not want to run anything centrally
A self-hosted PBX starts to earn its keep when:
- You already have someone competent who wants to own it
- Your call flows are genuinely unusual and no product fits
- Seat counts are high enough that per-seat pricing dominates the maths
- Compliance requires recordings and data on infrastructure you control
- You need deep integration with internal systems that have no public API
The middle path most people end up on
The distinction is less binary than it looks, because the PBX and the carrier are separate decisions.
Whichever you run, it still needs SIP trunks underneath it. That means you can keep the phone system you have and change only the carrier, or replace the phone system later without touching the carrier relationship, numbers, or routing.
That separation is worth preserving deliberately. Bundling the PBX and the trunks into one supplier makes changing either one a bigger project than it needs to be.
A question that usually settles it
If the person who would run your PBX left next month, what happens?
If the answer is “we would be fine, two other people know it”, self-hosting is a reasonable choice. If the answer is a long pause, buy the hosted product and spend the attention somewhere it differentiates you.
Either way, the trunks are the same
We connect to FreePBX, Asterisk, 3CX, Avaya, Cisco, and anything else that speaks SIP, and we host the PBX for customers who would rather not. The routing underneath is identical either way.
Tell us what you are running and we will tell you what connecting it involves.