Unlimited is a pricing decision, not a technical one
Nothing in this category is actually unlimited. What unlimited means is that the limit is unpublished and discretionary, which is a worse deal than a number you can multiply.
The short version
- An unlimited plan has a fair-use threshold. It is just not on the pricing page.
- A metered plan with a published rate lets you compute the bad month. An unlimited one does not.
- Unlimited prices the average user, so light users subsidise heavy ones.
- Goodcall's uncapped minutes are a genuine exception worth crediting, because the cap is on a different axis.
What unlimited actually means
Every service with an unlimited plan has a point at which a customer becomes unprofitable, and every one of them has a mechanism for dealing with it: a fair-use clause, a conversation, a forced upgrade, or a quiet non-renewal. That is not dishonest by itself. What is unhelpful is that the threshold is almost never published, so a buyer cannot tell whether they are near it.
The result is a plan that is predictable right up until it is not. A business whose volume doubles discovers the limit at exactly the moment growth made the service most valuable, which is the worst possible time to be renegotiating.
Compare that with a published overage rate. Ours is $0.45 a call on Starter. A buyer expecting 900 calls can work out $49 plus $315 in advance and decide whether to move up a tier. That conversation happens before the money is spent rather than after.
Who pays for unlimited
Unlimited pricing has to cover the heavy user out of everyone's subscription, which means the light user pays more than their usage costs. If your volume is modest, an unlimited plan is usually the most expensive way to buy a small amount of something.
It also removes information from your own business. A metered bill tells you how many calls you took and what they cost, which is a number worth having. A flat fee tells you nothing and quietly hides a change in your own call volume until something else surfaces it.
The counter-argument is real: unlimited is simpler, and simplicity has value for a business that does not want to think about a meter. We would rather offer a meter with a rate you can see than simplicity that resolves in the vendor's favor.
The exception worth crediting
Goodcall's uncapped minutes are not the pattern this post is complaining about, because the cap sits on a different axis. They count unique customers, published at $79 for 100 on the Starter plan with $0.50 for each additional one, and within that the minutes genuinely do not matter.
That is an honest design. The limit exists, it is published, and it is on a dimension the buyer can predict. For a business whose calls run long it is a better structure than ours, and we have said so on several pages.
The test for any unlimited claim is simple: ask what the fair-use threshold is and what happens when you cross it, in writing. A vendor with a good answer will give you one.
Hear it handle one of your own calls
Your scenario, your greeting, a couple of minutes.