Call Tariffs and Pricing for Telecom Resellers

Getting your pricing right is one of the most important things you’ll do as a telecom reseller. Charge too much and customers leave. Charge too little and your margins disappear. This guide walks you through how SAFE handles tariffs and pricing, so you can build a structure that works for your business.

Key Takeaways

• The UK telecoms resellers market is worth around £5.6bn in 2025-26 (IBISWorld, 2026), so a few pence per call adds up across the base
• Rating chains let SAFE turn raw call records into priced billable items automatically
• Per-class markups are the lowest-effort way to keep retail prices in step with wholesale costs
• Bundles and discount plans support inclusive minutes, tiered rates, and loyalty pricing
• From January 2025, in-contract price rises in consumer contracts must be quoted in pounds and pence at the point of sale

Key terms in this article

What is a rating chain?

A rating chain is the sequence of rules SAFE follows to turn one call into one priced line item. It checks the call type, looks up the customer’s tariff, applies any discounts, and works out a final charge.

What is a per-class markup?

A per-class markup is a percentage you add to your wholesale cost to set the retail price for a given call class (the grouping a destination falls into, such as UK mobile, UK landline, or international). It’s a quick way to maintain margin without writing a full custom tariff for every customer.

What is a tariff bundle?

A tariff bundle packages a fixed allowance of usage, like inclusive minutes, with overage rates that kick in when the allowance is exceeded. Customers like the predictability and you benefit from steady recurring revenue.

How Call Rating Works

Every time one of your customers makes a call, that call needs a price. The process of turning a raw call record into a billable item is called call rating.

Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

• A call detail record arrives with the caller’s number, the destination, and the duration
• SAFE looks up which customer owns that number
• It finds the right tariff for that call type
• It calculates the cost based on the tariff rules
• The rated call is ready for invoicing

This all happens automatically during your CDR processing step. But the accuracy depends entirely on how well you’ve set up your tariffs. Clean number assignments matter too: see our customer accounts and number management guide for the data hygiene side of this.

Building a Rating Chain

A rating chain is the sequence of rules SAFE follows to find the correct price for a call. Think of it as a series of questions:

1. Which call class does it belong to? The broad category: mobile, landline, international, or non-geographic
2. What’s the specific call type? Within a class, the exact destination network or country, such as O2, EE, or France landline, which often has its own wholesale rate
3. What tariff applies? The customer’s assigned tariff determines the per-minute rate
4. Is there a per-class markup? If no tariff is assigned, a fixed margin on your wholesale cost can be applied instead

Getting this chain right means calls are rated consistently against your tariffs. The tariff configuration guide explains each step in detail.

Per-Class Markups

Not every customer needs a full tariff with specific per-minute rates for each call class. Sometimes you just want to apply a fixed margin on top of your wholesale costs.

Per-class markups let you do exactly that. Instead of defining a complete tariff, you set a percentage markup on each call class. SAFE takes your wholesale cost, applies the margin, and that becomes the customer’s retail rate.

This is particularly useful when:

• You have many customers who all get the same margin
• You want to keep pricing simple without maintaining detailed tariffs
• Your wholesale rates change frequently and you’d rather your retail prices follow automatically

Your wholesale call rates come from your upstream carrier (BT Wholesale, Gamma, Voiceflex, or similar), so the practical question is the markup you set on top of your carrier rate card.

Fixed Fees and Recurring Charges

Call charges are only part of the picture. Many resellers also need to bill for:

• Line rental: monthly charges per phone line
• Handset costs: equipment charges spread over a contract
• Feature charges: voicemail, call recording, hunt groups
• Support packages: tiered service level agreements

SAFE handles these through fixed-fee tariffs, which work alongside your call tariffs. They appear on the same invoice, so your customers see everything in one place. Your recurring billing runs pick these up automatically alongside call charges, all wrapped up in your monthly billing run.

Discount Plans and Bundles

Bundled minutes and discount plans are powerful tools for winning and keeping customers. SAFE supports several approaches:

• Inclusive minute bundles: give customers a set number of minutes per month, with overage billed at standard rates
• Tiered discounts: reduce rates as usage increases
• Loyalty discounts: reward long-standing customers with better rates

The discount plans documentation covers how to configure each type.

A Worked Example

Here’s a typical setup for a small business customer with 10 phone lines:

Item	Monthly Cost
10 x line rental at £8.00	£80.00
UK landline calls (500 bundled mins, then 1.5p/min)	varies
UK mobile calls at 4p/min	varies
International calls at standard tariff rates	varies
Call recording (3 lines) at £3.00/line	£9.00
Fixed monthly total	£89.00 + calls

In SAFE, you’d set this up with:

• A base call tariff covering UK and international rates
• A 500-minute UK landline bundle
• Fixed-fee items for line rental and call recording

The whole lot gets calculated and invoiced automatically each billing run.

Managing Annual Price Increases

Many resellers raise prices annually. Doing this manually across hundreds of customers is tedious and error-prone.

SAFE’s price increase tools let you:

• Apply percentage increases across tariffs in one go
• Schedule increases for a specific date
• Keep an audit trail of all changes

Plan your increases well in advance. Since 17 January 2025, new and renewed UK telecoms consumer contracts must set out in-contract price rises in pounds and pence at the point of sale, and can no longer use inflation-linked or percentage-based terms for the main monthly price. See our pounds-and-pence price-rise guide for the detail on Ofcom GC C1.18 and what to put in your sales materials. Make sure any price changes you apply line up with the rules that were in force when each contract was sold or renewed, and give customers the notice they’re entitled to. Then make the change cleanly in one operation rather than updating accounts one by one.

For pricing IP voice services specifically (SIP trunks per channel, hosted PBX per seat, bundled minutes), see our SIP trunks and hosted PBX billing guide.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

After working with hundreds of resellers, here are the pricing pitfalls we see most often:

• Too many custom tariffs. Use per-class markups and overrides instead of creating a unique tariff for every customer. It’s much easier to maintain.
• Forgetting to rate all call types. Make sure your tariffs cover non-geographic numbers, premium rate, and directory enquiries. Unrated calls create billing errors.
• Not reviewing margins regularly. Your wholesale costs change. Check that your retail tariffs still deliver healthy margins at least quarterly.
• Ignoring bundles. Customers love the predictability of inclusive minutes. If you’re not offering bundles, you’re likely losing deals to competitors who do.

Getting Your Pricing Right

The tariff section of our user guide is a good place to start if you’re new to SAFE. For detailed reference on every pricing option, explore the full pricing and tariffs documentation.

Good pricing isn’t just about covering costs. It’s about building packages that are easy for customers to understand and profitable for your business to deliver.

View Tariff Documentation | Contact Us