Cloud Fax vs. On-Premises: Why Paying for Peak Capacity No Longer Makes Sense

Fax volumes are rarely consistent. One year you have 500 hundred thousand pages going out, the next it’s over a million. Or maybe your heaviest workload happens during business hours, while nights are practically silent. So why pay for and maintain on-premises fax infrastructure that supports peak volume 24/7?

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to.

On-Premises vs. Cloud Fax: A Question of Capacity

Traditional, on-premises fax infrastructure forces companies to build for the maximumpossibleload, whether they fulfill it or not. And, based on our data, most organizations don’t utilize their peak capacity consistently.

Annual fax volume for our biggest customers fluctuates by about 30% year over year, while a fifth of those report annual changes in volume of 50% or more.

If you still operate your own fax servers on-premises, this means investing in servers, phone lines, and IT resources just in case traffic spikes. You’re not just paying for what you send, you’re paying for what you might need.

Cloud Fax flips that model. Because you pay only for what you need, and actually send, right now.

At Retarus, if your daily volume doesn’t exceed 250,000 pages, you don’t even have to give us heads-up. We scale with you, automatically and invisibly.

Real-World Volume Variability

Here are three types of fax customers we’ve seen again and again:

The Year-to-Year Waves:
A financial services company sent just over 2 million faxes in 2022. In 2023? Over 5 million. The following year, they were back down to 3 million pages. This could happen for any number of reasons, from fluctuating investment volume or a cyclical business model to regulatory changes. With cloud faxing, they didn’t eat the cost of unused infrastructure, they only paid for what they needed.
The Seasonal Surges:
An insurance group sees a massive spike in December/January claims volume. A tax firm goes from quiet to chaos every February through April. Both benefit from the cloud’s ability to scale up during “busy season,” and scale down during off seasons without a second thought.
The Business Hour Regulars:
A healthcare client sends nearly all its faxes between 10 AM and 4 PM. At night? Barely anything. On-prem would require provisioning for that midday peak 24/7. With cloud fax, they let the infrastructure breathe, and the budget does too.