An MSP built for schools and non-profits, DNS phones 60-classroom buildings without the per-handset tax, keeps the whole stack agnostic, and tells every client they can walk in 30 days. Two years in, nobody has.
Schools do not get to choose how many phones they need. Building codes put a handset in every classroom, and at fifty or sixty classrooms per building, the standard hosted per-handset model turns a compliance requirement into a monthly tax.
“You have 50, 60 classrooms. You need to put a phone in there by code, and now you're paying $19, $20 a month per handset.”
Paging made it worse. Districts were, in Sam’s words, paying through the nose for proprietary IP paging systems when most schools only need one thing: generic all-call paging for bells and announcements.
DNS rebuilt the economics end to end on the 1Stream platform (bvoip, when the partnership began): a pricing model shaped for large environments instead of per-handset billing, standardized analog all-call paging with Algo endpoints pulling bells and announcements into one system, and inexpensive Yealink handsets in the classrooms. Upfront costs and ongoing costs both came down against what districts had bought before.
Just as deliberate is what DNS refuses to sell: lock-in. No long-term commitments, which matches how DNS itself bills, and nothing proprietary holding the client hostage.
“I use it as part of my sales deck: if you hate our services, cancel in 30 days, reset your phones... You're not locked into our proprietary system.”
For DNS, voice is not the bread and butter, and that is the point. It is a low-cost value-add that makes the whole client relationship stickier, which only works if the platform underneath is cheap to run, easy to support, and honest to sell.
“A successful vendor is somebody that overcommunicates... You need to be more proactive than reactive. The set-it-and-forget-it model is no longer applicable.”
Sam gets courted by twenty vendors at a time, so the bar is explicit: proactive communication, billing that just works, a real support mechanism, and a training portal his new hires can learn from without DNS running the class. And one requirement is non-negotiable:
“ConnectWise is my mothership, and if you don't have an integration path into that, whether it's for billing or ongoing support, I can't use you. I'm not going to build an infrastructure to support a vendor.”
“If you don't like our support, you don't like the service, cancel it. In fact, reset your phones. We'll help you through the offboarding. I've yet to have a single customer do that.”
That is the whole story in one offer. An agnostic stack means DNS wins on service, not switching costs, and two years of clients who could leave any month and choose not to is the only retention metric that matters.
No long-term lock-in, ConnectWise-native, and priced to make sense at classroom scale. See it on your own stack.
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