One of the biggest selling points of 3CX has always been their licensing model – you don’t pay per extension, instead you pay based on the simultaneous call count. This meant if you were in a school and needed an emergency phone in each classroom that maybe got used once a year, instead of paying for 500 classrooms, you could buy a license for 4 (or 8) SC.
3CX hadn’t officially announced the change when this post was first published, but they now have updated their website and sent out emails about their new “Fair Use Policy”. There was also multiple discussions on various sites that the “unlimited extensions” was coming to an end and 3CX was planning to implement a sliding 1 to 4/5/6/7 licenses, with the larger the license the more extensions you are allowed to have. The smallest 4SC Pro license is now capped at 15 extensions, where the 8, 16, and 24 are at a 1 to 5. Past there it starts to scale up, with the largest 1024 license being set at a 1 to 7 ratio.
This means if you have a 8SC license, you can only have 40 extensions max. For the school with 500 classroom phones previously using a 8SC license – they’ll need a 96 SC license. Retail enterprise pricing in the US means that their $425 license now costs $5,650.
While people can only speculate the reason for the change, it’s certainly suspicious that this change happened so soon after 3CX removed the 4SC enterprise license. It’s also likely that many people will move to another PBX, which could drive other revenue increasing initiatives as well.
(This post was updated with new revised limits published in November 2025)
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