When you set up phone forwarding service, you can purchase a pay-per-minute plan or a package plan. Pay-per-minute plans will get you the cheapest monthly price but you'll pay a call charge for every minute of talk time, and your per-minute call rates will be higher on average versus a package plan. Package plans already include a set amount of talk time in your monthly fee--you'll pay a high subscription fee, but the cost of your average call charges will be much lower than a pay-per-minute plan. 

The country and number type play a major factor in your monthly cost. For example, you can set up toll free forwarding or local number forwarding in countries like the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Singapore, and more at around $5 - $12 per month.  Meanwhile, toll free forwarding numbers in India may cost between $30 and $70 per month, while local forwarding numbers are generally priced around $40 - $55.

Like your monthly pricing, your call forwarding number call charges depend on the number type, the country the number is associated with, and how many minutes of talk time you expect each month. For example, inbound calls made to a local virtual number in Singapore may cost you as much as $0.056 per minute if you have a low-cost plan with no included minutes. Meanwhile, if you expect a large number of calls to be made to the number and you set up a larger plan, your average call charge could be as low as $0.02 per minute. 

There are a few other things to watch out for when comparing your business call forwarding pricing options. 

1. Setup fees: Charging setup fees for a phone number forwarding is becoming less common, but some providers still do so. If you want to use a provider that does charge setup fees, you should push to have those removed. If a call forwarding service provider thinks you will choose another call forwarding service that does not charge setup fees, they're likely to drop those charges for you. 
2. Add-on features: If you want advanced features included with your business call forwarding service, you can expect to pay add-on fees for those. However, that includes workforce-management features like call queuing, extended call recording storage, SMS, live call-monitoring, etc. There are plenty of call forwarding service providers that include standard features like virtual attendant, time-based routing, voicemail-to-email, and many more with every VoIP service plan.