Sfax by Scrypt Review: HIPAA Faxing Pricing & Alternatives

By Alexey Spasskiy · Published August 6, 2026 · 12 min read

Quick answer: Sfax is a HIPAA-focused cloud fax service, now owned by Consensus Cloud Solutions, that costs $37–$125 a month — not the $29/$49/$99 most review sites still quote. The security is genuine; the product around it has not been meaningfully updated in years.

If you are evaluating Sfax by Scrypt, you have probably already noticed that no two sources agree on what it costs. That is the first thing this review fixes. We pulled the numbers off Sfax's own checkout pages rather than off a comparison chart, then worked through the parts of the bill that never appear in the headline price: overage, extra fax lines, porting, and custom cover pages.

Sfax has been selling secure faxing to healthcare since 1998, and that heritage cuts both ways. The compliance engineering is real and well documented. The buying experience, the mobile app, and the published security attestations all read like they stopped being tended some time ago.

Sfax at a Glance

What Is Sfax, and Who Owns It Now?

Sfax is a HIPAA-oriented cloud fax service sold at scrypt.com, and it is owned by Consensus Cloud Solutions (NASDAQ: CCSI). You will not find that on the marketing pages, but the site footer reads "Consensus® and Sfax® are registered trademarks of Consensus," the help center carries a Consensus copyright, and the iOS app is published under Consensus Cloud Solutions LLC.

That matters when you are shortlisting. Consensus also owns eFax, MyFax, MetroFax and SRFax — so a "competitive" comparison between Sfax and three of its apparent rivals is really a comparison of four product lines inside one company. We unpack the same ownership structure in our SRFax review and our eFax review.

The product itself is aimed squarely at healthcare: send, receive, annotate, digitally sign and file faxes without printing anything, with an audit trail on every document. Sfax says it serves customers across all 50 states and has been doing this since 1998.

Sfax Pricing in 2026

Sfax has three self-serve plans — $37, $62 and $125 a month — plus a quote-only Enterprise tier. Every plan includes one toll-free fax line, unlimited users, one year of storage, and $0.10-per-page overage.

Annual billing is a straight "one month free" — $407 is exactly eleven times $37 — so the discount is about 8%, not the 20% that has become standard elsewhere.

The prices everyone else is quoting are wrong

Search for Sfax pricing and you will be told it starts at $29/month. Open the actual sign-up page and the Standard plan bills $37.00; Plus bills $62.00; Contender bills $125.00. The older $29/$49/$99 table is still sitting in the page's markup underneath the live one, which is almost certainly how it keeps getting copied into third-party reviews.

Budget from the checkout page, not from a comparison chart.

Overage is where the bills go wrong

Every plan charges $0.10 per page once you pass the bundle. That is straightforward on paper and brutal in practice, because fax page counts are not something a front desk tracks. A single 40-page records request eats 11% of a Standard plan's monthly allowance.

On Trustpilot, overage is the complaint that recurs most often alongside support — one long-time customer describes a single overage charge of $628. Nothing about that is a hidden fee; it is $0.10 a page applied to a volume nobody was counting.

The fees that are not in the headline price

None of these are outrageous individually. Together they are the difference between the plan you priced and the invoice you get, which is worth knowing before you compare Sfax against a service that bundles porting for free.

Is Sfax HIPAA Compliant?

Yes, with an important caveat about which plan you buy. Sfax is purpose-built for PHI, states plainly that it will sign a Business Associate Agreement, and backs that with a documented security stack:

• In transit: 256-bit TLS with 2048-bit private keys
• At rest: AES-256 on self-encrypting drives, with access-controlled decryption
• Access: role-based permissions, configurable session timeouts, two-factor authentication, and account access restricted to specific IP addresses
• Audit: detailed audit trails on every transaction, with faxes archived for the life of the account
• Facilities: Tier III and Tier IV geographically redundant colocations, biometric access, 24×7×365 onsite security

That is a stronger technical baseline than most fax vendors publish. The problem is the pricing grid: "BAA Available" appears on Plus, Contender and Enterprise — not on Standard. The page header simultaneously claims "All our faxing plans are HIPAA Compliant."

Those two statements cannot both be operative in the way a compliance officer needs. Under HHS's guidance on business associates, a covered entity may only let a business associate handle ePHI once it has satisfactory assurances in a written contract. Encryption without a signed BAA is not compliance — it is just encryption.

The SSAE 16 problem

Sfax still advertises "SSAE16 Type II certified" data centers across its product, security and mobile listings. SSAE 16 was superseded by SSAE 18 effective May 1, 2017 — nearly a decade ago. Modern buyers ask for a SOC 2 Type II report issued under the current standard.

It is very likely the underlying facilities are audited to something current and the marketing copy simply never got updated. But a security reviewer cannot accept "probably fine," and if you are the person filling out a vendor risk questionnaire, request the actual report rather than quoting the website. Our HIPAA fax requirements guide has the full checklist of what to ask for.

Sfax Features: What You Actually Get

Sfax's feature set is thorough and desk-shaped. The things it does well:

• Annotate and sign in the browser. Mark up a received fax, apply a digital signature, and send it back without printing. This is the feature Sfax customers actually stay for.
• Folders, contacts and a document library. Received faxes can be filed into custom folders; contacts are shared across the organization.
• Admin controls. Per-user permissions, the ability to suspend or deactivate a user, add or rename fax lines, and restrict access by IP.
• Windows and Mac desktop tools, including a print driver that faxes from any application's Print dialog.
• Box and ShareFile integrations for pulling documents out of an existing document store.
• Unlimited users on every plan — no per-seat charge at all. For a 30-person clinic this is a real, material advantage over per-seat competitors.

What you do not get: an email-to-fax gateway of the kind most rivals offer. Sfax argues the point deliberately — "we see email as a significant risk when sending sensitive information" — and restricts email to notifications only. That is a defensible position, not an oversight, but it does mean nobody in your practice will be faxing from Outlook.

The Sfax API

Sfax has a REST API, but it starts at the $125 Contender plan. Sfax's own developer documentation is blunt about both the tier and the effort: you need a plan of that size "to use the API in production," and "you will need to have a developer who understands and writes code in order to integrate."

The API works on named method calls — SendFax, ReceiveInboundFax, ReceiveOutboundFax, DownloadInboundFax, DownloadOutboundFax — with callback alerts when a fax completes and optional barcode reading on inbound documents. Documents come back as TIF or PDF. Credentials are generated per user, and payloads use AES encryption.

That is a capable integration surface. It is also a $1,375-a-year entry ticket even on annual billing, before you have written a line of code — and the developer documentation was last revised in 2021. If programmatic faxing is the reason you are shopping, read our HIPAA fax API guide before committing to a tier.

The Mobile App Is the Real Problem

Sfax's iPhone app was last updated on January 30, 2022 and averages 1.4 stars from 43 ratings. There is no Sfax app on Google Play at all.

Those are not opinions — they are the numbers on Apple's own App Store listing, verified in September 2026. The app still declares a minimum requirement of iOS 9.3, a version released in 2016. Its most recent help-center notice concerns legacy apps that stopped working in April 2017.

For a service whose entire pitch is faxing for healthcare — an industry that runs on people moving between rooms — this is the gap that should decide the shortlist. Sfax is excellent if your faxing happens at a desk. It has effectively conceded everything that happens away from one.

What Sfax Customers Say

Sfax holds a TrustScore of 1.7 out of 5 across 102 reviews on Trustpilot. Two themes dominate the negative half, and they are consistent:

1. Support responsiveness. Unanswered emails, voicemail instead of a person, and multi-day waits on password resets recur constantly — which sits awkwardly beside Sfax's marketing line, "No robots, just humans... you can call us anytime."
2. Billing surprises. Overage charges and unexpected billing frequency changes.

The praise is equally consistent and worth weighing: reviewers who are happy describe a simple interface and the relief of faxing medical records without thinking about compliance. That is exactly what the product is for.

Read the reviews by date rather than by average. The positive ones cluster in the service's earlier years; the frustrations are more recent. That pattern — a good product, thinly supported — matches everything else in this review.

Who Should Buy Sfax

Sfax is the right answer for a narrow but real set of buyers:

• Large teams with modest page volume. Unlimited users is the strongest thing on the price list. At 700 pages a month, Sfax's flat $62 beats per-seat pricing somewhere around a dozen users and keeps winning from there.
• Organizations that want signing and annotation in the fax tool itself, rather than exporting to a separate PDF editor.
• Compliance-first shops that fax from desks and genuinely do not want an email gateway in the workflow.

It is the wrong answer if you fax from phones, need an API without a $125 commitment, send fewer than 350 pages a month, or want a vendor whose published attestations match the current decade.

The Best Sfax Alternatives in 2026

mFax Business — when the BAA and the app both have to work

mFax Business is the closest like-for-like replacement for a practice that liked Sfax's compliance posture but not its price floor or its phone story. A signed BAA comes with every plan, not with a tier upgrade, and so does REST API access — there is no separate API fee and no $125 threshold to clear.

Pricing is built rather than chosen: $3 per seat plus $4 per 100 pages a month, with 20% off annual billing, starting from about $9/mo. Run the comparison honestly and it goes both ways:

Sfax wins above roughly a dozen users at the same page volume, because seats are free there and metered here. Below that, mFax is meaningfully cheaper — and the gap in what you get is wider than the gap in price: real apps on iPhone, Android, Windows and Mac rated 4.7 on both the App Store and Google Play, AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+, SOC 2 Type II, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and faxes processed in the US.

Two more differences worth pricing in. Porting an existing fax number is free on mFax and usually completes within 7 business days, against Sfax's $10 per line and a 2–4 week window that cannot start during your trial — the mechanics are in our fax number porting guide. And every member of an mFax organization can fax from Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail by addressing a message to <fax number>@send.mfax.to, with the login address authorized automatically — the workflow Sfax deliberately declines to offer.

SRFax — if you are Canadian and desk-bound

Sfax's sibling under Consensus is the better fit for clinics that need PHIPA alongside HIPAA and never fax from a phone. It has no mobile app either, so you are choosing it for compliance coverage, not convenience — the details are in our SRFax review.

eFax — the enterprise relative

Same parent company, larger footprint, higher price — and the same tier trap, only steeper: eFax puts the BAA on its Protect plan at $49.99/month and up, so the entry tiers cannot carry PHI either. Worth a look if procurement is already comfortable with Consensus; our eFax review has the full plan breakdown.

Shopping the whole category

If Sfax is one of three or four names on your list, start with our roundup of the best HIPAA compliant fax services, which compares BAA terms, encryption and real-world app quality side by side. The underlying rules — what a BAA has to cover, what "encrypted" has to mean — are in our complete guide to HIPAA compliant faxing.

The Verdict

Rated 3.0 out of 5. Points for genuine security engineering, in-browser signing, and a seat model that large organizations will struggle to beat. Points off for stale published pricing, a BAA that is not listed on the entry plan, an API gated at $125/month, a decade-old attestation standard on the security page, a 1.7 Trustpilot score, and a mobile story that has effectively been abandoned.

If your faxing happens at desks, in volume, across a lot of people, Sfax still earns a place on the shortlist. If any part of it happens on a phone — and in healthcare, it does — you are paying a premium for a product that cannot follow you there.

Fax Securely Without the Trade-offs

For a practice or office, mFax Business gives you a virtual fax number, a signed BAA on every plan, REST API access and seats for the whole team across web, mobile and desktop. Build your own plan with the live calculator — usage-based pricing from about $9/mo, and cancel anytime.

Just need to send one fax? Open mFax in your browser, upload your document, and send. 7 days free, then $7.99/mo. No machine, no store, no waiting.