Here’s a service with an expanding market, customers who rarely leave, and remarkably little competition for it — because most of your rivals are quietly walking away from it.
It’s fax. Not the machine in the corner, but the modern, cloud-based service that replaced it. The instinct across the industry is to treat fax as legacy and let it fade out of the portfolio. The numbers make a strong case for doing the opposite.
The number that should give you pause
The plastic box on the shelf really is disappearing. Manufacturers have slowed production, replacement parts are getting scarce, and hardware sales are in decline. But that is not the same thing as fax going away.
The service is growing. Cloud and online fax services are expanding at a compound annual rate of roughly 5% to 10%, even as the machines vanish. The broader fax services market sat at around $3.3 billion in 2024 and is on track to reach roughly $4.47 billion by 2030. In the US alone, something in the order of 17 billion faxes are still sent every year.
That distinction is the whole point for a partner. You are not being asked to sell hardware. You are selling a service — and the service line is on a growth curve, not a death curve.
Why it isn’t going anywhere
Fax persists for one unglamorous reason: compliance.
In healthcare, fax still accounts for roughly 70% of all communication, and up to 90% once you include electronic health record–linked faxing. Nine in ten healthcare leaders are now actively engaged in the cloud-fax market, and four in ten have already made the move. Legal, finance, and insurance tell the same story — HIPAA, GDPR, and industry rules make fax the path of least resistance for secure, auditable, verified document exchange.
Here is what that means in plain terms for your business: these customers are not shopping around for a trendier alternative. They need fax, they will keep needing it, and the switching cost is low motivation paired with high compliance risk. That is about as defensible as a revenue line gets.
What that actually does for your portfolio
Every partner is trying to do two things at once: grow the service mix and protect the base. Online fax quietly does both.
It is a growth line, because the services market is expanding. And it is a low-churn line, because compliance-anchored customers do not leave. You get both without building anything new or inventing a fresh pitch. Better still, it is a category most of your competitors are treating exactly the way you were tempted to — as legacy to be pruned. That neglect is the opportunity. The service everyone else is walking away from is the one with a growing market and customers who stay.
The wedge into verticals worth owning
Now the strategic move. Fax is not just a service to keep — it’s a foot in the door.
The businesses that depend on it — medical practices, law firms, accountants, insurance brokers — are exactly the SMBs with steady budgets and long relationships. They are also notoriously hard to win. Lead with the one service they are required to have, deliver it cleanly, and you have earned the seat to expand the relationship: secure business email, a professional website, directory presence, reputation management, the rest of the stack. Fax gets you in the room with customers who are otherwise difficult to reach.
And it is a far cry from the machine in the corner. Hostopia’s white-label Online Fax comes in Standard, Encrypted, and Multi-User tiers — HIPAA-compliant, integrated with cloud storage, and usable from any device, with the hardware and maintenance burden removed entirely. Your brand sits on the front; the compliance-grade infrastructure is handled behind it.
The takeaway
The instinct to treat fax as legacy is understandable. The data simply doesn’t support it. In a portfolio where most services are getting more crowded and more competitive by the quarter, fax is a rare thing: a growing, defensible line that your rivals are actively abandoning.
So instead of retiring it, promote it. See the Online Fax line-up at hostopia.com.
Hostopia — behind the brands that power small business.
