Every time I go looking for what the competition charges, I end up in the same place: a web form. Five9 will not tell you. Convoso will not tell you. ReadyMode will not tell you. RingCentral shows you a number, then hands you to a sales rep.
I get why. Per-seat pricing only survives contact with a spreadsheet if you cannot build the spreadsheet first.
So here is the other approach. Everything below is either a price the vendor publishes itself, or a figure reported consistently enough by independent price trackers that I am comfortable repeating it in public. I have dated it, because this market reprints its price list every few months and I would rather you catch me being out of date than catch me being vague.
Numbers checked October 2026.
What the published prices look like
Monthly bill for a 10-agent outbound team
Published or reported list prices, October 2026, multiplied by 10 seats.
Same team, same job, same calls. The difference is the unit: per-seat products charge for every human who can log in; Ecsow charges for how many calls can be in progress at once.
Some of those are the vendors’ own published numbers, some are the figures third-party price trackers report consistently, and a few are mine. Hosted VICIdial is the one I would treat as softest — hosts quote $50 to $75 a seat but the real number depends on how much configuration work you hand them.
Five9 will not sell to you anyway
Worth knowing before you get attached to a comparison: Five9’s published plans carry a 50 concurrent-seat minimum. Not 50 users, 50 concurrent seats. A ten-agent team is not a customer they are set up to take.
I do not say that as a dig. Five9 is built for contact centres with compliance teams and workforce management people. It has HIPAA and SOC 2 processes, geo-redundancy and a 24/7 support desk, and that costs money to run. Their entry plan is $119 and it does not even include voice, only chat, email and SMS. Voice starts at $159.
The point is narrower than “expensive is bad”: if you are a small outbound team, most of what per-seat platforms charge for is infrastructure you will never touch. You are paying enterprise rates for a five-person room.
Per seat and per line are different units, and that is the whole story
Per-seat pricing bills every human who logs in. Per-line pricing bills how many conversations can happen at the same time.
Those numbers are not close, and a dialer is exactly the tool that makes them diverge.
Two reasons. One, a predictive dialer places several calls for every agent who frees up, so that busy signals, nobody-home and answering machines get filtered out before an agent picks up a handset. Two, agents are not on calls all day. They are writing notes, setting callbacks, taking a breath after a rough one. On a real campaign, ten agents usually want three to five lines, not ten — and if they genuinely need ten simultaneous conversations, you buy ten lines and it still costs $50.
That is the uncomfortable part for per-seat vendors. A per-line price for a ten-person team lands in the same bracket as software for one or two people, which is why you will not find a per-line option on their pricing page.
The costs that never reach the pricing page
The number on the page is the most optimistic version of the truth. Before signing anything, get a written answer to these. In my experience the answers are usually provided, just never volunteered.
- Setup and onboarding. CallTools reviewers report $250 to $1,500 one-off. CloudTalk’s 2026 review reports CRM integration surcharges of $2,000 to $5,000 for complex connections. Five9 territory runs to five figures on enterprise deployments.
- Minimum seats. Five9’s 50-seat floor is the extreme version, but five- and ten-seat minimums are common. If you run three agents you are buying seats nobody sits in.
- Contract length. Annual, billed monthly, is the norm. CallTools is $119.99 month-to-month or $101.99 on a twelve-month term. That $18 difference is the price of being able to leave.
- A platform per-minute fee on top of your carrier. You pay your carrier for minutes in every model. The question is whether the software adds its own layer.
- Numbers and storage. DIDs, extra concurrent channels, recording retention. Individually small, additive overall.
- Feature gating. Predictive pacing, recording and useful reporting are frequently the reason you buy the tier above the one you signed up for.
- Can you leave? Ask explicitly whether you can export leads, recordings and reports. The answer tells you how they think about customers.
A worked example, with real arithmetic
Twelve agents doing insurance renewals, five concurrent conversations. They compare a per-seat platform at roughly $110 a seat against Ecsow at $30 a month for five lines.
First-year software spend, 12 agents
Twelve months, including the reported one-off setup fee on the per-seat side.
$17,340 = 12 seats × $110 × 12 months, plus a $1,500 setup fee. Ecsow has no setup fee and no contract. In both columns you still buy your own SIP trunk and pay your carrier for minutes.
One caveat, because it is the obvious question. A per-seat vendor is not charging forty-eight times more for the same phone calls. They are charging per human, and your team has more humans than concurrent lines. If that unit works for your business, buy it. If it does not, the arithmetic above is the whole argument.
Where being cheap stops being good
A page that only lists advantages is an advertisement, so here is the other side. All of these are real limits of Ecsow, and some of them have cost us sales I would have liked to keep.
- Windows only. It is a Windows desktop application. No Mac, no Linux, no browser version. If your team is on Chromebooks, we cannot help you.
- Outbound only. No inbound IVR, no blended queue, no omnichannel. Calls go out.
- No compliance certifications. If you need a signed HIPAA agreement or SOC 2 evidence for a procurement review, this is the wrong product and I would rather say so now than in a support ticket.
- Manual billing, on purpose. We do not store your card and debit you. You renew when you renew. Half our customers tell us they like it, and the other half find it a monthly chore.
- Support is email. Usually answered within a day. There is no phone line and no named account manager.
- Fewer integrations. Import is CSV, Excel or MySQL, not a catalogue of one-click CRM connectors.
- You own the SIP trunk. That is why the price is what it is, and it is also why setup is on you. It takes about ten minutes, but it is still your ten minutes.
If you need inbound, enterprise SLAs or a compliance certificate, a per-seat vendor is the right purchase and you should go make it. If you need outbound calls made by a team of three to thirty at a price that does not assume you are an enterprise, the per-seat model is charging you for something you are not using.
Eight questions worth asking every vendor
Ask all of them, ask in writing, and put the answers in one spreadsheet. The price argument usually ends there.
- What is my total monthly cost for exactly my seat count and concurrency, in writing?
- Is there a setup, onboarding or implementation fee?
- What is the minimum number of seats I have to buy?
- What is the contract term, and what happens if I cancel in month three?
- Does the platform charge per minute on top of my carrier?
- Which features cost extra: predictive pacing, recording, reporting, CRM integration?
- Can I export my leads, recordings and reports if I leave?
- What does support actually look like — which channel, which hours, what response time?
Try it before you believe me
Download Ecsow Auto Dialer and run a live campaign before you pay anything. The trial dials up to 20 contacts per campaign and does not ask for a card. Licensing starts at $10 a month for one line, scales to $30 for five and $50 for ten, bills by concurrent line rather than by seat, has no contract and carries a 15-day refund. The single-line price has not moved since 2017.
If you want to run the numbers for your own team first, the cheapest auto dialer piece has the full cost ladder including the free options, and the VICIdial comparison covers what you give up if you go that route instead.
Questions I get asked about this
How much does a predictive dialer cost per month?
Published per-seat prices run from about $65 to $249 per agent per month, and implementation is usually quoted separately. Per-concurrency pricing starts much lower: Ecsow is $10 a month for one line and $26 for four.
Why does nobody publish their prices?
Because on a call you can size the quote to the budget, bundle the features you would have bought anyway, and anchor on the highest tier the buyer will accept. A published price list removes all three moves. It is also why a per-line option never appears next to a per-seat price.
How many concurrent lines does a 10-agent team need?
Three to five in most campaigns. The dialer is already placing multiple calls per available agent to filter out no-answers and answering machines, and agents spend part of every hour on notes and callbacks rather than talking. Ten agents and ten lines is usually wasted capacity.
Is the SIP trunk and per-minute calling included?
No, and be suspicious of anything that claims otherwise. In every model you buy your own SIP trunk and pay your carrier for minutes. Ecsow talks to any SIP provider, IP PBX or SIP trunk, which is why there is no telephony hardware and no per-minute markup from the software.