There is a version of this article that lists software by sticker price, puts VICIdial at the top because it is free, and calls it a day. That version is useless, because the cheapest dialer is not the one with the lowest licence fee. It is the one with the lowest bill after you have paid for the parts nobody advertises.
So here is the comparison I would want if I were shopping. Six options that between them cover the whole market, converted to one number that is actually comparable: what a five-seat outbound team spends in its first year.
Year one, five agents, software and platform only
Published or consistently reported prices, October 2026. Your carrier and minutes are separate in every row.
DialSheet’s figure is their own published arithmetic at roughly $94 per rep all-in. VICIdial assumes a $40/month VPS plus six hours of admin a month at $20. Because five agents rarely need five simultaneous conversations, the per-line options use three lines.
Two things in that chart are worth arguing with, and I want to argue with them first because they are the strongest cases against me.
If your time is genuinely free, VICIdial wins
Self-hosted VICIdial is free software. If you already have someone on staff who administers Asterisk and does not consider it a chore, your real cost is the server bill — call it $480 a year — and nothing I sell can compete with that. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The honest version of that bar is: it depends entirely on who is doing the work. Six hours a month is a low estimate for someone learning the stack, and it is roughly right for someone who knows it. The moment you price that labour at anything above zero, the gap between VICIdial and a hosted product closes fast, which is the whole reason hosted VICIdial exists and sells for $50 to $75 a seat.
The other question is risk. An Asterisk box that nobody patches is a liability, and the person who owns the patch calendar is the person who owns the incident. If that is nobody, the saving is theoretical.
The cheap end of the per-seat market, read carefully
Cheaper per-seat options do exist and I would rather name them than pretend otherwise.
- DialSheet publishes its prices, which is refreshing: free for one person with 500 leads and 500 calls a month, then $29 a month per seat, with calls on your own Twilio account. Their own estimate is about $94 per rep per month all-in at 150 dials a day. That is the cheapest multi-line per-seat product with a public price list I can find.
- BatchDialer starts around $95 an agent on annual billing and $119 to $249 monthly. The monthly/annual spread is large, and the annual price is the one that gets quoted in comparison tables.
- Mojo runs roughly $99 to $149 a user a month depending on tier.
- WAVV is $99 a seat for a single line and $149 for multi-line, with a 30% annual discount.
- CallTools and Convoso sit at about $102 to $120 and about $90 respectively, both with the caveat that the real number arrives in a quote.
The pattern across all of them: the published floor is annual-billing, minimum-volume, base-tier. Every comparison that quotes only the floor is comparing your worst case against their best case.
The costs that decide the answer
These are the rows that separate a cheap dialer from a cheap decision.
| Cost | What people actually pay |
|---|---|
| Setup or onboarding | $0 to $1,500 reported in this market; enterprise implementations run far higher |
| Minimum seats | Five and ten are common. Five9’s published plans need 50 concurrent seats |
| Annual commitment | usually 15–20% cheaper per month, and that discount is the cost of leaving |
| Platform per-minute fee | varies; ask whether the software bills minutes on top of your carrier |
| Extra DIDs and channels | a few dollars each, and you will want more than you think |
| Recording storage | small per hour, non-trivial once retention policies apply |
| Your admin hours | the single largest line item in most self-hosted setups |
| Caller ID reputation repair | number rotation plus 60–90 days of reduced connect rates |
| List cleaning and DNC scrubbing | pennies per record, and the cheapest money you will ever spend |
The last two are the ones that quietly destroy a cheap plan. Carriers begin flagging numbers at roughly a hundred calls per number per day, and a “Scam Likely” label does not come off because you changed software. A team that buys the cheapest dialer and then burns its number pool has not saved anything.
How to actually pick
Three questions, in this order.
How many agents, and how many simultaneous conversations? If those two numbers are the same, a per-seat product is fine. If they are not — and for outbound work they almost never are — per-seat pricing is charging you for people who are not talking, and per-line pricing is charging you for the calls that are.
What happens in month three if it is wrong? Month-to-month costs more per month and less in regret. If you are new to this, buy the version you can leave.
What is your time worth? This is the question the free-software argument always skips. If you can answer it honestly and the number is low, self-hosted VICIdial is a genuinely correct answer.
Where Ecsow lands, honestly
Cheapest published per-line price in this set, and not the cheapest product in it. Windows only, outbound only, no inbound IVR, no native SMS, no built-in CRM, 32 concurrent lines maximum, email support answered within about a day, and manual monthly renewal because we do not hold your card details.
What you get for $10 a line is a Windows dialer that installs in about ten minutes, connects to whatever SIP trunk you already have, dials predictive or automatic, and does not care how many agents log in. Five lines is $30 a month. Ten is $50. There is no setup fee, no contract, and a 15-day refund.
Download it and run a campaign — 20 contacts in the trial, no card required. If a month of real dialing on your own list does not beat whatever you are using now, the refund exists for exactly that reason. And if the arithmetic points you at VICIdial instead, that comparison will tell you which side of the line you are on. Two other product-specific breakdowns are on the blog: what a CallTools alternative costs at five seats, and why Five9 will not sell to a ten-agent team at all.
Questions I get asked
What is the cheapest auto dialer software?
The cheapest licence is self-hosted VICIdial, which is free and open source, but it needs a server and an Asterisk-literate administrator. Among products with a published price list, Ecsow starts at $10 per month for one concurrent line and does not charge per agent.
Is there a free predictive dialer?
VICIdial is free and does predictive dialing. Hosting and operating it is not free. Every other “free” tier in this market is a trial or a single-user plan rather than a usable predictive dialer for a team.
Why is per-line pricing cheaper than per-seat pricing?
Because they charge for different things. Per-seat pricing bills every agent who can log in; per-line pricing bills how many calls can happen at once. A ten-agent outbound team normally runs three to five concurrent calls, so the two units diverge sharply.
What hidden costs should I ask about before buying?
Setup and onboarding fees, minimum seat counts, the contract term, any platform per-minute charge on top of your carrier, extra DIDs and channels, recording storage, and whether you can export your lists and recordings if you leave.