Here is a bill for one month of outbound calling. Twelve agents, five conversations running at once.
It is not my bill and it is not yours. It is every published price in this market.
Laid out the way a vendor would lay it out, if they sent an invoice instead of a quote.
Read it line by line. The total is the least interesting part.
Line 1: you are buying people, not calls
Twelve seats. That is twelve people who can log in at the same time.
You told the sales rep your team makes five calls at once. Nobody charged you for five. The unit is the human.
Per-seat pricing is old and it is not stupid. It was designed when a seat roughly meant a phone line and a desk. Somewhere along the way the two stopped matching, and the price never caught up.
That is the whole argument. A dialer exists to run more calls than you have agents. Billing by agent punishes you for using the product the way it was meant to be used.
Line 2: the fee you negotiate after you have decided
One thousand five hundred dollars, one time. That number is not universal — CallTools reviewers report $250 to $1,500, and a 2026 CloudTalk review puts complex CRM integrations at $2,000 to $5,000.
What matters is when it appears. Setup is quoted during onboarding, after the demo, after your team has already started imagining the new workflow. By then the decision is made and the fee is absorbed.
Ask for it in writing before the demo. It is the cheapest question in this article.
Lines 3, 4 and 5: three small words
Numbers, storage, support. None of them is large, and each has a catch worth thirty seconds.
Numbers are usually billed separately from seats, so they do not appear in the headline price. Storage is usually included up to a few months, then billed. Support usually means email during business hours; a phone line is a tier above.
None of this is dishonest. It is just not on the pricing page.
The line that is missing
There is no carrier line on that invoice, and it is the biggest number in your month.
Every model works the same way. You rent a SIP trunk from a provider, and you pay per minute. Published rates run from about half a cent to three cents a minute depending on destination. Twenty thousand minutes at half a cent is $100. The same twenty thousand minutes to Philippine mobiles is closer to $6,000.
So the invoice above covers the software and none of the calls. On a domestic campaign that is most of your bill. On a campaign into the Philippines it is a rounding error.
I wrote a separate piece on what SIP providers charge. The dialer is the cheap half of this bill, and almost nobody compares the expensive half.
The same month, billed by line
Same team. Same five conversations at a time. Same carrier, same minutes, same numbers.
Twelve months of the first invoice, including setup, is $17,340. Twelve months of the second is $360.
The difference is $16,980, and it buys the same calls.
I want to be careful here, because the obvious objection is the fair one. A per-seat vendor is not charging forty-eight times more for the same thing. It is charging a different unit against a team shape that does not fit it. If your team genuinely needs twelve people on twelve calls at once, buy twelve seats — the arithmetic stops arguing with you.
Four lines that will never appear on any invoice
The invoice is honest about money and silent about everything else. These four cost more than line 2.
Time to first call. Per-seat platforms are usually live in days. Anything you self-host is live in weeks, and the weeks are yours.
The tier you upgrade to. Pacing, recording and usable reports sit in the tier above the one on the pricing page. Everyone finds this out in month two.
The exit. Ask, before you sign, whether you can export leads, recordings and reports. The answer tells you what they think of you.
The owner. Somebody has to read the logs when calls start dropping on a Friday evening. On a hosted platform that person is included. On anything you run yourself, that person is you.
When the expensive invoice is the right one
Some teams should pay it. If you need inbound calls, a queue, or a blended campaign, buy the per-seat product. Same answer if procurement wants a signed HIPAA agreement or SOC 2 evidence. It is built for that and Ecsow is not.
Ecsow is Windows only. It is outbound only. It has no compliance certificates, no account manager, and support is email that usually answers within a day. It tops out at 32 lines. Renewals are manual on purpose, which half of our customers like and the other half find annoying.
The invoice above is worth paying when you are buying infrastructure you will use. It is worth questioning when you are twelve people making five calls.
What to do before you sign anything
Ask five questions in writing. What is my total for my exact seat count and concurrency? Is there a setup fee? What is the minimum seat count? What is the term, and what happens if I cancel in month three? Can I export my data?
Then run the same month through a per-line product and compare the two subtotals. Ecsow’s trial dials up to 20 contacts per campaign with no card, and licences start at $10 a month for one line. Fifteen-day refund, no contract, and that entry price has not moved since 2017.
If you want the whole ladder first, including the free options, this one has every rung. If the free route is tempting you, here is what it costs in Saturdays.
Questions people ask after reading the invoice
How much does a predictive dialer cost per month?
Published per-seat prices run from about $65 to $249 per agent per month, with setup quoted separately. Per-line pricing starts far lower: $10 for one line, $26 for four, $50 for ten.
Why will nobody publish a price?
On a call, a rep can size the quote to your budget and anchor on the highest tier you will accept. A published list removes both moves. It is also why a per-line option never sits next to a per-seat price.
How many lines does a twelve-agent team actually need?
Four or five in most campaigns. The dialer places several calls per free agent to filter out no-answers, and agents spend part of every hour on notes and callbacks. Twelve agents on twelve lines is usually wasted capacity.
Is the SIP trunk included in any of this?
No, in every model. You rent your own trunk and pay a carrier per minute. Ecsow connects to any SIP provider, IP PBX or SIP trunk, so there is no hardware and no per-minute markup from the software.