What a Power Dialer Really Costs Per Connect (Worked Math)
Most people pricing out an outbound dialer stare at the per-minute rate and stop there. "$0.05 a minute, fine." But the per-minute number is the least interesting part of the math. What actually determines your cost is how many dials it takes to reach a human, how long you talk once you do, and what you're paying per agent before a single call connects.
Full disclosure: I work for ReadySMS, and we sell a Power Dialer. I'm going to use our rates in the examples because they're the numbers I know cold — but the method here works for any dialer. Plug in your own provider's numbers and the structure holds.
The three costs hiding inside "cost per connect"
A connect — an actual conversation with a live person — costs you the sum of three things:
- Per-agent platform fee. Fixed monthly cost, divided across however many connects that agent produces.
- Dial-time minutes. Every ring, every voicemail, every "not interested" still burns metered minutes.
- Talk-time minutes. The actual conversation, which is the only part that produces value.
The trap is that connect rates are low. On a cold or semi-warm list, you might connect with 8–15% of dials (rough industry range — varies wildly by list quality and time of day). So most of your metered minutes go to ring time and voicemails that never turn into anything. That's the cost people forget to count.
Here are the ReadySMS Power Dialer plans, billed per agent, minutes metered in 6-second increments:
| Plan | Monthly / agent | Per-minute | Agents | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0.06 | 1 | 500 min/mo included, 1 free number |
| Pro | $29 | $0.05 | up to 3 | call recording, voicemail drop |
| Team | $69 | $0.0375 | unlimited | speed-to-lead auto-dial, lead routing, manager monitoring |
Full pricing lives on the pricing page.
A realistic agency scenario
Let's build a believable day. One agent on the Pro plan, dialing a list of leads who opted in but have gone quiet.
Assumptions (all adjustable):
- 250 dials in a working day
- 12% connect rate → 30 connects
- Average ring/voicemail time on a no-connect: 25 seconds (0.42 min)
- Average talk time on a connect: 3.5 minutes
- 20 working days/month
Metered minutes per day:
- No-connects: 220 dials × 0.42 min = 92.4 minutes
- Connects: 30 × 3.5 min = 105 minutes
- Total: 197.4 minutes/day
Monthly metered minutes: 197.4 × 20 = 3,948 minutes
Monthly minute cost (Pro @ $0.05): 3,948 × $0.05 = $197.40
Plus the agent fee: $29
Total monthly cost: $226.40
Monthly connects: 30 × 20 = 600 connects
Cost per connect: $226.40 ÷ 600 = $0.377 per connect
So a live conversation costs you about 38 cents in this scenario — and notice that nearly half your metered minutes (92.4 of 197.4 per day) were spent on calls that never connected. That's not waste you can eliminate; it's the cost of the channel. But it's the cost most people don't price in.
What changes the number most
Run the same scenario and tweak one variable at a time:
- Connect rate up to 18% (better list, better time of day — see best time to send SMS, the logic carries over to calls): now 45 connects/day, 900/month. Minutes barely move, agent fee is flat. Cost per connect drops toward ~$0.26.
- Talk time up to 6 minutes: connects get more expensive per minute but you're presumably closing more, so judge this on revenue, not cost.
- Switch to Team @ $0.0375/min: the per-minute drop matters at volume. 3,948 min × $0.0375 = $148.05 + $69 = $217.05. On a single agent it's roughly a wash with Pro. But add agents and Team's unlimited-seat structure plus speed-to-lead pulls ahead fast.
The headline: connect rate moves cost per connect more than the per-minute rate does. A 6-point connect-rate improvement saved more here than switching tiers. Spend your energy on list quality and call timing before you obsess over the rate card.
Dialing vs. SMS on a cost-per-outcome basis
This is where the comparison gets honest. SMS and dialing aren't competitors — they're different tools — but you can compare them on cost per meaningful response.
A single SMS segment is 160 GSM-7 characters. On the Starter tier that's $0.0084/segment plus the $0.0045 carrier pass-through = $0.0129 per segment.
Say you send a 1-segment text to 600 contacts:
- Cost: 600 × $0.0129 = $7.74 total
- Opted-in lists often see response rates around 30–50% (rough industry range). At 35%, that's 210 replies.
- Cost per reply: $7.74 ÷ 210 = $0.037 per response
Compare to the dialer's $0.377 per connect. SMS is roughly 10x cheaper per touch that gets a response.
So why ever dial? Because a reply and a conversation are not the same outcome. A 3.5-minute live call where someone asks questions and you handle objections is worth far more than a one-line text reply — for high-ticket services, real estate, B2B, anything with a real sales conversation. The math isn't "which is cheaper," it's "what's the value of the outcome each one produces."
If you want the SMS side of this worked out properly, the SMS ROI calculation guide goes deeper, and the real estate cost optimization post is a good example of weighing channels against each other for a high-ticket vertical.
The combination most people miss: text, then dial
The best version isn't choosing. It's sequencing.
On the Team plan, speed-to-lead auto-dials a new lead the moment they come in. Pair that with an instant SMS and you're working the first-five-minutes window — the period where contact rates are dramatically higher than if you wait even 30 minutes (well-documented in inbound sales research; the exact lift varies).
A practical sequence:
- Lead submits a form. Auto-text fires instantly: "Hey [name], thanks for reaching out — calling you in 30 seconds."
- Auto-dial fires. The text just warmed the connect; they're expecting the call.
- No answer? Voicemail drop (a pre-recorded message, so the agent doesn't sit through the beep) plus a follow-up text.
The text costs about a penny and a half. It meaningfully raises your connect rate, which — as the math above showed — is the single biggest lever on cost per connect. You're spending $0.013 to make your $0.38 connects more frequent. That's the trade you want.
A quick checklist before you buy any dialer
- Know your connect rate, even roughly. Without it, no cost-per-connect number means anything.
- Count no-connect minutes, not just talk time. They're real and metered.
- Match the plan to agent count. One agent? Pro is fine. Multiple agents who need routing and monitoring? Team's unlimited seats and lower per-minute rate earn their keep.
- Confirm billing increments. Per-minute rounding inflates cost on lots of short calls. ReadySMS meters in 6-second increments specifically so a 12-second voicemail isn't billed as a full minute.
- Pair it with SMS for speed-to-lead instead of treating the two as separate budgets.
Run your own numbers in the cost calculator before committing to anything.
The practical takeaway
Cost per connect isn't the per-minute rate — it's the per-minute rate times your no-connect overhead, plus the agent fee, divided by how many real conversations you actually produce. In a believable agency scenario that landed near 38 cents a connect, and the fastest way to lower it was improving connect rate, not switching pricing tiers.
SMS is roughly 10x cheaper per response, but a response and a sales conversation aren't the same outcome. The smart move is using cheap texts to make your more expensive calls connect more often.
If you want to test the dialer side, the Free plan gives you 1 agent and 500 minutes a month with no commitment — enough to measure your real connect rate before you scale up. Start there, get your numbers, then decide which tier the math points to.