Power Dialer Pricing, Explained: Per-Seat vs Per-Minute
Dialer pricing trips people up because there are two meters running at once, and they're charged on totally different logic. One is a flat monthly seat fee — you pay for the privilege of having an agent able to dial. The other is per-minute voice usage — you pay for the actual talk time. Confuse the two and you'll either over-buy seats you don't fill or get a usage bill that surprises you in month two.
Full disclosure: I work for ReadySMS, and we sell a power dialer. I'm going to use our Free/Pro/Team tiers as the worked example because I know the exact numbers, but the structure here — seats plus minutes — is how nearly every dialer prices. Once you understand the two meters, you can evaluate any vendor.
The two meters: seat fees vs minute rates
Think of a dialer bill as two stacked costs:
- Per-seat (per-agent) fee — a fixed monthly charge for each person who can place calls. This is your access cost. It doesn't move whether that agent dials 10 calls or 1,000.
- Per-minute voice rate — the cost of the actual call audio, usually billed in small increments. This scales directly with how much you talk.
The reason this matters: a "cheap" dialer with a low seat fee but a high per-minute rate can cost more than a higher seat fee at a low minute rate — it depends entirely on your call volume. You can't pick a tier without knowing roughly how many minutes your team burns.
ReadySMS bills minutes in 6-second increments, which matters for a busy desk. A 38-second call rounds to 42 seconds, not a full minute. Over thousands of short connects, increment size moves real money.
ReadySMS power dialer tiers, side by side
Here's the actual structure:
| Tier | Seat fee | Agents | Included minutes | Overage rate | Notable features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 1 | 500 min/mo | $0.06/min | 1 free number, voicemail drop, call recording |
| Pro | $29/agent/mo | up to 3 | none included | $0.05/min | manual + queue dial, auto-text |
| Team | $69/agent/mo | unlimited | none included | $0.0375/min | speed-to-lead auto-dial, lead routing, manager monitoring (transfer/barge/whisper) |
Two things to read out of that table:
- The seat fee climbs as you go up, but the minute rate drops — from $0.06 on Free to $0.0375 on Team. High-volume teams are essentially buying a cheaper per-minute rate with the seat fee.
- Free is genuinely free for one agent up to 500 minutes. That's not a trial gimmick — it's a real working tier for a solo operator or someone testing the workflow before committing.
Worked example: solo operator vs small team
Let me run the math, because that's the only way to actually choose.
Scenario A: One person, light dialing
Say you make ~300 minutes of calls a month — a part-time follow-up desk.
- Free tier: $0 seat + 300 minutes (under the 500 included) = $0/mo.
- Pro tier: $29 seat + 300 × $0.05 = $29 + $15 = $44/mo.
Free wins, obviously. Don't pay for Pro until you're either past 500 minutes or you need the queue-dial workflow.
Scenario B: One person, heavy dialing
Now ~2,000 minutes/mo — a full-time dialer.
- Free tier: $0 + (2,000 − 500) × $0.06 = $0 + $90 = $90/mo.
- Pro tier: $29 + 2,000 × $0.05 = $29 + $100 = $129/mo.
Free still looks cheaper on paper here — but you're giving up queue dialing and auto-text. If those features save the agent even a few minutes of manual dialing per hour, Pro can pay for itself in productivity. This is the kind of tradeoff where the cheaper line item isn't automatically the right call.
Scenario C: Three-agent team, full-time
Three agents, ~1,800 minutes each = 5,400 minutes/mo total.
- Pro tier: 3 × $29 + 5,400 × $0.05 = $87 + $270 = $357/mo.
- Team tier: 3 × $69 + 5,400 × $0.0375 = $207 + $202.50 = $409.50/mo.
Pro is cheaper here — but Team buys you speed-to-lead auto-dial, lead routing, and manager monitoring (whisper, barge, transfer). If your business depends on hitting new leads in the first five minutes, that feature set isn't a luxury. More on that below.
The crossover: when minutes make Team cheaper than Pro
Per-agent, Team costs $40 more in seat fee than Pro ($69 vs $29) but saves $0.0125 per minute ($0.05 vs $0.0375). The breakeven per agent:
$40 ÷ $0.0125 = 3,200 minutes per agent per month.
Above ~3,200 minutes/agent, Team's lower minute rate more than pays back its higher seat fee — before you even count the extra features. Below that, Pro is cheaper on raw cost, and you're choosing Team purely for capabilities.
That's the clean rule of thumb: estimate minutes per agent first, then check it against 3,200. If you're well above it, Team is a no-brainer on price alone. If you're well below it, the question becomes "do I need speed-to-lead and manager monitoring badly enough to pay for them?"
Don't forget the cost-per-connect lens
Total monthly cost is one view; cost per actual conversation is the one that ties to revenue. Not every dialed minute reaches a human — a chunk is ringing, voicemail, and bad numbers. If your connect rate is, say, 20%, your effective cost per connect is roughly five times your cost per dialed call.
I won't redo the full math here because we already broke it down in What a Power Dialer Really Costs Per Connect. The short version: a lower per-minute rate compounds hard when you're dialing thousands of times to reach a few hundred people. That's the real argument for Team at volume.
Where the dialer pays for itself: speed-to-lead
The single feature that changes the ROI math is Team's speed-to-lead auto-dial — a new lead comes in and the system dials an available agent and the lead automatically. The first-5-minutes window is where contact rates fall off a cliff; waiting an hour to call back can cut your odds of reaching someone dramatically.
The pattern that works best pairs an instant SMS with the auto-dial, so the lead gets a text the moment they convert and a call seconds behind it. We walk through that whole sequence in Speed-to-Lead: Pairing Instant SMS With Auto-Dial in the First 5 Minutes. If you're running paid lead-gen, the math there usually swamps the seat-fee difference between Pro and Team — one extra closed deal a month covers a lot of seats.
A quick honesty check before you buy
A few things worth saying plainly:
- If you dial occasionally, start on Free. One agent, 500 minutes, no card. Don't pay until you outgrow it.
- Per-minute rate matters more than seat fee once you're busy. Watch the 3,200-minute crossover.
- Features can justify the "more expensive" tier. Speed-to-lead and manager monitoring aren't line items you can replace with effort — if you need them, the cheaper tier isn't actually cheaper for your business.
- A dialer isn't an SMS replacement. Voice and text do different jobs. Most of our customers run both — outbound calls for live conversations, SMS for reminders, recovery, and the instant first-touch. If you're weighing the text side too, the GHL SMS pricing breakdown covers that meter.
The practical takeaway
Dialer pricing is two meters: a flat seat fee for access and a per-minute rate for talk time. Estimate your minutes per agent, compare against the ~3,200-minute crossover, and only then weigh the features each tier unlocks. For a solo, casual dialer, Free is the honest answer. For a small team that lives and dies by lead response time, Team usually wins on features even before the minute savings kick in.
If you want to plug your own agent count and minute estimates in, the cost calculator does the arithmetic, and the full dialer tiers live on the pricing page. Run your numbers before you pick — the right tier is the one your volume points to, not the one with the smallest seat fee.