ViciDial pricing starts at zero, and that is the trap
Most questions about ViciDial pricing come from owners who have heard it is free and then received a quote that clearly is not. Both are true. The software license costs nothing, as we explain in is ViciDial free. What you pay for is everything the software needs to make a call: a server, a carrier, phone numbers, someone to keep it running, and the people and PCs on the floor.
So the useful question is not what ViciDial costs. It is what a ViciDial floor costs per month, and which of those lines grows when you add seats. This post walks through each line, then puts them together in a worked example you can fill in with your own quotes. We do not quote third-party prices here, because carrier and hosting rates move every quarter and differ a lot between vendors.
The server: hosted, rented or in your office
ViciDial needs a Linux server. You can rent a dedicated or cloud server in a US data center, buy a machine and keep it in your office, or pay a hosted ViciDial provider who runs it for you and charges per seat. Each has a different cost shape. A rented server is a fixed monthly bill in dollars. An office server is a one-time purchase in rupees plus electricity, UPS, backup internet and an admin's time. A per-seat host is the easiest to start and the one that grows fastest as you add agents.
One server handles a modest floor. As you grow past a few dozen concurrent agents, or record every call, most setups split into a database server, one or more dialer servers and a web server. That is a cost step, not a smooth line, so plan for it before you hire the next batch of fronters. The trade-offs are covered in our post on cloud versus your own server.
VoIP minutes: usually the biggest line
On a predictive outbound floor, minutes are where the money goes. You pay for every connected second, and on a typical US list a large share of connects are voicemail and answering machines. If the dialer or the agent sits on a machine for twenty seconds before giving up, you paid for those twenty seconds.
Three numbers decide your minute bill: the per-minute rate your carrier charges, the billing increment (many carriers bill in six-second blocks, some in full minutes, so ask), and how many minutes each seat burns per shift. The last one is the one you control. Tighter answering machine detection, cleaner lists and a sensible dial level all cut it. Owners in Pakistan should also remember that carriers bill in dollars, so a weaker rupee raises this line even when nothing on the floor changed.
DIDs, caller ID and the cost of burned numbers
A DID is a phone number you rent to show as caller ID. Floors calling the US usually rent local-presence numbers in the area codes they dial most. The rent per number is small. The real cost is replacement: numbers that get flagged as spam stop connecting, so you rent new ones, and you pay setup fees again. Budget for a pool, not a fixed set.
Your carrier may also pass through charges tied to STIR/SHAKEN attestation or registration with the analytics companies. These vary, so ask each carrier for its full list of monthly and one-time fees, not just the per-minute rate.
Setup, support and the admin nobody budgets for
Someone has to install ViciDial, configure carriers, build campaigns, load lists and fix it when audio goes one-way at 7 p.m. PKT, just as the US East Coast wakes up. That person is either on your payroll or on a vendor's retainer. Local vendors in Pakistan and India often sell a one-time setup fee plus a monthly support fee. The ViciDial Group also sells support. None of this is the software license, but all of it is ViciDial cost.
If you hire in-house, count the salary, the night-shift allowance and the risk of that one person being unreachable on a Friday night. Floors that skip this line usually pay for it later in downtime.
ViciDial price in Pakistan and India: the currency problem
Owners searching for the ViciDial price in Pakistan are usually trying to compare a local vendor's rupee quote with a US host's dollar quote. The software line is zero in both, so what you are really comparing is how each one bills for hosting, support and minutes, and in which currency.
Look at it this way. Salaries, rent, electricity and local support are paid in rupees. Carrier minutes, DIDs, US data center servers and most hosted dialers are paid in dollars. When the rupee weakens, only the dollar lines move, and on an outbound floor those include the minute line, which is often the largest one. A budget that looked fine in January can be tight by June without a single extra seat.
Two practical habits help. Keep a separate column in your budget for dollar costs, so you can see your exposure at a glance. And ask local vendors whether their rupee price is fixed or tied to the exchange rate, because some quietly pass dollar costs through. Paying foreign carriers also takes paperwork. Many floors pay by international wire, and some carriers handle that slowly, so build a few days of buffer into your top-ups.
A worked example you can fill in
Here is the structure we use when an owner asks us to sanity-check a ViciDial budget. Replace each letter with the figures from your own quotes. The point is to see which lines move when seats move.
Monthly cost = H + (S × M × D × R) + (N × P) + T + (S × C). For a 30-seat fronting floor running 22 shifts a month, if each seat uses M billable minutes per shift, the minute line is 30 × M × 22 × R. If M drops by a fifth because AMD stops wasting time on machines, that line drops by a fifth too, with nothing else changed. In most worked examples we see, the minute line and the seat line are the two largest, and the server is the smallest.
Do the same exercise for growth. Double S and see what happens. On a rented server, H stays flat until you hit the point where you need a second server. On hosted ViciDial priced per seat, H doubles with S. R stays the same in both, unless your carrier offers a lower rate at higher volume. T often stays flat until your floor is large enough to need a second admin. The lines that move are the ones to negotiate hardest.
- H: server or hosting per month (fixed for rented servers, per seat for hosted ViciDial)
- S: number of seats on the shift
- M: billable minutes per seat per shift, after your carrier's rounding
- D: shifts per month, usually 20 to 26 depending on your Saturday policy
- R: carrier rate per minute for US calls
- N and P: number of DIDs in your pool and the monthly rent per DID, plus replacements
- T: support, admin salary or vendor retainer
- C: fully loaded cost per seat (salary, PC, headset, internet share, electricity, transport)
What changes the total most
On a fronting floor the seat line is usually bigger than any software line, and it grows one-for-one with headcount. That is why owners who have tuned their carrier and server costs start looking at the seat line next. We broke that down in what a fronting seat really costs.
This is the line B3 Voice works on. A fronter bot logs into ViciDial like an agent, so H, R and N stay the same, and a bot replaces a share of C with a flat monthly price per bot that includes unlimited calls and no per-minute charge from us. You still pay your own carrier for the minutes. Our pricing page has the current figures, so you can put them straight into the formula above.
