What VICIdial costs for a 10-agent team

For a 10-agent team, VICIdial runs on a single small server, a modest carrier bill, and either a few hours of your own admin time or a flat managed fee. The software itself is free. Most of the cost is the box and the minutes.

That three-part shape — server, minutes, labor — is the whole story, and it is the same model we explain in what VICIdial really costs. This post fills in the numbers for ten seats.

The three cost lines

VICIdial is free, open-source software under the AGPL license. You never pay for the dialer code. What you pay for is the server it runs on, the carrier minutes your agents burn, and the labor to keep it secure and patched. A Carrier is the SIP voice provider that connects your calls to the phone network — you bring your own.

Line one is the server. Ten agents fit comfortably on a small VPS — a virtual private server, meaning a slice of a physical host you rent by the month. Two to four cores and 4 to 8 GB of RAM handles a 10-agent dialer with room for Call recording, the audio files written for every call. Call it a $40 to $100 a month box, depending on disk and provider.

Line two is carrier minutes. You pay your SIP provider directly, per minute, plus a small monthly rental for each DID (direct inward dialing) — a Direct Inward Dialing number, the phone number people see on caller ID. Per-minute rates are a fraction of a cent to a few cents. Ten agents dialing outbound full-time might push a few tens of thousands of minutes a month; at, say, two cents a minute that is a real but predictable line. We never mark those minutes up.

Line three is labor. Self-hosting means you install, secure, and patch the box yourself. Managed hosting means a flat per-server fee folds the OS patching, backups, firewall, and SSL into one number — see VICIdial hosting cost for how that line shakes out.

Where the money goes

flowchart TD
  A[Small server - 40 to 100 monthly] --> D[Total monthly cost - 10 agents]
  B[Carrier minutes - per minute variable] --> D
  C[DID rentals - small fixed] --> D
  E[Labor or flat managed fee] --> D

The per-agent figure

Here is the part that surprises people moving off per-seat dialer SaaS. With VICIdial the server is a fixed cost. Spread across ten agents, a $100 box is $10 per agent per month of infrastructure. Add your managed fee and minutes and the per-agent number stays in the low double digits. Per-seat dialer platforms typically run on the order of $100 to $200 or more per agent per month, and they bundle and mark up your minutes on top. The deeper math is in VICIdial cost per agent.

VICIdial bills nothing per agent. It is the same software whether you run 1 seat or 50. We charge a flat per-server price, not a per-seat license, because the cost driver is the Server trunk — the SIP connection from your box to the carrier — and the box itself, not the number of people logged in.

Self-hosted vs managed for 10 seats

If you have a Linux admin in-house, self-hosting trades dollars for hours. You buy the cheapest box and pay with your own time: hardening the firewall, applying Asterisk and OS patches, and restoring from a Server snapshot when something breaks. For a small team that often means the dialer is one bad night away from a quiet outage.

Managed hosting flips that. We provision a dedicated, Single tenant server — yours alone, no shared host — and install secured VICIdial in under 40 seconds. You get a Branded subdomain over HTTPS and stop worrying about the layers underneath. For ten agents, the labor you skip usually costs more than the managed fee you pay.

For current VICIfast server pricing and what the flat monthly fee includes, the source of truth is our pricing page. Bring your own carrier, pay your minutes at cost, and run ten agents on a single box for far less than a per-seat platform.