VICIdial vs Convoso: a cost calculator

Convoso is a per-seat dialer SaaS that bills per logged-in agent and usually bundles or marks up carrier minutes. VICIdial costs nothing to license and instead asks you to pay for a server and your own carrier. To compare them you have to convert a per-seat quote into the same units as a per-server quote.

For the underlying cost model before we run numbers, see what VICIdial really costs. Here we build a Convoso-versus-VICIdial calculator on top of it.

What you are actually comparing

Convoso's published pricing varies by tier and contract, but per-seat dialer SaaS in this category typically lands on the order of $100 to $200+ per agent per month, with minutes often bundled into the seat or billed on top. Confirm their current numbers directly. The thing to notice is that the seat is the unit, so the bill tracks your roster.

VICIdial is open-source software you do not license. You rent a VPS, a virtual private server, and you bring a Carrier, the telephony provider that carries your calls, paying them per minute. With Managed hosting, where a flat per-server fee covers patching, backups, firewall, and SSL, you never pay a per-agent license and we never mark up your minutes.

Inputs to gather

• Peak agent count.
• Your Dial level, the ratio of numbers dialed per available agent under Ratio dialing, which drives how many minutes you burn.
• Connected talk minutes per agent per day.
• Per-minute carrier rate plus monthly DID (direct inward dialing) rental, the cost of renting a phone number you dial from.
• A server tier matched to agent count.

A worked example: 40 agents

Take 40 agents averaging 3.5 hours of talk a day across 21 days. That is about 4,400 minutes per agent per month, or roughly 176,000 minutes for the team. At an illustrative 1.2 cents a minute, the raw carrier spend is about $2,100. Add, say, $50 in DID rentals. These numbers are made up to show the structure.

On the per-seat side, 40 seats at a hypothetical $140 each is $5,600 a month, often before any overage on bundled minutes. On the VICIdial side you pay one server line for a box sized to 40 agents plus the $2,150 in carrier and DID costs you control directly. The seat tax disappears; the variable cost is exactly the minutes you place.

The cost mechanism

flowchart LR
  A[Seat fee x agents] --> C[Convoso total]
  B[Bundled minutes plus overage] --> C
  D[Server tier - fixed] --> V[VICIdial total]
  E[Raw carrier minutes] --> V
  F[DID rental] --> V
  G[Managed fee or labor] --> V

Reading the result

Small rosters keep the two totals close, and the operational simplicity of a hosted seat-based product has real value when you are tiny. Once you cross a couple dozen agents, the per-server math tends to win because compute scales cheaper than seats. Our boxes are Single tenant, one customer per server, and there is also a BYOI (bring your own infrastructure) option, bring-your-own-infrastructure, where we install and manage VICIdial on a box you already own. To go deeper on hosting economics, read VICIdial hosting cost.

Run your real agent count and dialing pattern through the inputs above, then check our pricing page for current VICIfast figures rather than the illustrative ones here. The honest comparison is the one with your own minutes plugged in.