Guide · Call Tracking
One restaurant, one salon, light call volume: the cheapest way to track which ad drives calls
At a few dozen calls a month, the included-credit tiers and pay-as-you-go floors decide the bill — and the cheapest named plan is $30, not the one with the lowest sticker base.
If you run a single restaurant or salon and field a few dozen calls a month, you are the one buyer for whom call tracking is genuinely cheap — because your usage never escapes the entry tier’s bundled allowance. The honest answer to “which ad drove that call?” is WhatConverts’ Call Tracking plan at $30/mo, which includes a $30 usage credit the vendor pegs at roughly 148 calls. At light volume your metered usage disappears inside that credit, so $30 is both the sticker and the bill. The only thing that beats it is going base-free entirely: Dialics publishes no monthly tier at all (pay-as-you-go, local $0.045/min, tracking numbers $1/mo), so a 150-minute month — about fifty 3-minute calls — costs roughly $7.75 plus the number.
That split is the whole decision. Everything else is a question of whether you want a named plan with a dashboard and a credit cushion, or a pure usage meter.
What light volume actually costs
These platforms bill base subscription plus metered per-minute usage. At a salon’s volume the metering barely registers, so the base price — and whether the tier bundles minutes or a credit — is what you pay. Here is a 50-call month at 3 minutes each (150 local minutes), one tracking number, cheapest first:
| Vendor / plan | Base | Usage at 150 min | Effective monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dialics — Pay As You Go | $0 | 150 × $0.045 + $1 number | ~$7.75 |
| WhatConverts — Call Tracking | $30 | $6.75, inside the $30 credit | $30 |
| Convirza — Starter | $29 | 150 × $0.08 + $3 number | ~$44 |
| CallRail — Lead Tracking | $50 | inside 250 incl. min + 5 numbers | $50 |
| WildJar — Starter | $39 | 150 × $0.05 + $4.50 number | ~$51 |
Every figure here is the vendor’s published rate. WhatConverts’ $0.045/min local rate is platform-wide, so the $6.75 of usage sits comfortably under the included $30 credit — you’d have to clear roughly 148 calls before paying a cent over base. CallRail’s Lead Tracking bundles 250 local minutes and 5 tracking numbers for $50, which a single location won’t exhaust, but you’re paying a $50 floor for headroom you don’t use.
Why the lowest base price isn’t the cheapest bill
Convirza’s Starter has the lowest published base in the dataset at $29/mo — a dollar under WhatConverts. But it bundles no usage: every minute is $0.08 (nearly double WhatConverts’ rate) and each number is $3.00/mo. At 150 minutes that’s $29 + $12 + $3 = ~$44, half again more than WhatConverts despite the cheaper headline. This is the trap in a metered category: the sticker base only wins when you read the per-minute and per-number lines underneath it.
The same logic rules out the pay-per-call and lead-gen platforms for this buyer. Nimbata’s cheapest tier (Pro, $35/mo) bills per answered call; Ringba’s entry Business plan is $147/mo; Infinity starts at $249/mo plus $0.20 per tracked call. Those are priced for agencies and performance marketers buying call volume, not for one storefront asking which Google or Facebook ad rang the phone.
The two honest answers
If you want a real product — a dashboard, source attribution, a credit that absorbs your usage — WhatConverts at $30/mo is the cheapest named plan, and at your volume the $30 credit means you never pay overage. Its 2026 entry price is corroborated by an independent pricing roundup, and the $30-credit-equals-about-148-calls allowance is the vendor’s own ceiling.
If you’d rather pay only for what rings and don’t need a tier, Dialics’ pay-as-you-go is the floor: no base, $0.045/min local, $1/mo per number, with transcription a further $0.02/min if you want it (about $10.75 all-in for our 150-minute month with transcription on). That is the cheapest possible way to attribute calls in this dataset — at the cost of a thinner product around the meter.
One caveat worth stating because none of these publish otherwise: if you’re a medical or dental practice that wandered into this comparison, stop here. Neither WhatConverts nor Dialics publishes HIPAA or BAA support — only CallRail (HIPAA and BAA, on healthcare accounts) and CallTrackingMetrics (HIPAA, from its Marketing Pro tier) do in this dataset, and both sit well above the $30 line. For a restaurant or salon, that line doesn’t apply, and $30 — or $7.75 if you’re truly counting — is where this ends.