Guide · Call Tracking
Per-minute or per-answered-call call tracking? The crossover is about three and a half minutes
One slice of the call-tracking market bills by the minute and another by the answered call, so the cheaper meter depends entirely on how long your calls run — and the published rates pin the exact tipping point.
The two billing meters in call tracking only look comparable until you ask how long a call lasts. Most of this market charges per minute of talk time; a smaller group — Infinity and Nimbata — charges a flat fee per answered call, no matter the duration. Because one meter scales with minutes and the other doesn’t, the cheaper model is decided by your average call length, and the published rates put the crossover at roughly three and a half minutes. Below that, per-minute wins; above it, per-call wins. Everything else is base-fee arithmetic.
Where the meters cross
Infinity is the only vendor in our dataset that publishes a clean per-call rate: $0.20 per tracked call on its Essentials tier ($249/mo) and $0.15 per tracked call on Pro ($349/mo). Set that against the per-minute crowd and the tipping point falls out directly — divide the per-call rate by the per-minute rate to get the call length where they break even.
| Comparison | Per-minute rate | Per-call rate | Crossover call length |
|---|---|---|---|
| CallRail vs Infinity Pro | $0.045/min | $0.15/call | 3.3 min |
| CallRail vs Infinity Essentials | $0.045/min | $0.20/call | 4.4 min |
| WildJar Starter vs Infinity Pro | $0.05/min | $0.15/call | 3.0 min |
| WildJar Agency vs Infinity Pro | $0.04/min | $0.15/call | 3.8 min |
CallRail’s local rate is $0.045/min (a platform-wide rate, not a per-tier one); WildJar runs $0.05/min on Starter ($39/mo) and $0.04/min on Agency ($89/mo). The reading is consistent: if your tracked calls average under about three minutes — quick “are you open?” and booking calls — the per-minute meter is cheaper, because Infinity charges the same $0.15–$0.20 whether the call lasts twenty seconds or four minutes. Once average duration climbs past three to four minutes, the per-call flat fee stops the meter while per-minute keeps running.
The base fee is the other half of the bill
Crossover only settles the usage line. The bases are not close. Infinity starts at $249/mo (Essentials) and $349/mo (Pro) before a single call is tracked. The per-minute vendors start far lower: WhatConverts at $30/mo (with a $30 usage credit, ~148 calls), WildJar Starter at $39/mo, and CallRail Lead Tracking at $50/mo with 250 local minutes already bundled. So even at long average durations, per-call billing only pays off once your volume is high enough to dilute Infinity’s base — which is why Infinity reads as an enterprise tool and CallRail as an SMB one.
Nimbata is the other per-answered-call vendor (Pro $35/mo, Marketing $80/mo, Agency $120/mo), and it’s the cautionary footnote here: it bills one flat charge per answered call but does not publish the per-call rate on its pricing page. You cannot compute its crossover at all, which means a buyer drawn to per-call billing for its duration-blindness has exactly one vendor — Infinity — whose rate is actually quotable in advance.
When each model is the right call
Per-call billing is the rational choice for a specific shape of traffic: long calls, high volume, predictable cost. A car dealership or a clinic whose tracked calls routinely run five to ten minutes will pay Infinity a flat $0.15 each while a per-minute competitor charges $0.25–$0.50 for the same conversation. The duration-blindness is the feature — you stop being taxed for thorough phone work.
Per-minute billing wins everywhere else, and it’s most of the market for a reason. Ringba ($0.055/min Business, $0.05/min Professional), Convirza ($0.08/min Starter, $0.05/min Agency), Dialics (pure pay-as-you-go at $0.045/min local, $0 base), and CallRail all reward short calls and low volume with a near-zero entry cost. For a business with a $30–$50 base and calls under three minutes, you’d have to track thousands of calls a month before per-call economics caught up.
How to read this
Pick the meter by measuring one number: your average tracked-call duration. Under ~3 minutes, choose per-minute — CallRail at $0.045/min or WildJar at $0.04–$0.05/min, on a $30–$50 base. Over ~4 minutes and at real volume, per-call pays — but Infinity’s $249–$349 base means only larger operations clear it, and it’s the sole per-call vendor that publishes a rate ($0.15–$0.20/call) you can model before signing. Nimbata bills the same way without quoting the number, so it can’t be compared in advance at all. The crossover is real and computable; the base fee decides whether you ever reach it.