Guide · Call Tracking
Per-minute or per-answered-call call tracking? The crossover is about three 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, and one vendor, Mediahawk, charges both meters at once. 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 in a band that clusters around three minutes — as short as 1.5 minutes against the most expensive published minute in the category, as long as 4.4 against the cheapest. Below your own vendor’s crossover, 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 meters its call tracking on a clean per-call rate in dollars: $0.20 per tracked call on its Essentials tier ($249/mo) and $0.15 per tracked call on Pro ($349/mo). (WildJar does publish a dollar figure per answered call — $0.90 — but that is the price of its AI Voice Agent answering the call, not the meter its tracking runs on.) 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| WildJar Growth/Agency vs Infinity Pro | $0.10/min | $0.15/call | 1.5 min |
| WildJar Growth/Agency vs Infinity Essentials | $0.10/min | $0.20/call | 2.0 min |
| CallRail vs Infinity Pro | $0.06/min | $0.15/call | 2.5 min |
| CallRail vs Infinity Essentials | $0.06/min | $0.20/call | 3.3 min |
| WhatConverts vs Infinity Pro | $0.045/min | $0.15/call | 3.3 min |
| WhatConverts vs Infinity Essentials | $0.045/min | $0.20/call | 4.4 min |
CallRail’s local rate is $0.06/min on the 250-minute allotment its entry plan bundles — not a platform-wide figure, because CallRail steps the rate down as the allotment grows and only reaches $0.045/min on a 4,000-minute bundle whose base is $295/mo month-to-month. WildJar meters its Growth/Agency plan at $0.10/min on an $89/mo base — the most expensive published minute in this dataset — and publishes no per-minute rate at all for its $150/mo Starter plan, which bundles 500 minutes and 4 numbers instead of metering from the first one. That spread is the whole point: the crossover moves with the per-minute rate, not the per-call one. Against a cheap minute like WhatConverts’ $0.045, Infinity’s flat fee only starts winning at 3.3 minutes on Pro and 4.4 on Essentials; against WildJar’s $0.10 it wins from 1.5. The reading is otherwise consistent: if your tracked calls run short — 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 your own vendor’s crossover, 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 (a $30 usage credit included, and by its own table up to 148 tracked phone-call leads; the page publishes no annual rate, so $30 is the only basis there is), CallRail Lead Tracking at $55/mo — the month-to-month rate, quoted on the same basis as the bases beside it; $50/mo if you commit annually — with 250 local minutes already bundled, and WildJar’s Growth/Agency plan at $89/mo (its $150 Starter tier buys 500 bundled minutes rather than a published meter, and WildJar sells no annual billing at all). 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 $39/mo month-to-month, Marketing $89/mo, Agency $149/mo, or $35 / $80 / $120 per month billed annually — and it’s the cautionary footnote here: it bills one flat charge per answered call but does not publish the per-call rate on its pricing page. You cannot compute its crossover at all, which means a buyer drawn to per-call billing for its duration-blindness has exactly one vendor — Infinity — whose per-call rate is quotable in dollars before you sign.
Mediahawk is the third structure on this question, and it runs both meters at once: a per-call connection fee — 15p on Starter, 12p on Professional — charged on top of per-minute rates of 2.5p to 14p, which vary by number type and destination rather than by plan. The subscriptions under them are £199/mo and £299/mo month-to-month (£179 and £269 on an annual contract), with unlimited users on both and nothing bundled, so the metering starts on the first minute. Mediahawk publishes all of it openly — it simply publishes none of it in dollars, and its pricing page carries no ”$” figure anywhere, so it cannot join the crossover table above without an exchange rate the vendor does not quote.
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 $0.23 to $1.00 for the same conversation, depending on whether its minute is WhatConverts’ $0.045 or WildJar’s $0.10. 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. Convirza ($0.08/min on its $29 Starter base month-to-month, $0.05/min on the $149 Agency tier), Dialics (pure pay-as-you-go on a $0 base, $0.045/min for inbound local calls — the only kind its published table covers), and CallRail all reward short calls and low volume with a near-zero entry cost. Ringba meters the same way ($0.055/min Business, $0.05/min Professional) but from a $147/mo month-to-month base ($127 billed annually), so it is a volume play rather than a cheap way in. For a business with a $30–$55 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 ~2.5 minutes, choose per-minute — CallRail at $0.06/min or WhatConverts at $0.045/min, on a $30–$55 base; and check your own vendor’s rate, because WildJar’s $0.10/min crosses over at 1.5 minutes rather than 3. 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 dollar 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.