The tracking number itself is a line item — and a local one runs $1 to $8.50 a month before a single call connects

Most call-tracking comparisons stop at the base plan. But a tracking number is a phone number a carrier provisions and rents to you, so it carries its own fee — separate from the base subscription and separate from the per-minute charges your calls rack up. For a business running one or two numbers, that fee is a rounding error. For anyone doing keyword-level or campaign-level tracking — where the whole point is to spin up a fresh number per ad group, per landing page, per source — it becomes the line item that dominates the bill.

Across the vendors that publish a per-number rate, the spread on a local number is 8.5x: from Dialics at $1.00/mo to WildJar at $8.50/mo on its Growth/Agency plan.

Who publishes a per-number fee, and what it is

Five vendors in our dataset put an explicit price on a provisioned number. Three of them — Dialics, Ringba and WildJar — state that price as a monthly rent, and only those three carry a “/mo” in the table below. The other two do not state a period at all: CallRail prints its as “$3 ea.” and “$5 ea.”, and Convirza publishes its $3.00 and $1.00 the same bare way. Those gaps stay open here rather than getting closed with an assumption.

Vendor	Plan	Per extra number	Base / mo
Dialics	Pay As You Go	$1.00/mo (local)	$0
Convirza	Agency	$1.00	$149
Ringba	Professional	$2.00/mo (local)	$297
Convirza	Starter	$3.00	$29
Ringba	Business	$3.00/mo (local)	$147
CallRail	Lead Tracking	$3.00 each, no period stated (local, past the 5 bundled)	$55 month-to-month ($50 billed annually)
WildJar	Growth/Agency	$8.50/mo (local)	$89
WildJar	Starter	4 included; no rate published past them	$150

Two patterns jump out. First, the per-number fee often moves opposite to the base plan: Convirza’s cheaper Starter tier ($29) charges $3.00 per number while its pricier Agency tier ($149) drops that to $1.00 — a three-fold difference that only matters at volume. Ringba does the same, $3.00/mo on Business falling to $2.00/mo on Professional. The upgrade isn’t just buying features; it’s buying a cheaper number rate.

Second, WildJar charges the dearest number on this board by a wide margin — $8.50/mo for a local tracking number on its Growth/Agency plan, nearly three times the $3.00 that CallRail, Convirza and Ringba charge at their entry tiers, and WildJar publishes no bundled numbers on that plan to offset it. Its other tier changes the model rather than the price: Starter at $150/mo includes 4 tracking numbers alongside 500 minutes of call volume and AI transcription, and publishes no rate for a fifth — so on the question this guide asks, Starter has no answer to give, and we are not going to invent one from the tier beside it. Dialics sits at the other end at $1.00/mo for a local number (its toll-free numbers run $2.00/mo), and because Dialics has no monthly base at all — it’s pure pay-as-you-go — the number fee is most of the fixed cost. Toll-free numbers are priced separately and higher wherever a vendor breaks them out — $2.00/mo at Dialics, $5.00 each at CallRail, each above that vendor’s own local rate.

Why the spread dominates keyword-level tracking

Run the arithmetic at the volume this fee is built for. Suppose you provision 30 tracking numbers to attribute calls down to the keyword:

• On Dialics, that’s 30 × $1.00 = $30/mo in number rent, on top of a $0 base.
• On Ringba Business, 30 × $3.00 = $90/mo, on top of a $147 base.
• On WildJar Growth/Agency, the same 30 numbers cost 30 × $8.50 = $255/mo — nearly three times the vendor’s own $89 base plan.

The base subscription you compared in the brochure is now the smaller half of the bill. At 30 numbers WildJar’s number rent ($255) runs close to three times its base ($89), for $344/mo of fixed cost before a minute is metered; at Dialics the number rent ($30) is the entire fixed outlay. This is the trap in ranking these tools by sticker price: an $89 plan with $8.50 numbers is structurally more expensive at scale than a $0 plan with $1.00 numbers — or, closer to home, than a $147 plan with $3.00 ones. WildJar’s base undercuts Ringba Business by $58 while its number costs $5.50 more, so Ringba is the cheaper fixed cost from the eleventh number onward ($58 ÷ $5.50 ≈ 10.5). Whatever the $89 platform fee buys you, it stops being the cheap way to run numbers about a dozen numbers in.

The bundlers play a different game

Not every vendor charges for the first number. CallRail bundles before it itemizes: its entry Lead Tracking plan — $55/mo month-to-month, $50/mo billed annually — includes 5 local tracking numbers and 250 local minutes in the base, and only past that does it charge $3 for each extra local number and $5 for each toll-free one, with local minutes metered at $0.06 at that allotment. That’s a genuinely different shape: for a business that needs a handful of numbers, five-in-the-box beats a low base with a per-number tax from the first number. The itemized vendors only pull ahead once your number count climbs past what the bundle includes — and past it, CallRail’s $3.00 is mid-table, not cheap.

Run the same 30-number arithmetic on it: five come with the plan, so the other 25 cost 25 × $3.00 = $75. Read that $3 as a monthly rent and CallRail’s fixed cost is $130/mo ($125 on annual billing); read it as a one-time provisioning charge and it is $75 once, then $55/mo. CallRail’s page does not say which, so both readings stand — and neither changes the ranking, because the $75 they differ by is smaller than the gap to the vendors on either side: Dialics at $30 all-in on a $0 base below it and Ringba Business at $237 above it, with WildJar Growth/Agency further out again at $344, $255 of that in number rent. CallRail will also sell the numbers in bulk instead: its plan table lists a 40-local-number, 4,000-local-minute allotment at $295/mo month-to-month ($265 billed annually), where local minutes meter at $0.045. On the monthly reading that is more than double the entry plan’s fixed cost at 30 numbers — but what you are buying there is the minutes, not the numbers.

WildJar’s Starter bundles on a smaller scale and with a harder edge: $150/mo for 4 tracking numbers, 500 minutes and AI transcription. Four numbers is a location-level program, not a keyword-level one, and because the page prices neither a fifth number nor a minute past the 500, Starter is the tier that cannot tell you what growth costs. Mediahawk bundles more than either, and prices it all in pounds: £199/mo month-to-month (£179 on an annual contract) for Starter and £299/mo (£269) for Professional, each including either one dynamic number pool or 10 static numbers, with unlimited users on both. It publishes that openly — it just publishes no dollar figure anywhere on the page, so it cannot be ranked in a dollar table. That is a currency problem, not a secrecy one, and the two should not be confused.

How to read this

If your tracking strategy is a few numbers — one per location, one per channel — the per-number fee is noise; pick on features and base price, and a bundler like CallRail or Mediahawk may quietly include everything you need. The moment your strategy is granular attribution, invert the question: a number rate of $8.50 against $1.00 is an 8.5x multiplier on your fastest-growing cost. At that point the cheapest base plan and the cheapest tracking program are rarely the same vendor — WildJar is the clearest case on this board, with a base that undercuts Ringba’s and a number fee that overtakes it before you reach a dozen lines — and the per-number column, not the headline price, is the one to negotiate. As always, these are published rates captured from each vendor’s own pricing page on 2026-09-08 — CallRail’s and WildJar’s read in a headless browser, CallRail’s because its grid is drawn in JavaScript and WildJar’s because its page loads with Australia selected and shows US dollars only once you switch region; metered per-minute and recording charges sit on top, and we publish that source behind every figure.