Unlimited calling is cheaper for a predictive agent once their billed minutes would cost more than the flat fee on pay as you go. At OVOKY's French prices, that point is 5,000 minutes a month when you call only mobiles, and about 17,100 when you call only landlines. In the worked example below, a full-time agent on a mobile list passes it; a part-time agent, or a list with many landlines, does not.
The two pricing models
- Pay as you go. You pay for each billed minute, billed per second, from a prepaid balance. Cost follows activity: quiet weeks cost less, busy weeks cost more.
- Unlimited calling. A flat fee per agent per month covers calls, with a cap on simultaneous calls per agent. Cost stays fixed whatever the volume.
OVOKY's prices at the time of writing, per agent per month for unlimited calling and per minute for pay as you go:
| Country | Unlimited calling | Pay as you go, landlines | Pay as you go, mobiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| France | €120 | €0.007 | €0.024 |
| Belgium | €150 | €0.028 | €0.028 |
Unlimited plans in both countries allow up to five simultaneous calls per agent. Numbers are billed separately at €10 per month each on either model, and the agent license comes on top (€26.20 per month on the Professional plan).
Why predictive campaigns bill more minutes than agents talk
In telephony, billing normally starts when a call is answered, whoever or whatever answers it. A predictive dialer places several calls per agent and only passes live conversations through, so it pays for answered seconds that no agent ever hears:
- Answering machines. Every call picked up by a voicemail is billed from the moment it answers until detection hangs up.
- The connection gap. When a person answers, a moment passes before an agent is bridged in.
- Abandoned calls. If a person answers and no agent is free, the seconds before the call is released are billed too.
- More talk per hour. The biggest effect is the one you want: predictive agents spend far more of each hour talking than agents who dial by hand, and every one of those minutes is billed.
Unanswered rings, busy signals and failed attempts are usually not billed. With per-second billing, the machine and gap seconds stay small; with per-minute billing, each of those calls would cost a full minute. See per-second vs 60/60 billing for the math.
Finding the break-even point
The break-even is the number of billed minutes at which pay as you go costs exactly the flat fee.
The blended rate is (share of mobile minutes × mobile rate) + (share of landline minutes × landline rate).
| Scenario | Blended rate | Break-even per agent per month | Per working day (21 days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| France, mobiles only | €0.0240 | 5,000 minutes | 238 minutes |
| France, 70% mobiles, 30% landlines | €0.0189 | 6,349 minutes | 302 minutes |
| France, landlines only | €0.0070 | 17,143 minutes | 816 minutes |
| Belgium, any mix | €0.0280 | 5,357 minutes | 255 minutes |
In France on a mobile list, unlimited calling pays off once an agent bills about four hours of minutes a day. A landline-only list never gets there in practice: 816 billed minutes is more than 13 hours a day.
A worked example: three predictive agent profiles
Assumptions, which you should replace with your own data:
- 21 working days a month.
- A part-time agent dials 3 hours a day, a full-time agent 6 hours and an intensive agent 7 hours.
- Part-time and full-time agents talk 40 minutes per dialing hour; the intensive agent talks 45.
- Per dialing hour, about 30 machine-answered calls billed 6 seconds each (3 minutes), 15 connection gaps of 2 seconds (0.5 minutes) and 3 abandoned calls of 10 seconds (0.5 minutes). That is 4 billed minutes per hour that no agent hears. The intensive agent's campaign runs at a higher dial ratio, so we assume 5.
| Profile | Dialing hours per month | Billed minutes per hour | Billed minutes per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part-time | 63 | 44 | 2,772 |
| Full-time | 126 | 44 | 5,544 |
| Intensive | 147 | 50 | 7,350 |
Monthly calling cost per agent:
| Profile | France, mobiles only | France, 70% mobiles | France unlimited | Belgium, pay as you go | Belgium unlimited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part-time | €66.53 | €52.39 | €120 | €77.62 | €150 |
| Full-time | €133.06 | €104.78 | €120 | €155.23 | €150 |
| Intensive | €176.40 | €138.92 | €120 | €205.80 | €150 |
Reading the table:
- Part-time agents are cheaper on pay as you go in every scenario.
- A full-time agent sits close to the line. Unlimited saves about €13 a month in France on a mobile-only list and about €5 in Belgium, while pay as you go saves about €15 in France on a 70% mobile list.
- The intensive profile clearly favors unlimited: about €56 saved per agent per month on mobile lists in both countries, and about €19 in France on the 70% mobile mix.
When the results are this close, the deciding factor is often something other than the price per minute.
What the five-call cap means for pacing
On unlimited plans, each agent can have at most five calls in progress at once. For a predictive campaign, that limits the dial ratio to five lines per agent.
Whether that matters depends on your list. At a 20% live answer rate, five lines per ready agent already produce about one live answer per round, which keeps agents busy. If your list is answered so rarely that you would want more lines than that, look at the list first: low answer rates often point to old data or to caller IDs with a poor reputation (see why your caller ID gets flagged as spam). For how dial ratios relate to answer rates, see predictive, preview or manual dialing.
Factors beyond the price per minute
- Predictability. A flat fee makes the monthly budget easy to forecast, which matters to BPOs that price their own clients per seat.
- Volume swings. Seasonal campaigns, launches and pilots have uneven volume. Pay as you go follows it down as well as up.
- Prepaid balance. On pay as you go, calls draw on your prepaid balance. Plan top-ups around your busiest campaigns so calling is never interrupted mid-shift.
- Destinations. Check which destinations each plan covers, especially if you call across borders.
- Team mix. If some agents dial all day and others mostly take inbound calls, their minutes differ widely. Compare per profile, not per average agent.
How to decide in practice
- Pull a month of billed minutes per agent, split between mobiles and landlines. If you are new to predictive dialing, estimate it as dialing hours × (talk minutes per hour + overhead minutes per hour); we used 4 to 5 minutes of overhead above.
- Compute the blended rate and the pay-as-you-go cost per agent.
- Compare it with the unlimited fee, profile by profile.
- Where the gap is small, weigh predictability and volume swings more than the saving.
- Review the choice every quarter, since lists, dial ratios and staffing change.
How OVOKY prices calling
OVOKY offers both models. Voice is billed per second with no minimum and no connection fee, from a prepaid balance in euros. Unlimited calling costs €120 per agent per month in France and €150 in Belgium, with up to five simultaneous calls per agent. A predictive agent in France on the Professional plan with unlimited calling comes to €26.20 + €120 = €146.20 per month, all in except numbers (€176.20 in Belgium).
Agent reports show talk time per agent, and the Cost & Consumption Trend report shows daily cost and minutes, which gives you the data for the first step. Current prices are on the pricing page, and pacing settings are described on the predictive dialer page.