Here's the trap. You line up four contact centre quotes. Two price per seat, one prices per minute, one will not say. You put them in a spreadsheet anyway, and the spreadsheet is meaningless because three of the four columns are measuring different things.
Seven of the 23 platforms in the CCaaS category publish a rate at all. Five publish a seat price, two publish a per-minute price, and sixteen publish nothing.
The two pricing models can be compared, but only after you convert one into the other, and the conversion produces a number no vendor prints: the amount of talk time per agent at which per-minute stops being the cheaper option.
Who publishes a price?
| Platform | Published rate | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Five9 | $119 | per seat per month |
| NICE CXone | $110 | per seat per month |
| Talkdesk | $85 | per seat per month |
| Dialpad | $27 | per seat per month |
| 8x8 | $24 | per seat per month, unverified |
| Amazon Connect | $0.038 | per minute |
| Google CCAI | $0.06 | per minute |
The other sixteen route you to a sales conversation, which is normal at this tier and puts the category firmly among the majority of tools you cannot price before talking to someone.
How do you compare a seat price with a per-minute price?
Convert the seat into minutes. A $119 seat at Amazon Connect's $0.038 a minute buys 3,132 minutes, which is 52 hours a month, which across 21.7 working days is about 2.4 hours of talk time a day.
| Platform | Seat price | Equivalent Connect minutes | Talk-hours per agent per day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five9 | $119 | 3,132 | 2.4 |
| NICE CXone | $110 | 2,895 | 2.2 |
| Talkdesk | $85 | 2,237 | 1.7 |
| Dialpad | $27 | 711 | 0.5 |
| 8x8 | $24 | 632 | 0.5 |
That last column is the decision. If your agents talk for less than 2.4 hours a day, Amazon Connect costs less than Five9. If they talk for more, the seat licence wins. Against Dialpad the threshold collapses to about half an hour, because a $27 seat buys very few minutes.
Against Google CCAI at 6 cents a minute the same thresholds are 1.5 hours a day for Five9 and about 20 minutes for Dialpad.
What does the comparison leave out?
Something important, and in the per-minute vendors' favour. Amazon Connect's $0.038 covers telephony and the platform. Contact Lens for analytics, Lex for the conversational layer and storage are all separate line items on top.
So the table above compares a floor for Connect against a fuller price for the seat vendors. The real crossover is lower than 2.4 hours, possibly considerably, and how much lower depends on which components you turn on. That is the same problem our voice cost model exists to solve: an advertised rate that excludes the parts you will certainly need is quoting orchestration rather than a bill.
It cuts the other way too. Seat licences at this tier are typically annual, and the published figure is a starting position rather than a rate, which is why procurement exists.
So what should you actually do?
- Measure your talk time per agent per day before taking any quotes. It is the one number that decides which pricing model suits you, most contact centres already have it, and no vendor will ask you for it.
- Under about two hours a day, price the per-minute options seriously. Amazon Connect is genuinely cheaper for low-utilisation or seasonal operations, and it is the only platform here you can start using without talking to anyone.
- Above three hours a day, price the seats. Talkdesk at $85 and Five9 at $119 are the mid-market reference points, with NICE CXone at $110 now that we have the figure right.
- Ask the per-minute vendors to quote with every component you will use switched on. The headline rate excludes analytics and the conversational layer, and those are not optional in practice.
- Do not assume the sixteen silent ones are expensive. They are unpriced, which is different. Some will be cheaper than the published options once negotiated, and you cannot know without asking.
The answer to the question in the title is seven, and the more useful answer is that the seven are not quoting the same thing. Until you know your talk time, a per-minute quote and a per-seat quote are two numbers that cannot be compared, which is convenient for everyone selling one of them. If you are not yet sure this is even the right category, CCaaS is one of five voice categories and the difference between them is who ends up on the call. One refinement to the table above, from reading AWS's own page since: Connect's 3.8 cents excludes telephony, which pulls the crossover from 2.4 hours a day to about 1.8.
