Here's the trap. Somebody tells you contact centre software starts around $24 a seat, which sounds like a rounding error against Five9's $119. You get a quote and it comes back at four times that.
The $24 and $27 figures belong to phone systems, not contact centres. Dialpad and 8x8 both sell a business phone system and a contact centre. The cheap number is the first product. Their contact centre seats are $95 and $85.
Which means there is no cheap end of this category in the way the comparison articles imply. There is a cheap adjacent product that the same vendors also sell.
What do they actually charge?
| Vendor | Entry price | What that buys | Contact centre seat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dialpad | $27 | The phone system tier | $95 |
| 8x8 | $24 | The phone system tier | $85 |
Dialpad's figures were verified in August 2026. 8x8's $24 and $85 carry no verification date in our records and its pricing page rate-limited us when we tried to re-read it, so treat that row as unconfirmed rather than current.
Set the real numbers against the mid-market and the picture changes completely. At $95, Dialpad's contact centre seat is more expensive than Talkdesk's $85 and within striking distance of NICE CXone's $110. The vendor most often cited as the budget option is not the budget option.
Why does the confusion happen?
Because both companies genuinely sell both things, on the same pricing page, under one brand. That is their actual proposition: phone system, meetings and contact centre from one vendor on one bill, which is a real benefit for a company that wants exactly that.
It also means the lowest number on the page is a phone system, and anyone assembling a comparison table by taking each vendor's cheapest published figure will put a phone system in a contact centre column. That is how $24 ends up being quoted as the floor of a category whose real floor is around $85.
Do you actually need the dearer tier?
Genuinely worth asking, because a lot of teams asking for a contact centre want something the phone system already does.
The phone system tier covers a shared business number, an auto-attendant menu, extensions, voicemail and transcription, call recording and basic reporting. For a team where whoever is free picks up, that is the whole requirement.
The contact centre tier adds the things that only matter when deciding who answers is itself a problem: skills-based routing, queue management with position and callback, omnichannel handling in one agent interface, supervisor live monitoring, and workforce management for forecasting and shift adherence.
The dividing line is the one we drew when defining the category: CCaaS exists because humans have shifts, breaks and varying skill. If none of those facts is currently costing you anything, the $27 tier is not a compromise, it is the correct purchase.
Is the combined platform worth it?
For some companies, clearly. One vendor for telephony, meetings and contact centre removes integration work and consolidates a bill, and both of these do it competently.
The trade-off is depth, and our own notes on both are consistent about it. Dialpad is broad rather than deep, and a dedicated contact centre platform will beat it on routing sophistication and workforce management. 8x8's strength is international telephony, with unlimited calling in many countries, and its AI is a recent addition rather than a foundation.
So the honest framing is not cheap versus expensive. It is consolidated versus specialised, at roughly the same price.
So where is the actual cheap end?
- Per-minute, if your agents do not talk much. Amazon Connect at 3.8 cents a minute plus telephony beats every seat licence below roughly two talk-hours per agent per day, which we worked through in the Connect teardown.
- The phone system tier, if you do not actually need a contact centre. Plenty of small teams asking for CCaaS want a shared number, a menu and voicemail transcription. That is what $24 to $27 buys, and buying it deliberately is completely reasonable.
- Nothing, if you need real routing and workforce management. The floor for that is around $85 a seat wherever you shop, and the category does not have a budget option. Knowing that before you build the business case saves a round of surprise.
The answer to the question in the title is that $27 buys a phone system and a contact centre seat costs three and a half times that. Both products are real, both are worth buying in the right circumstances, and the number that keeps appearing in comparison tables is attached to the wrong one.