A Dialpad alternative that charges for AI by the person who uses it
Dialpad welds the AI to a seat you must buy before anyone dials, and puts it on a higher tier. Here it is two cents a minute on the account that uses it. The account costs nothing to hold, and Professional includes recording, transcripts, and on-demand AI call notes priced per minute rather than per person.
Keep Dialpad
The transcript is the artefact your team works from, a manager coaches off recorded calls, or the summary is what goes into the CRM. Take that away and you have not saved money, you have removed the reason the tool was bought.
Choose Airlophone
Your team needs international calling without a licence for every person. You pay only when somebody makes a call.
See Team callingRead the full comparison
01What it is
What Dialpad actually is
Dialpad transcribes calls as they happen, writes a summary afterwards, and prompts whoever is on the line while they are still on it. Around that sits a full business phone system with meetings and messaging. The AI is the actual product and it is good at it, which is why the whole thing is priced per person.
02The model
How Dialpad is priced
A licence per user per month across tiers, with the AI features that are the reason to buy it gated to the higher ones, and an annual commitment usual. Everyone with a login is a licence whether or not they placed a call.
Seat prices change. Check Dialpad's own pricing page for its current figure. Airlophone publishes every rate at /rates.
03Where it stops
Where it stops, if the problem is international calling
The feature you are paying for is per person, and calling is not.
A transcript is worth something for the person having the conversation. On a team where three people talk to customers and twelve are on the account so they can be reached, twelve licences buy three transcripts.
The tier that has the AI is not the tier that has the price.
The entry plan is a phone system. The reason most teams choose Dialpad sits above it, so the figure worth comparing is the one for the tier you would actually be on.
International minutes are still metered on top.
Bundled calling is bundled by destination, and the destinations that are bundled are rarely the ones a diaspora or supplier corridor uses. Check the specific countries you call rather than the number of countries listed.
Transcription is not a substitute for knowing whether it connected.
The thing a summary cannot tell you is what happened on the calls with no transcript, which are the ones that rang out, hit a menu, or reached a voicemail nobody labelled.
04What we are not
What you would be giving up
Airlophone is calling, not a phone system. These are the specific things Dialpad does that Airlophone does not, stated before the price rather than after it.
No live transcription while the call is happening.
Not built. The plumbing exists and it stays switched off, because recording a call is a consent question in most of the places this is used from and it is not a feature to ship for being technically easy.
No coaching, no sentiment scoring, no keyword alerts.
Nothing listens to the call, so nothing prompts you during it and nothing scores it afterwards. What is recorded is what happened: who called, where, how long it rang, how long it lasted and what it cost.
No meetings, no video, no team messaging.
This makes and takes phone calls. It is not where your team talks to each other, and it will not replace the tool where they do.
No native app, on a phone or a desktop.
It runs in a browser tab. Nothing to install is the point of it, and it also means no icon on a home screen and no notification reaching you when the tab is not in front of you.
05What changes
What is different the week after you move
Twelve licences stop buying three transcripts.
Everyone stays on the account and keeps calling. Professional is priced per minute rather than per person, so the three people who talk to customers pay for the minutes they use and the twelve who are there to be reached cost nothing.
The notes stop being the machine's guess at what was agreed.
You type what matters while you are still on the call, a reference number, who you spoke to, what they promised, and the AI completes it against the transcript. Speech recognition mishears a reference number and you do not, so your note is the part it is told to trust.
Cancelling does not take your transcripts with it.
Everything already produced stays readable, searchable and exportable whether or not you keep paying. That is worth stating because most of this category does the opposite.
07What it costs
What the calling itself costs here
No licence, no seat, no minimum and no commitment. You fund one balance, the team spends from it, and a colleague who made no calls this month costs nothing. Rates for a distributed team calling head office and clients, from $0.03 a minute across 221 countries:
| Destination | Landline | Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $0.03 | $0.03 |
| United Kingdom | $0.09 | $0.12 |
| India | $0.19 | $0.15 |
| Philippines | $0.69 | $0.99 |
| Australia | $0.09 | $0.29 |
Per minute in US dollars from a US caller ID, billed per minute with part of a minute counting as a full one. Read live from the published card, so this table cannot disagree with what you are charged. A landline and a mobile in the same country are priced apart because they cost different amounts to reach, and the band is resolved from the digits you dial rather than from a question you are asked.
A shared balance, a monthly cap per person enforced when they press Call, and an answer rate per member rather than a call count: see how the team account works, including the five things it deliberately does not do.
08Try it
Price a call your team actually makes
Type a real number from your own call log. The exact rate for that number appears before anything dials.
Calls to United States from $0.03 a minute for landline and toll-free. Basic rate.
Rates from a US caller ID. Your selected caller ID is priced before calling.
Sign up when you press Call.
09Questions
Common questions
What is the best Dialpad alternative without AI features?
Then the question is who uses it, not whether you want it. Recording, transcripts and AI call notes come with Professional, which is priced per minute, so a team where three people talk to customers pays for the minutes those three use rather than for everyone with a login. What you still lose is real: no live transcription while the call is happening, no coaching, no sentiment scoring and no keyword alerts.
Does Airlophone record or transcribe calls?
Yes, on the calls you pick. The account recording policy must allow it, and the caller chooses recording on each call. Professional costs two cents a minute on top of the ordinary rate, recorded or not. After a recorded call, open the transcript and choose Generate AI call note to create one from the transcript and any call notes you wrote. The consent decision stays yours: it differs by country and often by which end of the call you are on, so you get the switch and a spoken notice rather than legal advice. What is not here is live transcription while you talk, coaching, sentiment scoring or keyword alerts.
Is there a business calling service with no per-user licence?
Yes. Airlophone charges per minute against one shared prepaid balance and there is no licence to make a call, so a colleague who made no calls this month costs nothing and a colleague who only receives them costs nothing either. The optional part is the AI: recording, transcripts and notes come with Professional, priced per minute, so a team where three people talk to customers pays for the minutes those three use rather than for everyone with a login. That is the opposite way round from a phone system that licenses the dial tone and gates the AI above it. Each member can be given a monthly cap enforced when they press Call rather than reported afterwards.
How do I compare international calling costs between providers?
Price the specific numbers you call, not the countries. A landline and a mobile in the same country are frequently priced several times apart, and a rate card that quotes one figure per country is quoting an average of the two. Airlophone publishes both bands for every country it covers and resolves the band from the digits you dial, so the figure you see is the one for that number.
Bring your team onto one balance
Invite members for free. Set spending limits and see every call in one place.