How to Choose Ping Post Software: What to Check Before You Sign

Most buying guides for this category rank platforms and never quote a price. That is not an oversight. Two vendors can both say “from five hundred dollars a month” and be describing completely different meters. One is counting every ping that arrives. The other is counting only the leads you keep.

So this guide does the thing the category avoids. It puts the published numbers side by side, separates the platforms that publish a full ladder from the ones that publish only a headline, and explains what each meter taxes. Every figure below was read on the vendor’s own site on 8 September 2026, and every one is linked so you can check it.

When ping post is the right architecture, and when it is not

Ping post is a real-time auction. A lead arrives, the platform sends a stripped-down version of it (the ping) to a set of buyers, collects bids, and delivers the full record (the post) to whoever wins. If you want the mechanics in detail, we cover the auction itself in how ping post works and the wider architecture in our ping-post leads guide.

You need this architecture when you have more than one buyer for the same lead and those buyers disagree about what it is worth. That disagreement is the entire point. If every buyer pays the same fixed price, an auction adds cost and latency for nothing, and a simpler round-robin router will serve you better.

You also need it when your buyers want to see something before they commit. A buyer who will pay more for a lead in one state, or in one age band, cannot express that in a flat feed. The ping is how they say so.

You do not need it if you are only buying. Ping post is seller-side and distributor-side infrastructure. A pure buyer connects to someone else’s system rather than running one. If you are on the buying side of that relationship, the questions that matter are different, and we set them out in our lead distribution software buyer’s guide.

What ping post software actually costs

Here is what each platform publishes as of 8 September 2026. The middle column is the important one, because it is what the price is attached to.

Two things fall out of that table, and neither is obvious from any vendor’s own page.

The first is that the cheapest published entry point is not the cheapest platform. Two of the six publish a zero-cost tier, ClickPoint and ActiveProspect, and ActiveProspect’s next level up is quoted as starting at ten dollars a month. Those are real prices, but they are entry doors rather than operating costs: ClickPoint’s starter tier is capped and allows no overage at all, and ActiveProspect’s levels are starting-at figures sitting on top of per-transaction rates it does not publish. LeadProsper’s five hundred dollars a month buys a defined allowance instead, five thousand leads against two hundred thousand pings and pre-pings. Those two allowances run down at very different rates. If your suppliers ping you heavily and you accept only a fraction, the ping allowance is what you will exhaust first, not the lead allowance.

Overage is where the tier you pick quietly pays for itself. On LeadsPedia the published lead overage is fifty dollars per thousand leads on Lite and twenty-five on Premium, and the ping overage halves the same way. So the more expensive plan is not only buying a bigger allowance, it is buying a cheaper unit past that allowance. If you routinely run over, the higher tier can cost less in total than the cheaper one. Its Enterprise plan publishes no overage rate at all, so that comparison stops where the published numbers stop.

Past the allowance, LeadProsper’s lead rate steps down across seven bands, and the spread is wide enough to change how you model a year. It starts at five cents a lead between five and ten thousand, drops to two cents in the band above, and keeps falling to one twentieth of a cent past five million a month. The step that matters most is the fourth band, one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand leads, where the rate falls by roughly an order of magnitude. Model the band you will be in twelve months from now, not the one you are in today.

The second is that the real split in this category is not price, it is which direction gets metered. boberdoo and LeadProsper both count only what arrives. boberdoo says “every other user, buyer, vendor, and outbound action is unlimited.” LeadProsper’s pricing page says you only pay for data coming in, and that outbound is “always free.” So if you fan a single lead out to thirty buyers, on either platform all thirty of those outbound deliveries cost you nothing. That is the difference that shows up on an invoice, and neither headline price reveals it. If your fan-out is wide and your accept rate is low, boberdoo and LeadProsper are the two meters here that work in your favour.

Key numbers, all read 8 September 2026: boberdoo’s lowest published tier is $1,075 per month with a $250 setup fee (boberdoo). LeadsPedia’s entry plan is “Lite $1,500 per month” (LeadsPedia). LeadProsper’s base is “$500/mo” including “5K leads, 200K pings & pre-pings” (LeadProsper). ClickPoint’s Growth plan is “$825” monthly or “$660/mo” billed annually (ClickPoint). ActiveProspect’s Professional level is “Starting at $1,000 monthly” and its Enterprise level “Starting at $5,000 monthly” (levels), while its Contracted model “Requires annual contract with $24K+ spend commitment” (pricing).

One caution on the published ladders. boberdoo currently shows a promotional banner offering “unlimited volume for $500/month” for three months, after which “standard platform fees and pricing will apply to all lead activity.” A promotional rate is not a price. Model the tier you will land on, not the one you start on.

The billable unit is the whole decision

Among the platforms here that publish a meter at all, four shapes show up. The meter, not the sticker price, decides what your bill looks like at volume.

That last row is the one operators misjudge most often, and it is worth stating plainly because ActiveProspect states it plainly itself: a rejected lead still bills. If your funnel runs five integrations on every lead and rejects a large share of them, you pay five times on leads you never sold.

What the software has to do while the consumer is waiting

The auction runs while a human being is sitting on a form or holding a phone. That budget is short, and it is the constraint every other feature bends around.

Three things have to happen inside it. The platform has to fan the ping out to your buyer set in parallel rather than in sequence. It has to apply a timeout so one slow buyer cannot hold the whole auction hostage. And it has to fall back cleanly when the top bidder fails to respond, rather than dropping the lead.

Ask to see the timeout setting itself, not a description of it. You want the default value, whether you can change it per buyer, and what happens when the timer expires. Does it award to the next bid, or discard the auction? A platform that cannot answer that specifically is not one to route live traffic through. Ask about partial failure too: if eighteen of twenty buyers respond and two time out, does the auction settle on the eighteen, or wait? That answer changes both your fill rate and your latency.

How leads get in and out: the integration surface

The auction is the interesting part. The integration surface is the part you will live with.

Check four things. First, how leads arrive: a posting API you can hand to a source, a form builder, or both. Second, how the ping and post payloads are shaped, and whether you can define which fields go in the ping and which are held back for the post. That split is your leverage, because a ping that gives away too much lets a buyer decline and act on the data anyway.

Third, how buyers connect. A buyer who cannot accept your post format will need a custom integration. Ask who builds it, what it costs, and whether that cost sits inside the platform fee or arrives as a separate line. Price it before you sign rather than after.

Fourth, what it costs to run those integrations on every lead. On a transaction-fee model this is not a fixed cost, it is a multiplier on your volume, and LeadConduit says so directly: fees apply “per integration used.”

What it has to store and prove

Whatever you sell, you will eventually be asked to show where a lead came from. The software either kept that record or it did not.

At minimum the platform should retain the full submitted record, the source it arrived from, the timestamp, the list of buyers pinged, the bids returned, and which buyer took it. That chain is what lets you answer a buyer dispute with evidence instead of an apology.

Three capabilities are worth checking line by line, because each one is a cost or a retrieval problem before it is anything else.

It has to keep the consent record with the lead, not next to it. The FTC’s guidance on complying with the Telemarketing Sales Rule tells sellers and telemarketers to create and keep the consent record for every transaction that needs one. A certificate that lives in a separate tool, unjoined to the lead ID, is a record you will not be able to produce quickly. If you are still choosing how to capture that proof, our TrustedForm versus Jornaya comparison covers the two options.

It has to scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry, and that access is a real line item rather than a feature. The FTC set FY 2026 fees at $82 per area code and $22,626 for all area codes nationwide, effective October 1, 2025, with the first five area codes free. The registry’s own rules also say every seller needs its own Subscription Account Number, separate from the telemarketer’s. So ask whether the platform scrubs under its subscription or expects you to bring your own, because that answer moves real money.

It has to query the FCC’s Reassigned Numbers Database and store the answer it got back. The database returns “no data” for numbers with no disconnect record before January 27, 2021. So “we check the database” is not the answer you want. “We store the literal response value against the lead” is.

Consent capture is usually a separate product rather than a platform feature. boberdoo publishes an optional lead quality add-on billed per lead rather than folding it into the tier. Others list third-party validation among their features without publishing what it costs. Neither approach is wrong, but they price very differently at volume.

The practical test is a retrieval test. Ask the vendor to pull a single lead from six months ago and show you the consent proof, the scrub result and the reassigned-number response in one query. How fast that happens, and how complete the record is, tells you more than any feature list.

How to run the evaluation before you sign

Seven questions, asked of every vendor in the same words, will separate them faster than any demo.

1. What exactly does your meter count, and what does it not count?
2. What is my bill on one thousand leads, twenty buyers each, four hundred sold?
3. What is the auction timeout default, can I change it per buyer, and what happens when it expires?
4. Who builds a buyer integration that does not fit my post format, and what does it cost?
5. Can I pull consent proof, do not call scrub result and reassigned number response for one lead ID in one query?
6. Who owns the buyer relationships and the data if I leave, and how do I export them?
7. What is the price after any promotional period ends?

That sixth one is the question operators skip and later wish they had asked in writing. The title of this piece is what to check before you sign, and exit terms are part of signing.

Two decisions sit upstream of the platform and are worth settling before any pilot starts: whether you are buying exclusive or shared leads, and how you verify a lead before you bid. Neither is a software question, and getting them wrong will cost you more than picking the second-best platform.

The short version. Steady volume fits a plan tier, where you buy capacity at a discount. Spiky or seasonal volume fits a metered model, so the troughs cost less. Wide fan-out with a low accept rate favours a meter that ignores outbound actions. Heavy enrichment favours anything except a per-transaction fee that bills rejects.

If you also route inbound calls rather than form leads, the platform set is different and overlaps only partly with this one. We compare that group separately in our pay-per-call software guide.

What ping post software will not fix

It will not create buyer demand. With one buyer, an auction has nothing to auction and you are paying platform fees for a router.

It will not improve a bad source. A platform that meters arrivals makes a noisy source more expensive, not less.

It will not settle a dispute you have no record of. And it will not tell you whether your price is right. It tells you what your buyers will pay today, which is a narrower thing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ping post software? It is software that runs a real-time auction for a lead. It sends a partial record to multiple buyers, collects bids, and delivers the full record to the winner, usually while the consumer is still on the page or the line.

How much does ping post software cost? They fall into three groups. Four publish a full ladder you can price yourself: boberdoo, LeadsPedia, LeadProsper and ClickPoint. ActiveProspect publishes headline account levels, starting at ten dollars a month, but not the per-transaction rates beneath them. Phonexa publishes no platform subscription price at all. Across the ladders that are published, the floor is a zero-cost capped tier, plans that buy a real allowance begin at five hundred dollars a month, and boberdoo’s ladder runs up to $11,375 a month at the top volume band. Compare the meter before the number, because the meters are not equivalent.

Is there genuinely cheap ping post software? Two platforms publish a zero-cost tier, ClickPoint and ActiveProspect, and ActiveProspect quotes its next level as starting at ten dollars a month. None of those is an operating cost. ClickPoint’s starter tier is capped with no overage allowed, and ActiveProspect’s levels sit on top of per-transaction rates it does not publish. Among paid plans that actually let you exceed the allowance, LeadProsper starts lowest, at five hundred dollars a month. Whether any of them is cheap depends on the shape of your traffic, not the headline.

Do I need ping post software if I am buying leads rather than selling them? Usually not. Ping post is seller-side and distributor-side infrastructure. A buyer connects to a seller’s system rather than operating one.

Which platforms publish their pricing? As of 8 September 2026 they split three ways. Four publish a full ladder, including what you pay past the allowance: boberdoo, LeadsPedia, LeadProsper and ClickPoint LeadExec. ActiveProspect publishes headline account levels on its levels page as starting-at figures, but says the per-transaction rates beneath them live on the individual product pages. Phonexa publishes add-on build fees and no platform subscription price, routing you to a custom quote instead. One caution on reading these pages: LeadsPedia’s overage rates sit in hover popovers rather than visible table text, so a quick scan of the page will miss them.

Choosing between these comes down to matching the meter to your traffic, and that is a question about your own numbers rather than the vendor’s. If you want a second read on which model fits the volume and fan-out you actually run, talk to us.