First Orion vs Hiya: Branded Calling Pricing Compared

At every volume both vendors publish, they land within a few percent of each other. First Orion INFORM is $31 for 250 branded calls a month, $52 for 500, $104 for 1,000 and $240 for 2,500. Hiya Branded Call is $29 for 250, $99 for 1,000, $275 for 3,000 and on up to $3,175 for 50,000, plus a one time $25 setup fee. The price is not the deciding factor. What decides it is that First Orion caps how many phone numbers each plan covers, Hiya does not, and First Orion's enterprise rate is the cheapest published per-call figure in the category once you are past 20,000 calls a month.

These two are the only branded calling vendors in the US market that publish a full price ladder instead of a contact form. Both pricing pages were rendered on August 24, 2026. Here is what they print, what the arithmetic says once you divide the fees by the calls, and the one number on Hiya's page that changes how you should model the whole purchase.

First Orion vs Hiya: which is cheaper?

Neither, in any way that should move a decision. At 250 branded calls Hiya is $29 and First Orion is $31. At 1,000 Hiya is $99 and First Orion is $104. The tiers stop lining up in the middle, where First Orion sells 2,500 calls for $240 and Hiya's nearest plan is 3,000 for $275. At the top, Hiya lists $1,500 for 20,000 calls while First Orion's enterprise minimum is $1,200 for the same volume, and at 50,000 calls Hiya is $3,175 against roughly $2,875 on First Orion's ladder, which is our arithmetic on their published rates rather than a quote we were given.

Two vendors arriving independently at nearly the same number at four different volumes is worth noticing. It suggests branded calling has a settled market rate rather than a spread you can negotiate your way around, and that anyone quoting you dramatically more or less is selling something different.

How much does First Orion INFORM cost?

Four published plans below enterprise, all month to month and cancellable. The 250 call plan is $31 and covers one branded display name across six phone numbers with standard analytics. The 500 call plan is $52 and covers up to two branded names across eight numbers. The 1,000 call plan is $104 and covers up to four names across eighteen numbers, and it is where the advanced analytics start. The 2,500 call plan is $240 and covers eight names across forty numbers.

Read those number allowances rather than the prices, because for an outbound team they are the real constraint. Rotating a pool of phone numbers is the standard defense against carrier spam labeling, so the teams most likely to buy branded calling are exactly the teams most likely to run more numbers than a plan covers. Forty numbers at the $240 tier is a serious pool, but six numbers at the $31 tier is not a rotation strategy, it is a single desk.

Above 20,000 calls the model changes entirely. There is a $1,200 monthly minimum that covers the first 20,000 calls, an annual agreement, and then billing on actual usage against a declining ladder: $0.0600 a call from 20,001 to 25,000, $0.0550 up to 50,000, $0.0450 up to 200,000, $0.0400 up to 500,000 and $0.0350 above that. Unlimited branded names for unlimited phone numbers come with it, which removes the constraint that shapes the smaller plans. First Orion also states it works with more than 16,000 businesses including Fortune 500 companies, which is its own claim rather than an audited figure.

How much does Hiya Branded Call cost?

Eight published plans, from $29 for 250 branded calls to $3,175 for 50,000 or more. In between: $99 for 1,000, $275 for 3,000, $449 for 5,000, $799 for 10,000, $1,500 for 20,000 and $2,000 for 30,000. Every account pays a one time $25 security setup fee. All the monthly plans state unlimited phone numbers and users, and Hiya says they can be changed or cancelled at any time. A custom plan carries a 12-month contract.

Calls beyond your plan allowance are billed individually, and the rate steps down as the plans get bigger: $0.13 each on the 250, 1,000 and 3,000 plans, then $0.10, $0.09, $0.085, $0.08 and $0.075. Hiya's calculator shows the arithmetic openly. Ask it about 3,000 outbound calls on the 1,000 call plan and it returns $99.00 for the plan, $127.40 for 980 additional branded calls at $0.13, and a $226.40 total.

Coverage is region-dependent. Hiya supports the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, and notes that outside those markets the smaller packages typically start around $550 a month. For a US-only outbound program that is irrelevant, but it matters if any of your dialing is international.

What does a branded call actually cost per call?

Divide each plan fee by the calls it includes and both ladders tell the same story: branded calling costs about 12 cents a call for a small team and about 6 cents at enterprise volume.

On Hiya, 250 calls at $29 is $0.116 each, 1,000 at $99 is $0.099, 3,000 at $275 is $0.092, 5,000 at $449 is $0.090, 10,000 at $799 is $0.080, 20,000 at $1,500 is $0.075, 30,000 at $2,000 is $0.067 and 50,000 at $3,175 is $0.064. On First Orion, 250 at $31 is $0.124, 500 at $52 is $0.104, 1,000 at $104 is $0.104, 2,500 at $240 is $0.096, and the enterprise minimum works out to $0.060 flat across its first 20,000 calls. Roughly a two to one spread between the smallest buyer and the largest, for an identical product.

There is a second piece of arithmetic worth doing before you pick a plan size. On Hiya the bundled rate is cheaper than the overage rate at every single tier, and the gap widens as you climb: $0.116 bundled against $0.13 overage at the bottom, $0.064 against $0.075 at the top. Sizing your plan to your real volume is therefore worth 11 to 15 percent versus drifting into per-call billing. That is not universal in this industry. When we priced voice AI platforms for AI voice agent pricing we found a vendor whose included minutes divided out to exactly its overage rate, meaning the plan fee bought concurrency rather than a cheaper minute. Run the division before you assume a bundle is a discount.

Do all of your branded calls actually display?

No, and this is the number that should reshape your model. Hiya's plan calculator, on its own pricing page, estimates how many of your outbound calls will actually be branded. Set it to 3,000 and it answers 1,980. That is 66 percent. The page explains why in one line: your brand displays whenever the recipient's network or device supports it, and that varies.

Branding is not a property of the call you place. It is a property of the network that terminates it and the handset that rings. So if you buy 10,000 branded calls at $799 and about two thirds render, your cost per call that actually showed your name is nearer $0.12 than the $0.08 the plan implies. That does not make branded calling a bad purchase, because the calls that do display are the ones lifting your answer rate. It does mean any business case built on full coverage is out by roughly a third before you begin.

First Orion does not publish an equivalent figure, which is not a mark against the product so much as a reason to ask. Request an expected display rate against your own carrier mix, in writing, from whichever vendor you shortlist. A refusal to give one is itself informative. First Orion does publish a survey claim that nine in ten people say they do not answer calls from numbers they do not recognize, which is a vendor survey rather than independent research, and worth treating as directional.

Which one should you buy?

The decision splits by shape rather than by size, and neither vendor wins outright.

Pick Hiya if you rotate a large pool of phone numbers at modest volume, if you want to leave without a contract, or if you simply want the vendor that publishes its expected coverage rate. Unlimited numbers on every plan removes the ceiling that makes First Orion's small tiers awkward for outbound teams, and the ability to change or cancel monthly is worth real money on a channel you are still testing.

Pick First Orion if you are committing to high volume from a stable set of numbers. Past 20,000 calls a month its ladder produces the cheapest published per-call rate anywhere in the category, bottoming out at $0.035, and the enterprise tier drops the branded-name and phone-number caps entirely. The trade is a year of commitment and a $1,200 monthly floor whether or not you use it.

If your volume sits between 2,500 and 20,000 calls a month, get both quoted, because that is precisely the band where First Orion stops publishing and starts selling. We keep the full category view, including the vendors who sell reputation monitoring rather than branding, on our branded caller ID and branded calling cost page.

What neither of them fixes

Branding writes your name onto the display. It does not stop carrier analytics attaching a spam label to the number underneath it, and a flagged number with a brand attached is still a flagged number. Those are separate products and almost always separate charges: PhoneBurner sells its ARMOR reputation product as an add-on on all three of its tiers, Readymode gates DID reputation monitoring behind its iQ plans at $199 and $249 per licence, and Kixie, CloudTalk and Numeracle all sell remediation without publishing a price at all.

Nor can either vendor change your attestation. Under 47 CFR 64.6301(b)(2) your voice service provider makes all attestation-level decisions for every call it originates, and that duty stays with the provider even when the cryptographic signing is outsourced. Full A-level attestation requires the carrier to have originated the call, to have a direct authenticated relationship with you, and to have a verified association with the calling number. You qualify for it through your carrier relationship. It is not a line on a price list.

The practical lesson is that reputation is a monitoring problem before it is a purchasing problem. Carriers do not tell you when they label a number. Your answer rate just quietly falls, and if you only look at campaign-level metrics you will read it as a bad list. The discipline is the same one any infrastructure team already knows, which is that you do not learn a thing is broken from the vendor, you learn it because something you set up is checking it on a schedule and telling you when the number moves. Track answer rate per number rather than per campaign, and the label shows up in your own data days before anyone mentions it.

The rest of the remediation process, including how to spread volume so the pattern never triggers a label in the first place, is in our guide to how to avoid Spam Likely on outbound calls, with the connect rates you should be measuring against in cold call connect rate benchmarks. If suppression and record keeping are the part you have not solved, that sits on TCPA compliance software. And if the honest problem is that the calls are not being made at all rather than that they display badly, the dialer comparison is on best dialer for cold calling.