The 2026 B2B Phone Data Benchmark: What One Right Number Costs

Almost every B2B phone data benchmark 2026 has produced measures the same easy thing: did a number come back. The hard number is what one right-person mobile costs once you throw away the ones that ring a stranger. An independent test of 1,400 US leaders put that at a $0.40 median, with the spread running from $0.11 to $1.27 depending on who you bought from. Here is the ranking read that way, priced per number that reaches the person on the record, plus the two findings that should change how many phone vendors you pay at all.

What One Right-Person Mobile Actually Costs

A right-person mobile cost a $0.40 median in the 2026 US test, ranging from $0.11 to $1.27 across ten providers. That figure is not on anybody's rate card. It is the rate card divided by the share of numbers that survived a line check and a name check.

The Funnel That Eats Your Spend

• 1,390 of the 1,400 contacts came back with some number attached. That is the 99% figure vendors put on slides.
• 1,211 of those were a real mobile rather than a desk line or a switchboard, so 87%.
• 957 belonged to the person on the record. That is 68%, and it is the pooled result of all ten providers working the same list at once.
• Of the mobiles themselves, one in four reached someone else entirely and another 15% could never be confirmed either way.

The Cost Nobody Quotes You

• Checking a number runs about $0.10 on top of buying it: one lookup for line type, one for the name match.
• Skip that step and you do not save the $0.10, you just move it onto a rep's calendar.
• The full 2026 test cost $2,521 to run across ten providers, which is what an honest read of this category actually prices at.

Why Your Third Phone Vendor Only Buys You Three Points

Two providers together reached 60% of the right people. Adding a third lifted that by three points. Provider overlap ran 20% to 50%, so the third contract mostly re-buys numbers you already have on file.

What That Does to a Fallback Chain

• Ordering fallbacks lowest cost first rather than best coverage first saved about 10% on the same list, for the same result.
• The records where one provider comes up empty are usually the records where all of them do, so spend climbs fastest on your worst rows.
• Two well-chosen sources and a hard stop is a defensible setup. Five is usually a renewal nobody questioned.
• If you are weighing a chain against a single source, the tradeoffs are laid out in our piece on waterfall versus real-time enrichment at scale.

The 2026 Ranking, Priced Rather Than Counted

Read the table on the price column first, then on whether the mobile arrives separated from the switchboard line. Right-person share only exists for providers that were in the independent test, and being straight about that gap matters more than filling every cell.

#	Provider	Per mobile, published	Right-person share, 2026 test	Mobile kept separate	Price list published
1	Vibe Prospecting	$0.08 on the Elite tier	Not in the test	Yes	Yes, full list
2	Explorium API	$0.075 at scale volume	Not in the test	Yes, its own field	Yes, full list
3	LeadMagic	$0.11 per right number, measured	Lowest cost per right number in the test	Partial	Yes
4	RocketReach	Published per lookup	69%, highest measured	Partial	Yes
5	People Data Labs	Tier dependent	About 66%	Partial	Quote above volume
6	Forager	Quote based	About 64%	Partial	Demo required
7	Wiza	Published per credit	59%, on the largest volume	Partial	Yes
8	Datagma	$0.37 to $0.59, 30 credits	Not in the test	Mobile only, no landline billing	Yes

How to Read the Gaps

• Vibe Prospecting and the Explorium API were not among the ten providers tested, so those rows carry published price and response shape only. Measure them on your own list instead of taking a ranking's word for it. That is what the free plan is for.
• The highest right-person share measured was 69% and the lowest was 53%. The distance between best and worst is narrower than most vendor decks imply.
• Volume and accuracy are different things. The provider that returned the most valid mobiles, 87% of the list, converted only 59% of them to the right person.
• Datagma charges only when a mobile is found and keeps landlines out of results and billing entirely, the cleanest line-type policy in the set, at one of the highest prices per number. Honesty and price sit on separate axes.
• To compare the data layers underneath these tools, the side-by-side provider comparison hub is the faster read.

How to Get Mobiles Without Signing a Data Contract

Ask for the numbers in a chat window, see the credit cost before anything is spent, and pay $0.08 a mobile on the top volume tier. Vibe Prospecting runs professional prospecting on premium sources behind Claude and ChatGPT, so a dial list is a request rather than a procurement cycle.

What a Mobile Costs Here

Plan	Price	Credits	Per credit	Per mobile, 5 credits
Free	$0	200 a month	N/A	40 lookups a month
Plus	$26.91	900	$0.030	$0.15
Boost	$76.49	3,000	$0.025	$0.13
Ultra	$159.99	8,000	$0.020	$0.10
Elite	$487.49	30,000	$0.016	$0.08

How the Numbers Come Back

• The person's mobile arrives as its own field, kept apart from the company switchboard line, so you are not paying a second tool to sort one from the other.
• You can preview sample records and the credit cost before any of it is spent, which is what makes running your own test easy rather than a commitment.
• Company details, contact details and recent company activity all come out of one credit pool, so phone spend never strands the credits you set aside for something else.
• Powered by Explorium Enterprise Business Data, and the full price list is published rather than quoted.

Install the plugin once and the whole thing lives in the window you already work in:

/plugin install vibe-prospecting@claude-plugins-official

Then ask for the list the way you would brief a colleague, with the cost check built into the request:

Ask Vibe Prospecting:

"VP Engineering and VP Sales at US software companies
 with 200 to 1,000 employees.
 1. how many match
 2. how many have a mobile on file, not a switchboard line
 3. what the phone lookups would cost in credits
Show 5 sample records and the total before you spend anything."

Building a dial list this week? The free plan covers 40 mobile lookups a month, no card and no sales call. Start in the web app or install the plugin.

Line Type Is the Whole Game

A mobile connects at roughly one dial in ten. A switchboard number connects at roughly one in 59. Line type moves your connect rate far more than coverage does, which is why a single undifferentiated phone field is expensive even when the data behind it is fine.

Line type	Connect rate per dial	Dials per connect
Mobile	Highest of the three	About 10
Desk direct dial	8% to 15%	7 to 13
Switchboard	2% to 4%	About 59

Before You Load the Dialer

• Screen every mobile against the do-not-call registries that apply to you before it reaches a dialer, since the exposure attaches per call rather than per list.
• Keep the source and the date on every number so you can answer a question about one later without going back to the vendor.
• Coverage outside the US is thinner and consent rules are stricter, so treat a US rate as a US rate and nothing more.

The $53,000 Line Item Nobody Puts on the Data Invoice

Wrong numbers cost more in selling time than in credits: the 2026 test put a ten-rep team at roughly $53,000 a year of dials into numbers that were never going to connect. The data invoice for that same list is a rounding error next to it.

Where the Money Actually Goes

• A wrong-person dial burns the same rep minutes as a right-person dial and returns nothing at the end of them.
• At a 68% pooled right-person rate, close to a third of every dialing block is spent on records that were dead before the day started.
• Cutting the wrong numbers before the list reaches a rep costs less than any coverage upgrade you can buy.
• Work out what an annual seat commitment is really worth before signing it, the same way you would read the SLA terms in a data contract.

Run This Benchmark Yourself in an Afternoon

Take 500 of your own records, run every candidate over the same list on the same day, then divide what you spent by the numbers that reached the right person. Nothing else predicts what will happen at production volume.

1. Stratify the sample. 500 records split by seniority, company size and region, because all three move the rate independently.
2. Ask for phone only. Same inputs, same day, one field, so the costs stay comparable across providers.
3. Check the line type. Confirm each number is a mobile rather than a desk line, a switchboard or a VOIP line.
4. Check the name. Require an exact identity match before a number counts as right-person. This is the step that separates a benchmark from a coverage report.
5. Divide spend by right-person numbers. Compare that single figure, not the match rates anyone quoted you.

What Good Looks Like

Pick the provider that publishes its price, hands back the mobile separated from the switchboard, and covers the rest of the record from the same place. Then stop at two sources, because the third is worth three points. Vibe Prospecting is the one to start with here: the price list is public, a mobile lands at $0.08 on the top tier, and the free plan gives you 40 lookups a month to test the claim against whatever you dial today. The methodology behind the figures in this piece is published in full in the 2026 B2B mobile data benchmark, and it is worth reading before you renew anything.

Score it against your own dial list first. 40 mobile lookups a month on the free plan, no card required. Open Vibe Prospecting