How is Ping Me billed?

Ping Me is billed on its own meter, separately from the platform subscription: a one-time device cost through the portal store, then a per button press charge and a per talk minute charge as the device is used. None of this is covered by the flat $50/month connection fee.

What Ping Me charges cover

Ping Me is a physical call-button device. A contact presses the button, and it opens a live voice call routed through your Arino One instance. Three charges apply:

The device charge is a single purchase per unit. The per-press and per-minute charges are metered usage, billed in the same way as other channel usage on your instance.

A worked monthly example

Say a site has two Ping Me devices in active use over a month, with 80 button presses total and an average call length of 3 minutes:

• Presses: 80 × $0.10 = $8.00
• Talk time: 80 presses × 3 minutes × $0.009 = $2.16
• Monthly usage total: $10.16

The devices themselves are a one-time $200 each, paid once at purchase, not repeated monthly. So a first month with two new devices would be 2 × $200 + $10.16 = $410.16, and every month after that is usage only — in this example, around $10.

Ping Me and the optional $50/month Arino Core connection

The optional $50/month connection is strict and does not extend to Ping Me. It covers only Arino support, management, updates and WebRTC at $0.009/minute for a connected instance. It does not cover Ping Me devices or usage, message and conversation costs, extra channel activations, extra WhatsApp senders, or custom development. Ping Me sits entirely outside that fee — you pay for the device once through the portal store, then for what the device actually does, billed against your own Infobip account.

How this differs by connection status

Every client owns their own Infobip account, so the device and per-use rates are identical whether or not you're connected. The difference is support: connected clients can escalate Ping Me issues to Arino, while unconnected clients handle setup, monitoring and any provider-side issues themselves.

Buying and monitoring devices

Purchase devices through the portal store under Account → Ping Me, where each device is registered to an instance on purchase. Usage — presses and talk minutes — appears in the same usage view as your other channels, so a spend threshold set there will also catch an unexpected spike in button presses.

Keeping Ping Me spend predictable

Ping Me is the one part of the rate card where cost is driven by physical behaviour rather than campaign volume, so it behaves differently from messaging spend. A button in a staff-only area produces a stable handful of presses a day; a button on a public-facing entrance can be pressed dozens of times an hour, including accidentally. Three habits keep this predictable.

First, review presses per device rather than presses in total. A single outlier device is almost always a placement problem — a button at child height, or one mounted next to a door handle — and moving it is cheaper than absorbing the presses. Second, watch the ratio of presses to answered talk minutes. A high press count with almost no talk time means callers are abandoning before an agent answers, so you are paying $0.10 a press for calls nobody handled; that is a routing or staffing fix, not a billing one. Third, set a monthly spend threshold in the usage view for each device group so a fault — a stuck button, for instance — raises an alert rather than a surprise invoice line.

Decommissioning is equally simple: unpair a device in Account → Ping Me and its usage stops immediately. There is no recurring per-device subscription, so an unpaired or unused device costs nothing beyond the original $200 hardware purchase, and it can be re-paired to a different location later without a new charge.

Next steps

Set up your first device on the Ping Me setup guide, and see the full rate card, including how Ping Me sits alongside voice, messaging and the platform subscription, on billing and plans.

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