A cloud phone priced per minute costs the rate times the minutes it is switched on, and the minutes are the part people underestimate. Eight hours a day for 30 days is 14,400 minutes per phone. Left on around the clock it is 43,200. A rate that looks like a rounding error, a fraction of a cent, becomes a monthly bill for each phone, and a bill that grows with every phone you add.
We do not sell cloud phones. Mosaic has none, and no real Android devices either. That is one reason we can do this sum without a stake in where it lands.
Cloud phone price per minute, worked out for a month
Vendors list their per-minute rates on their own pricing pages, and they change, so we will not quote one here. The arithmetic works for any rate, so take the rate from the page and run it through this:
| Hours open a day | Minutes in 30 days | At half a cent a minute | At one cent a minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,800 | $9 | $18 |
| 4 | 7,200 | $36 | $72 |
| 8 | 14,400 | $72 | $144 |
| 24 | 43,200 | $216 | $432 |
The two rate columns are round examples for the arithmetic, not any vendor's price. All figures are in US dollars, per phone. Ten phones open through an eight-hour day at one cent a minute is $1,440 a month. Per-minute pricing rewards short sessions: open the phone, post, close it.
The meter also counts minutes in which nobody is doing anything. A phone left open in a tab while you answer email is billed the same as one you are typing into. Before you compare, read three things on the vendor's page: whether a started minute is billed in full, whether a stopped phone still costs something for its storage, and whether a monthly bundle of minutes is sold at a lower rate than the meter.
Make 500 profiles in one go, then work on all of them at onceIn Mosaic: Bulk actions. 500 profiles per batch; start, edit and type into many. Free holds 3 profiles. Pro is $49 a month for any number.
Mosaic is a desktop app
Email yourself the link and open it on your computer.
What the minutes buy that a browser cannot
A cloud phone is an Android system running somewhere else, so it has what a phone has: an app store, installed apps, push notifications, the mobile app's own sign-in. That is worth paying for when the account lives in an app. Some features exist only in a platform's mobile app, and some sign-ins expect a phone. A browser of any kind cannot open those.
A lot of account work never touches the app, though. TikTok Shop's Seller Center, TikTok Business Center, Meta's business tools and the marketplace seller dashboards are websites. So are most of the screens an agency spends its day in. For that work a per-minute phone is a website opened in a phone's browser, on a meter.
What Mosaic's Android profiles are, and are not
Mosaic's Mobile library holds Android profiles. Each is drawn from a whole captured phone: its screen, pixel ratio, threads, memory, touch points, GPU, fonts and model name, all set in our engine so a website reads one consistent phone. They are desktop Chromium in device mode. They are not a phone, they cannot install an Android app, and they have no app store. If an account needs the app, a Mosaic profile is the wrong tool and a real device or a cloud phone is the right one.
A Mosaic profile has no meter. Pro is $49 a month, one plan, and a profile left open for a whole day costs nothing extra, because it runs on your own computer. Profiles live on that computer too, which is the other side of the trade: there is no phone in a data centre to reach from somewhere else. The reasoning behind a flat price is in why Mosaic Pro is one price, and the current plans are on pricing.
Which one to pay for
Count the hours first. A few minutes a day on a handful of app-only accounts is where per-minute cloud phones are cheap and flat plans are not. Many phones kept open through a working day is where the meter grows fastest, and the table shows how fast.
Then count what lives in an app. If the answer is nothing, the work is website work, and a browser profile per account does it. Social media teams running client accounts mostly work this way, and we wrote up their setup under social media teams. If the answer is some accounts, those few need a phone and the rest do not, and nothing stops you from paying for both. Other products that bundle cloud phones are in our anti-detect browser roundup.
Whatever you choose, use it on accounts you are allowed to run. A phone in a data centre does not change what a platform's terms allow.
