AI voice agent pricing tracker

What platform prices leave out

A headline rate is one line of a five-line bill: telephony, speech-to-text, the language model, the voice and the orchestration that ties them together. These are the costs most often billed on top.

• Telephony. Twilio lists US inbound calls to a local number at $0.0085 a minute plus $1.15 a month per number, and outbound calls at $0.0140 a minute. Retell charges $0.015 a minute on US local numbers and $0.06 on toll-free; on Vapi, carrier minutes are billed by the carrier.
• The language model. Vapi passes model costs through at provider cost; Retell prices them per minute, from $0.0016 (GPT 5 nano) to $0.32 (GPT 6 Astra) on the standard tier, or $0.0032 to $0.16 for Claude models; its fast tier and speech-to-speech models cost more, up to $0.64 a minute. ElevenLabs bills them separately by model.
• The voice. On Retell a platform voice is $0.015 a minute and an ElevenLabs v3 or v4 voice $0.10. Bought directly, ElevenLabs lists $0.04 to $0.08 per 1,000 characters and Deepgram Aura-2 $0.030.
• Concurrency. Retell charges $8 a month per concurrent call above 20 and Vapi $10 a month per line above its package. With burst pricing enabled, ElevenLabs bills calls over the plan’s concurrency limit (up to 3x) at $0.16 a minute.
• HIPAA. Vapi’s add-on is $2,000 a month. Elsewhere a BAA usually means an enterprise contract, and Twilio signs one only on its Security or Enterprise Edition (per its HIPAA page).

All-in cost per minute: a worked example

Stacking Retell AI’s own published components gives about $0.110 a minute, or about $552 a month at 5,000 minutes. This is our arithmetic, not a Retell quote. It assumes US calls on Retell’s Twilio numbers, a platform voice, Claude 4.5 Haiku, no add-ons, one phone number and no more than 20 calls at once.

Voice infrastructure             $0.055/min
Platform voice                   $0.015/min
Model: Claude 4.5 Haiku          $0.025/min
US telephony (Retell’s Twilio)   $0.015/min
Total per minute                 $0.110/min

5,000 min × $0.110 + $2 number = about $552 a month

The model moves the total most. Swap in Claude 5.5 Haiku at $0.0032 a minute and the same stack is about $0.0882 a minute, or about $443 a month, if it passes your call tests. Bundled rates such as Bland’s $0.14 already include the model and voice but not the call, so add your carrier’s rate before comparing. The AI voice agent cost guide runs the same sum for Vapi and a custom stack at 1,000, 10,000 and 50,000 minutes a month.

Platform or custom build?

For most first voice agents a platform is the cheaper start: no build to pay off, and the per-minute fee covers infrastructure you would otherwise run. A custom stack pays Twilio, Deepgram and the model vendor directly at the component prices above, and in our cost guide’s list-price model it starts paying back somewhere between about 11,000 and 31,000 minutes a month, depending on the platform it replaces. When we build one, it is a Fixed-Price Build of $25k–$120k, fixed after discovery; our AI voice agent development page covers what that includes and when we would tell you to stay on a platform.

How we check these prices

Once a month we open every vendor’s own pricing page or documentation and re-read each figure. The rules:

• Vendor pages only. No review sites, directories or competitors’ comparison pages.
• Logged-out list prices in US dollars, US rates where a region applies. Not negotiated quotes.
• Each row keeps its source link and the date we last read it. A vendor with no published figure shows “No public price (sales quote)”.
• Where a page contradicts itself, we say so in the row notes rather than pick a number.
• No affiliate links, ratings or rankings.

Spotted a price that has changed, or a vendor we should add? Tell us and we recheck the source before the next update. Vendors can use the same route to correct their row.

Change log

1. October 19, 2026
   • First published: 11 voice agent platforms and 8 model, speech and telephony price lists, each read from the vendor’s own page.
   • Compared with our October 18, 2026 check for the AI voice agent cost guide, no Vapi, Retell, Twilio, Deepgram or Claude price changed.
   • Retell’s plan comparison lists HIPAA/BAA on pay-as-you-go as well as enterprise; we corrected the cost guide, which said enterprise only.

Sources

1. Vapi pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
2. Retell AI pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
3. Bland AI pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
4. ElevenLabs pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
5. Deepgram pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
6. Twilio pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
7. Cartesia pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
8. Amazon Web Services pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
9. Google Cloud pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
10. Synthflow pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
11. PolyAI pricing (checked October 19, 2026)
12. Twilio Programmable Voice (US) (checked October 19, 2026)
13. ElevenLabs Text to Speech API (checked October 19, 2026)
14. OpenAI Realtime API and GPT-Live (checked October 19, 2026)
15. Google Gemini Live API (checked October 19, 2026)
16. Anthropic Claude API (checked October 19, 2026)
17. Twilio HIPAA (BAA requirement) (checked October 19, 2026)