Vapi
five cents a minute for vapi, and everything that makes a phone call work costs extra.
the cheapest markup in the category, attached to a pricing page that never shows you what a complete call costs.
the $0.05 is purely vapi's fee. stt, llm and tts pass through at the provider's own rate — or at zero if you bring your own api keys, which is the genuinely clever part of the model — and telephony is charged by the provider rather than by vapi. for a team that already buys deepgram and elevenlabs at volume, that structure is close to ideal.
for everyone else it is opaque. vapi itemises the split between its fee and 'model provider cost' but never sums an example call, so we built the estimate ourselves: roughly $0.15 to $0.30 a minute for a typical stack. that figure is ours, not vapi's, and the fact that we had to construct it is the criticism.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- ai voice agent platforms
- pricing
- $0.05/min
- website
- vapi.ai
the cheapest markup in the category, attached to a pricing page that never shows you what a complete call costs.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more ai voice agent platforms
Retell AI
we checked this$0.07/minthe only vendor whose headline band already includes telephony, stt, tts and the llm — with the sub-rates printed underneath.
LiveKit Agents
we checked this$0.01/minapache 2.0 top to bottom — self-host it and the platform fee simply stops existing.