There is no single comparable per-minute market price. The following are extracted public prices observed on 23 October 2026, not signed quotes. Where a page is undated, that observation date is the applicable evidence date.
What do public supplier prices include?
| Supplier or purchasing option | Published price and billing unit | What the buyer must distinguish |
|---|---|---|
| Retell AI | Advertised AI voice-agent range: $0.07–$0.31/minute | The configuration determines consumption. Telephony and optional features require separate examination; this is not an all-in managed deployment quote. (retellai.com) |
| Vapi | $0.05/minute hosting, with model-provider costs passed through | Support packages and additional controls sit alongside usage. Core is $29/month; Pro is 10% of hosting fees, with a $999/month minimum. (vapi.ai) |
| Bland AI | Start: $0.14/minute, no platform fee. Build: $0.12/minute plus $299/month | Includes LLM, speech recognition and speech generation. Telephony is separate. Published transfer rates are $0.05/minute and $0.04/minute, respectively; bring-your-own-telephony customers do not pay Bland transfer fees. (bland.ai) |
| Goodcall | $79/month for 100, $129 for 500, or $299 for 2,000 unique customers | Bills by distinct caller phone number within the month, not minutes. Additional customers cost $0.79, $0.26 or $0.15, respectively. A local number is included. (goodcall.com) |
| Smith.ai AI Receptionist | Pro starts at $150/month for 75 calls; Enterprise starts at $500/month for 300 calls | Per-call service packaging rather than raw infrastructure. Enterprise advertises full-service setup and ongoing optimisation. Confirm escalation arrangements and overages in the actual proposal. (smith.ai) |
| Smith.ai human answering alternative | $300/month for 30 calls, $810 for 90, or $2,100 for 300 | A human-staffed alternative, not equivalent to an autonomous agent. Published overages are $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per call, respectively. (smith.ai) |
| Twilio US connectivity component | Local inbound: $0.0085/minute; US/Canada outbound: $0.014/minute; local number: $1.15/month | Telephone connectivity, not a complete voice agent. Additional services and applicable charges can change the bill. (twilio.com) |
Procurement implication: a hosting minute, a bundled AI minute, a handled call and a unique caller are different products. Normalise each proposal against the same call distribution before comparing costs.
Which additional charges can change the decision?
Vapi lists $2,000/month for HIPAA-eligible data handling, including its standard DPA and BAA, and $10 per additional concurrent line per month. These fixed charges can matter more than minute-rate differences in a small deployment. Purchasing an eligible configuration does not itself establish that the buyer’s complete workflow complies with HIPAA. (vapi.ai)
Retell’s page separately lists knowledge-base access at $0.005/minute, PII removal at $0.01/minute, and AI quality assurance at $0.10/minute after the first 100 free minutes. Buyers should identify which features are actually enabled and how much traffic is assessed. (retellai.com)
Desk calculation: Bland’s Build plan saves $0.02 per AI minute relative to Start but adds $299 monthly. Ignoring transfers, carrier costs, call caps and other plan differences, the rate-only break-even is 14,950 minutes/month: $299 ÷ $0.02. A lower advertised minute rate does not automatically produce a lower bill. (bland.ai)
What implementation price range is defensible?
This source set does not establish a representative US implementation-fee distribution. The earlier desk estimates for small and enterprise setups should remain assumptions, not procurement benchmarks.
There is clear evidence that configuration work remains necessary. In a 14 May 2026 ServiceTitan podcast, ARC Electric described spending weeks on setup and restricting the agent to estimate bookings; larger installation requests became messages for staff follow-up. That is evidence of one deployment’s operating choices, not a universal implementation timetable. (servicetitan.com)
For a comparable statement of work, ask suppliers to price:
- Workflow discovery and approved policy configuration.
- Each scheduling, dispatch, CRM or practice-management integration.
- Test design, execution and remediation.
- Number migration, routing and fallback configuration.
- Security and privacy review support.
- Supervisor training and operating documentation.
- Ongoing monitoring, change requests and model-change regression tests.
- Export, handover and exit assistance.