Work that needed a count, a cost model or a careful read of somebody else’s pricing page. Every figure carries the date we read it. Where a source has an interest in the answer, the source list says so.
We ran six buying searches for AI SDR and voice agent tools on 13 August 2026 and read the byline on all 49 results. 29 were published by a company selling in the category. Reddit ranked in the top three on every single query.
A census of published pricing across 264 AI SDR and voice agent tools, with the date each price was read off the vendor's own page.
Advertised per-minute rates against the computed all-in floor for the three most compared voice platforms, with every component rate dated and sourced.
The reseller economics of white-label voice platforms, with the claimed margins recomputed against a component cost model that carries dates.
Twilio publishes $0.0140 a minute for US outbound and that is carriage only. A voice agent also pays for recognition, a model and synthesis, none of which Twilio supplies. Here is the full component floor, with a dated source per line.
Whisper is open-weights, so there is no licence fee. Commercial streaming recognition publishes $0.0065 to $0.0077 a minute, and below moderate volume that is cheaper than operating your own. Here is where the line actually falls.
LiveKit Agents and Pipecat Cloud both publish $0.01 a minute; Voximplant publishes $0.004. All three exclude recognition, the model and synthesis. Here is what each one actually carries, and what you take on with it.
Calendly publishes $12 a seat a month. Cal.com publishes $12 and $28 as "per month/user" in its comparison table while every paid tier is billed annually, and the discount badge references a monthly price no toggle reveals.
109 of 264 AI SDR and voice tools publish a free tier. 12 of those will not let you start one without talking to sales, and 16 never publish what it costs to continue. Split by category, the pattern is not about generosity.
Woodpecker $35, Saleshandy $36, Snov.io $39, Smartlead $39, Instantly $47, Hunter $49 — all self-serve, all verified in August 2026. The catch is the same for all six and nobody selling them says it.
Most AI SDR platforms want a year up front for something you cannot test in a quarter. These eight bill monthly or quarterly, so a failed experiment costs weeks rather than a budget cycle.
Autocalls $34, Rosie $49, Phonely $50, Goodcall $79, Slang.ai $399, Sameday $449 — a 13x spread for the same job. None of them publishes calls per month, which is the only number that turns any of these into a bill.
Whisper, LiveKit, Speechmatics, Gladia, Fish Audio and Vocode can all run on your own hardware. The licence is free in most cases. The engineer is not, and that is the comparison nobody publishes.
Lavender free, Instantly $47, Hunter $49, Apollo $65, lemlist $69, Clay $185 — all self-serve, all runnable without ops support. The hard part is that none of them fixes the thing that is actually wrong at your stage.
Woodpecker $35, Salesforge $48, QuickMail $49, Smartlead $39, HeyReach $79 — five tools whose pricing does not multiply by client count. The trap is per-workspace billing, and it is the line agencies discover in month three.
A parallel dialer puts a human rep on more calls. An AI voice agent removes the rep. Only one of them changes the number that decides whether cold calling works for you, and it is not the one you think.
Residency for your call audio and residency for your prospect data are two separate questions, and most vendors answer only the first. A tool hosted in Frankfurt that enriches through a US broker has moved your problem one layer down, not solved it.