Thirty-four voice agent platforms sit in this directory. Twelve publish a per-minute rate. The other twenty-two publish a contact form.
| Platform | Advertised | Platform fee | Self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voximplant | $0.004/min | None | Yes |
| Pipecat Cloud | $0.01/min | None | Yes |
| LiveKit Agents | $0.01/min | None | Yes |
| Millis AI | $0.02/min | None | Yes |
| Vapi | $0.05/min | None | Yes |
| Ultravox | $0.05/min | None | Yes |
| Bolna | $0.06/min | None | Yes |
| Retell AI | $0.07/min | None | Yes |
| Deepgram Voice Agent | $0.075/min | None | Yes |
| ElevenLabs Agents | $0.08/min | $6/mo | Yes |
| Vogent | $0.09/min | None | Yes |
| Bland AI | $0.11/min | $299/mo | Yes |
The rates are not comparable, and here is the proof
This site computes a component floor of $0.0465 a minute from four dated published rates: speech recognition, the language model, speech synthesis and telephony. That is what the raw ingredients of a voice minute cost.
Five of the twelve advertise below it. Millis at $0.02 is priced at under half the floor, and Voximplant at $0.004 is a tenth of it.
Nobody is selling you a minute below cost. Those rates are cheap because they exclude more, and what they exclude is not on the pricing page next to the number.
What Vapi's $0.05 actually covers
Vapi is the clearest worked example because Vapi documents it. The comparison table on its own pricing page is headed Excludes Model Provider Costs, and the FAQ confirms that speech recognition, the language model and synthesis are billed at cost on top, with telephony outside the platform entirely.
So $0.05 is the hosting fee. This directory computes the all-in figure at $0.0965 a minute, which is 93% above the advertised rate. Vapi's own usage calculator, on its default inputs, totals $0.1103.
That last detail is worth sitting with. The vendor's own calculator produces a number 13% higher than our independent computation, which means the advertised rate understates the bill by more than we say it does. We are being conservative and Vapi agrees.
Read the rate as a boundary, not a price
The useful way to read this table is not cheapest to dearest. It is how much of the stack the vendor is willing to own.
- Transport-only (Voximplant, LiveKit Agents, Pipecat Cloud). You bring recognition, the model and synthesis, and you bring your own carrier. The rate is real and it buys the smallest slice.
- Orchestration (Vapi, Millis, Bolna). The platform runs the conversation loop and passes component costs through at cost. This is where the gap between sticker and bill is widest.
- Bundled (ElevenLabs Agents, Deepgram Voice Agent, Ultravox). Synthesis or recognition is included because the vendor makes it. Higher sticker, fewer separate invoices.
- All-in with a floor (Bland). The $0.11 covers more, and there is a $299 monthly platform fee underneath it that the per-minute rate does not mention.
A team comparing $0.02 against $0.11 and picking the first is not choosing a cheaper product. They are choosing to receive four invoices instead of one, and to find out the total at the end of the month.
The platform fee nobody puts in the comparison
Eight platforms here charge a monthly fee on top of usage: ElevenLabs Agents $6, Autocalls.ai $34, Lindy $49.99, Phonely $50, Botpress $189, Bland $299, Ringly.io $349, Thoughtly $500.
At low volume the fee dominates completely. Bland's $299 is 2,718 minutes of component cost before a single call is placed, so a team running 500 minutes a month is paying roughly six times as much for the subscription as for the calls. A per-minute rate cannot express a fixed fee, which is why every comparison built only on per-minute rates is wrong for small deployments and none of them says so.
Who else answers this
We bought the search result on 17 August 2026. Reddit holds position one, six vendor pages follow, and there is no independent publisher on the page at all.
Retell AI appears twice and Synthflow once. Both are priced in the table above, which means two of the products being compared are also writing the comparison.