$0.0140 a minute, US outbound. Free tier, self-serve, no seat. Read on Twilio's own pricing page 2026-08-12. That figure is correct and it is not your bill.
Twilio sells carriage. A voice agent needs four things to hold a conversation, and Twilio supplies one of them.
The four components, and who bills for each
| Component | Vendor priced here | Rate | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speech recognition | Deepgram streaming list | $0.0077 | 17% |
| The model | Low-latency tier | $0.0108 | 23% |
| Synthesis | Cartesia, at 50% talk ratio | $0.0140 | 30% |
| Telephony | Twilio, US outbound | $0.0140 | 30% |
| Total | $0.0465 | 100% |
So the number on Twilio's pricing page is about 30% of the floor, and the floor assumes you pay list price for everything and negotiate nothing. Real invoices run higher.
The four land within about two cents of each other, which is the useful part. No single component dominates, so there is no one line to optimise. What separates them is spread.
Synthesis is the only component with real range
Telephony is a carrier rate and barely moves. Recognition varies by tenths of a cent. The model is capped because voice agents need fast models, which are already cheap.
Synthesis runs from about $0.014 a minute on Cartesia to roughly $0.085 on premium ElevenLabs voices. That single dropdown moves the total further than every other component combined, and it is the one nobody asks about in a demo, because the demo voice is always the expensive one.
Is Twilio the cheapest way to make the call?
No, and it is not close. Plivo publishes $0.0115 for the same US outbound call and Telnyx starts at $0.005, both read 2026-08-16. Plivo's browser and SIP legs are $0.0033 in both directions, which is roughly a quarter of Twilio's rate.
What Twilio's price buys is ecosystem: more integrations, more worked examples, more people who have already hit your problem. That is a real thing to pay for and it is not a per-minute argument. At serious volume a direct SIP carrier relationship costs materially less than any of the three.
Why every platform excludes telephony
Vapi, Retell and Bland all exclude it from their advertised per-minute rate. That is defensible, because it is a pass-through to a carrier rather than something they produce.
It is also the line most often forgotten when an agency quotes a client a flat monthly retainer. A platform at $0.11 plus telephony at $0.014 is $0.124, and the retainer was priced on $0.11.