Vapi publishes $0.05 a minute, no platform fee, self-serve. Eleven other platforms in this directory publish a rate you can read without a sales call.
| Platform | Rate | What you still buy | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voximplant | $0.004/min | STT, LLM, TTS, carrier | Yes |
| Pipecat Cloud | $0.01/min | STT, LLM, TTS, carrier | Yes |
| LiveKit Agents | $0.01/min | STT, LLM, TTS, carrier | Yes |
| Millis AI | $0.02/min | Components at cost | No |
| Ultravox | $0.05/min | Carrier; TTS included | Yes |
| Bolna | $0.06/min | Components at cost | Yes |
| Retell AI | $0.07/min | Carrier | Yes |
| Deepgram Voice Agent | $0.075/min | Carrier; STT included | Yes |
| ElevenLabs Agents | $0.08/min | Carrier; TTS included, $6/mo | Yes |
| Vogent | $0.09/min | Carrier | Yes |
| Bland AI | $0.11/min | Less, but $299/mo underneath | Yes |
Read the third column, not the second
The component floor for a voice minute, computed here from four dated published rates, is $0.0465. Four of these platforms advertise below it.
They are not selling minutes at a loss. Voximplant at $0.004 and the two orchestration frameworks at $0.01 are transport products: you supply recognition, the model, synthesis and a carrier. The rate is honest and it buys the thinnest slice on the page.
Which one, by why you are leaving
Leaving on cost. Retell at $0.07 and Bolna at $0.06 are the closest like-for-like swaps, and neither will save you much, because the component pass-through dominates on all three. If cost is genuinely the problem, the saving is in the synthesis voice you picked rather than the platform you are on.
Leaving on control. LiveKit Agents and Pipecat Cloud at $0.01 hand you the whole pipeline. You will spend engineering time you were not spending, and you will stop being surprised by your bill.
Leaving on invoice count. ElevenLabs Agents at $0.08 and Deepgram Voice Agent at $0.075 bundle the component their parent company makes. Higher sticker, fewer vendors to reconcile.
Leaving on support. Bland at $0.11 with a $299 monthly floor is the most expensive entry here and the most complete. It is also the one whose transfer billing counts a transferred minute twice, so read that before assuming the higher rate is all-in.
The migration question nobody answers
Flows do not port. There is no standard for a voice agent configuration, so moving between any two platforms on this page means rebuilding the prompt, the tool calls, the transfer logic and the telephony wiring.
Budget for that before you move on a two-cent rate difference. On 10,000 minutes a month, the gap between Retell at $0.07 and Vapi at $0.05 is $200, and a rebuild is a week of somebody competent. The arithmetic favours staying put far more often than the alternatives pages ranking for this query suggest.
Who wrote the other answers
We bought this search result on 17 August 2026. Reddit is first, and then it is vendors: Synthflow, Telnyx, Retell AI, Ringly.io, Replicant and Lindy.ai all rank with pages recommending alternatives to a competitor, and Vapi holds a slot on its own query.
Two of those titles claim first-hand testing. Every one of them is written by a company that appears in its own list, which is the structural reason this page exists.