Retell AI pricing: what a minute really costs

The per-minute price is four meters added together: Retell's own $0.055 "Voice Infra" fee, the voice, the AI model and the phone line. The model you pick moves the bill more than anything else. Every price below comes from Retell's pricing page and its docs, checked October 23, 2026.

Source: Retell AI pricing page, October 23, 2026.

Retell AI pricing per minute

Retell AI's price per minute is the sum of four meters: Voice Infra at $0.055, a voice from $0.015, an AI model from $0.0016 and a phone line at $0.015 in the US. A common setup lands at $0.149 a minute, and Retell's own cost estimator opens at $0.150.

Calls bill to the second with no rounding per call, and charges add up across the month. After a transfer, the agent fees stop and only the phone line keeps billing. Retell's comparison page says speech-to-text is included in its per-minute price, and the pricing page has no transcription line.

Retell AI LLM costs by model

The Retell AI LLM line is the biggest swing in the bill: from $0.0016 a minute on GPT 5 nano to $0.384 on GPT 6.1 Sol (Ultrafast), with a faster "Fast Tier" at 1.5 times the standard rate.

The four models Retell marks "recommended" run $0.064 to $0.16. Switching from GPT 5.5 to GPT 5.6 Terra cuts the model line by 60%, so test the cheaper recommended models before you settle.

Retell AI telephony and phone number cost

Retell AI telephony costs $0.015 a minute for US calls on a Twilio number bought through Retell, and the number is $2 a month. Telnyx numbers bill $0.03 a minute in the US, toll-free inbound is $0.06, and rates abroad run from $0.03 (Canada) to $0.80 (Philippines).

Retell only sells US and Canadian numbers; toll-free is $5 a month. Bring your own carrier over SIP and Retell charges nothing for the line, but your carrier bills you. For scale, Twilio's own US rates are $0.014 a minute outbound, $0.0085 inbound and $1.15 a month for a local number.

How much does Retell AI cost per month?

Retell AI costs about $156 a month for 1,000 minutes on a simple inbound line, about $1,015 for 5,000 outbound minutes, and about $3,750 for 20,000 minutes with add-ons and 40 lines at once. All three bills use Retell's published rates and our own usage assumptions.

Our assumptions: the outbound bill is 12,000 dials producing 5,000 billed minutes from 5 verified numbers; the 20,000-minute bill runs up to 40 calls at once and sends one minute in ten to AI quality review. None of the bills include branded caller ID, SMS or a prompt over 4,000 tokens, each covered below.

Across all three, Retell's own Voice Infra fee is 27% to 35% of the bill. At 20,000 minutes that's $1,100 a month, or $13,200 a year, before the model, voice or phone line.

Retell AI concurrency and concurrent calls

Retell AI includes 20 concurrent calls per workspace, and each extra one costs $8 a month. Inbound callers who find every line busy wait about 40 seconds, then go to your fallback number or get dropped, per Retell's concurrency docs.

Outbound calls over the limit are rejected unless you turn on burst. Burst lets you go up to three times your limit (or your limit plus 300, whichever is lower), but every burst call pays an extra $0.10 a minute for its whole length. That adds about two-thirds to a $0.149 minute, so buy steady capacity at $8 a line if you hit the cap often.

Retell AI knowledge base, SMS and other add-ons

Retell AI add-ons are billed per minute, per call or per month on top of the base rate. A knowledge base adds $0.005 a minute on any call that uses one, and the first 10 knowledge bases are free.

Retell AI SMS works only on US Twilio or your own numbers that pass A2P registration, with one-time fees of $4 or $45 to register the brand and $15 per campaign, which isn't refunded if the campaign is rejected. Knowledge base text also counts toward the prompt-size rule below, so a large knowledge base can cost more than its half cent.

Retell AI outbound calls: batch, branded and verified numbers

Retell AI outbound calls cost the same per minute as inbound, plus $0.005 per dial for batch calling and $0.10 per outbound call for branded caller ID. Branded caller ID is the one to watch: on the 12,000-dial bill above it adds up to $1,200 a month, more than doubling it to $2,215.

Branded calls and verified numbers are US-only, need a verified business profile and take one to two weeks to approve. Retell warns that calls from unverified numbers may show as "Spam Likely". Its pricing page lists the verified number at $10 a month in one table and as a one-time $10 fee in another, so confirm with Retell before you budget 20 of them.

Outbound AI calls also come with calling-law rules. Our guides to AI cold calling and the TCPA rules for sales calls cover them. This isn't legal advice.

Retell AI billing and credits

Retell AI bills usage from prepaid credits. Since September 30, 2026, every non-enterprise workspace runs on a credit balance, and calls stop with a "credit_exhausted" reason when it hits zero. Enterprise accounts still get monthly invoices.

Per Retell's billing docs, credits never expire but are non-refundable. Auto recharge can trigger anywhere from $10 to $1,000 and refill to between $20 and $2,000. Monthly items don't come out of credits: numbers, extra concurrency, extra knowledge bases and the SMS subscription go on your card at the end of each calendar month, prorated. Retell can change rates by posting them on the pricing page, effective your next billing cycle, under its terms of service.

Why your Retell AI cost runs above the rate

Your Retell AI cost runs above the listed rate for four documented reasons: long prompts, silence, short calls and burst. The biggest is prompt size. Once an agent's prompt passes 4,000 tokens, Retell scales the billed duration by tokens divided by 4,000, so a 60-second call at 4,800 tokens bills as 72 seconds.

That token count includes the prompt, tool descriptions, the transcript so far, tool results and knowledge base chunks, so it grows during a long call. Retell's docs call it LLM price scaling but apply it to billed duration, so ask Retell which lines it scales before you write a 6,000-token prompt. Silence and hold time bill in full, and calls under 10 seconds that open with a dynamic AI greeting bill as 10.

Is Retell AI free?

Retell AI isn't free: there's no free plan, only $10 in trial credit for new accounts, with no card needed. At $0.149 a minute that covers about 67 minutes of calls. The credit is granted once per email address, including deleted accounts.

After that there's no free sandbox: test calls bill at production rates. You need a card to buy a number or keep going past the trial.

Retell AI enterprise pricing

Retell AI enterprise pricing is custom, quoted by sales, with no published minimum, discount or contract length. What's listed: custom concurrency from 50+ calls, monthly invoicing, custom MSA and DPA terms, SSO, role-based access, 24/7 support, and paid add-ons for implementation help and a dedicated stable server.

Retell's compliance page lists SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 and GDPR terms, signed at no extra charge. Any enterprise rate you read elsewhere is a guess until Retell quotes you.

Retell vs Vapi pricing

Retell vs Vapi pricing comes down to what the platform fee covers. Retell's $0.055 a minute includes speech-to-text and bills the voice, model and line at its own listed rates. Vapi charges $0.05 a minute for hosting and passes speech-to-text, the model and the voice through at cost. Vapi needs no monthly plan to start, but its pay-as-you-go tier includes 4 concurrent calls to Retell's 20.

So Vapi's base fee is lower, and its all-in rate depends on which providers you plug in. Retell is easier to forecast from one page. Teams that want the most control over each part tend to pick Vapi; teams that want one bill tend to pick Retell. Our Vapi alternatives guide compares the two in depth.

Retell AI competitors and alternatives

The main Retell AI alternatives are Vapi, Bland AI and Synthflow among developer platforms, and ready-made AI receptionist services for teams that don't want to build. Bland AI charges $0.14 a minute on its Start plan with no platform fee, or $0.12 on Build at $299 a month, with the model, speech-to-text and voice included and the phone line billed separately. Bland's details are in our Bland AI pricing breakdown, and the full field is in the Vapi alternatives guide.

Retell AI reviews: what users say about cost

Retell AI reviews are mostly strong: 4.9 out of 5 from 805 reviews on Trustpilot, with users praising control and uptime. Retell's community forum has threads about credit offered for reviews, so read the score with that in mind.

On cost, builders in a Retell community thread report paying $0.11 to $0.17 a minute in practice, and $0.35 to $0.40 with ElevenLabs v3 voices and a large knowledge base. The common complaints are the price of testing, surprise surcharges from long prompts, and slow support replies.

Build your own AI voice agent instead?

Building your own AI voice agent makes sense once the platform fee is a real line in your budget, and not before. Retell's Voice Infra fee is the part of every minute you rent for as long as you use it: $55 a month at 1,000 minutes, $1,100 a month at 20,000.

An owned agent still rents the parts. Every voice agent needs a phone carrier and an AI model, billed at their own rates, plus speech-to-text, which Deepgram sells at $0.0048 a minute. What you'd own is everything above that: the conversation logic, scripts, CRM and calendar hookups, recordings and transcripts, running on your hosting with no per-minute platform fee. How the pieces fit is in what an AI voice agent is.

If you're under a few thousand minutes a month, testing, or running one simple agent, stay on Retell. If your agents run tens of thousands of minutes a month next to a CRM, dialer and other subscriptions, owning typically costs less than you spend today, paid monthly with an end date on the build. Here's how our pricing works. For the receptionist side of the math, see AI receptionist cost and our AI receptionist guide.

Sources

All checked October 23, 2026. Prices change; check the vendor's page before you buy.

• Retell AI pricing
• Retell vs Vapi comparison (data as of May 2026)
• Retell docs: LLM options, international calls, buying numbers, concurrency, knowledge base, SMS, branded calls, billing, legacy billing notice, billing exceptions, testing pricing, compliance
• Retell AI terms of service (updated October 7, 2026)
• Vapi pricing, Bland AI pricing, Twilio US voice pricing, Deepgram pricing
• User sentiment: Trustpilot, Retell community thread on cost per minute

The SaaS cost calculator adds up your whole software stack in about two minutes. If voice agents plus the rest come to a few thousand a month, book a free audit and we'll show you what owning it would look like.