Advertised per-minute rates are platform fees, not totals. Put your real call volume in and see what each pricing model costs you per month — unbundled, blended, and flat subscription.
Outbound minutes cost more in telephony pass-through, especially to mobile numbers.
Drives LLM token cost — longer prompts and retrieval mean more tokens per turn.
Wage plus taxes, benefits and overhead. Set to $0 to skip the comparison.
2,100 billable minutes/month
Unbundled platforms advertise an orchestration fee and bill the rest separately. Three line items sit outside that headline rate, and together they usually cost more than the rate itself.
Every conversational turn resends the full context. Long system prompts and knowledge-base retrieval are the biggest single driver of variance between two agents on the same platform.
Premium voices cost several times standard ones per character. Most teams pick the best-sounding voice during a demo and never revisit the decision.
Carrier minutes are passed straight through. Outbound to mobile numbers costs a multiple of inbound landline, and international calling is where forecasts break hardest.
How this calculator works. Unbundled is modelled as a $0.06/min platform fee plus LLM ($0.02–$0.10/min by complexity), voice synthesis ($0.02 standard / $0.06 premium per minute) and telephony ($0.012/min inbound, $0.025/min outbound). Blended follows the published tier structure of end-to-end vendors — $0.14/min with no commitment, $0.12/min on a $299/mo plan, $0.11/min on a $499/mo plan — and the calculator picks whichever tier is cheapest at your volume. Flat subscription uses a market-typical SMB structure (allowance tiers at 500 / 1,500 / 4,000 minutes with $0.15/min overage) rather than any single vendor’s published plan. These are planning estimates based on rates verified in August 2026, not quotes. Your real number depends on your prompt length, model, voice and calling geography — always confirm current rates with the vendor.
We will model your call volume against real vendor quotes and tell you which pricing model you should be on — and which one you are overpaying for.
It depends on your call volume, average call length and pricing model. Per-minute plans generally run around $0.10 to $0.35 per connected minute. Flat-rate and per-seat plans typically start in the low hundreds per month and rise into four figures for multi-location businesses. Enter your own numbers above rather than working from a headline rate, because the model that wins changes completely with volume.
Per-minute wins at low volume and with short calls, which suits emergency-led trades where callers want a booking rather than a conversation. Flat-rate wins as volume rises and with longer consultative calls, and it is the only model that gives you a predictable monthly number. The crossover usually sits somewhere between 150 and 300 calls a month depending on call length.
Most booking and enquiry calls run two to four minutes. Intake-heavy calls in legal and medical settings run longer, often four to seven minutes. If you do not know your own average, pull the last 90 days from your phone system before comparing quotes, because a two-minute difference in average handle time can double a per-minute bill.
Usually yes, and they are worth paying attention to. Expect a one-off configuration fee covering call flow design, integration with your booking or dispatch system, and testing. Be wary of quotes with no setup fee and deep integration promised, since the integration work is real and has to be paid for somewhere.
It gives you a well-grounded range rather than a quote, based on current market pricing across the main models. Actual pricing varies with integration complexity, concurrency requirements, language coverage and whether outbound calling is included. Use it to work out which pricing model suits your volume, then get quotes with that in mind.
Still deciding? Talk to us about your call volume →