Retell AI

Our full take

Retell’s own banner now quotes $0.07 to $0.31 a minute all-in, and for once the floor is not marketing: the arithmetic checks out. The part that hears the caller and the part that speaks back (the voice engine) come together for $0.055 plus $0.015, SIP telephony is free if you bring your own line, and the cheapest AI model on the menu (GPT 5 nano) is $0.003 a minute. Add it up: 0.055 + 0.015 + 0.003 + 0 is about $0.073. What Retell still does not bundle is that AI model, the bit that actually decides what to say, and the menu now spreads wide. GPT 5.5 tops it at $0.16 a minute ($0.32 on the fast tier), GPT 4.1 sits at $0.045, Claude 4.6 Sonnet at $0.08, and Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $0.081, nearly double GPT 4.1, so do not assume the Google model is the budget pick. New in July, the GPT 5.4 family fills the middle: GPT 5.4 at $0.080 (flagged Recommended, half the GPT 5.5 rate), GPT 5.4 mini at $0.036, and a GPT 5.4 nano that exists only on the fast tier at $0.01, with GPT 5.2 ($0.056) and GPT 5.1 ($0.04) alongside. The floor and the ceiling have not moved. A typical build with GPT 4.1 and a US Twilio line at $0.015 lands about $0.13 a minute before add-ons.

One new line on the voice side: text-to-speech is $0.015 a minute across the platform, Minimax, Fish, Cartesia and OpenAI voices, and Retell now lists ElevenLabs voices at $0.040 a minute. That is an extra 2.5 cents on the meter for the premium sound, a fair trade if the voice is what wins your calls, and a pointless one if a stock voice does the job.

So Retell sits one notch more managed than a build-it-yourself tool. You still see the parts on the bill, but the speech side is handled for you, and the operational features come out of the box. You can plug in your own phone-number supplier (SIP trunking), hand a live call to a human with the AI’s summary read to them first (a warm transfer), and fire off a whole list of outbound calls from an uploaded spreadsheet, with no limit on how many run at once.

On compliance, Retell holds SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, and marks HIPAA and GDPR. The change since our last review is the one healthcare buyers will care about most: the HIPAA paperwork is no longer gated. Retell’s docs state the BAA (the legal data-handling agreement HIPAA requires) and the DPA, including the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, are available for self-signing at click-agreements.retellai.com, with no additional fee and no plan restriction stated. So a clinic on pay-as-you-go can now sign the standard agreement itself, no sales call needed. The wrinkle we flagged last review has closed: the pricing page’s own compare-plans table now ticks HIPAA/BAA in the pay-as-you-go column (captured 2026-07-23), so the pricing surface has caught up with the docs, and the “Custom BAA” line under Enterprise reads as the bespoke-terms variant for big contracts, not a gate on the standard agreement. And one GDPR line worth knowing: Retell handles it through the AWS DPA, and the same docs say the company does not currently operate services within the European Union, so EU buyers should weigh where the processing actually happens.

A word on the add-ons, because they stack quietly. A knowledge base, background-noise removal, stripping out personal details, and automatic quality checks each add a few cents a minute, and the quality checks in particular cost $0.10 a minute once you pass the first hundred free. Three more lines joined the menu in July: safety guardrails at half a cent a minute, a batch-call fee of half a cent per dial, and SMS at a cent a message. And the concurrency question now has a published price: every account gets 20 simultaneous calls free, then extra lines are $8 a month each (Vapi charges $10 for the same thing). Read the per-minute lines before you commit to a high-volume campaign.

We have not placed our own test calls to Retell yet, so there are no Voxrater latency numbers here. The figures above are from Retell’s pricing page, captured 2026-07-23, and its compliance docs, captured 2026-07-11. The benchmark section fills in once we run the calls.