Vapi
Build a phone agent exactly the way you want it, choosing each part yourself, if you have a developer to hand.
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The build-it-yourself option. Vapi runs the phone call, but you choose and pay for each part separately (the voice, the AI, the phone line). That means real control and a bill that depends on your choices. Great for developers, fiddlier than most people want.
About $0.05 to 0.30 for a minute of conversation, once the phone line and the AI are added in.
That's roughly $3.00–18.00 an hour. It is pay as you go, no monthly subscription.
Pricing
Show the cost breakdown
| What the platform charges to run the agent, before the phone line and the AI usage are added on. | $0.05 /min |
|---|---|
| The step that turns what the caller says out loud into text the AI can read. | — |
| The AI 'brain' that reads what the caller said and works out what to say back. | — |
| The step that turns the AI's written reply back into a spoken voice. | — |
| The phone line itself: the service that connects the call to a real phone number. Usually billed on top of the platform. | — |
| The total you actually pay for one minute of conversation once every piece is added up: the platform, the AI, the voice and the phone line. | $0.05–0.30 /min |
Vapi's own charge is the $0.05/min platform (call-hosting) fee. Speech-to-text, the AI model and the voice are billed at cost straight from your chosen providers ($0 Vapi markup with your own API keys); the phone line is billed by your carrier, so those components are 0 here because Vapi does not set them. The 0.05 to 0.30 range brackets Vapi's floor up to a typical stacked mid-range config; the real number depends on the providers you wire in. Two plans: Build (usage-based) and Scale (annual contract that adds SSO, RBAC and SOC 2). Add-ons: HIPAA $2,000/mo; Zero Data Retention $1,000/mo. Concurrency: 10 lines included, then $10/line/mo.
Every plan in one place: the monthly fee, what each one includes, and the features it unlocks. Anything beyond a plan's allowance, or on a pay-as-you-go tier, is billed at the per-minute rate above. A blank in the features means the vendor's plan page does not state it for that plan, not that it is unavailable.
| Build | Scale | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | — | Custom |
| Included | Pay per use | — |
| Plan notes | Usage-based; $0.05/min platform fee plus your chosen providers at cost | Annual contract, volume-based; adds SSO, RBAC, SOC 2 and data residency |
| What each plan unlocks | ||
| Concurrent calls | 10 lines, then $10/line/mo | Custom |
| Priority support | Email + Discord (no SLA) | Named engineer + account manager, custom SLA |
- Build —Pay per use
Usage-based; $0.05/min platform fee plus your chosen providers at cost
- Concurrent calls
- 10 lines, then $10/line/mo
- Priority support
- Email + Discord (no SLA)
- Scale Custom—
Annual contract, volume-based; adds SSO, RBAC, SOC 2 and data residency
- Concurrent calls
- Custom
- Priority support
- Named engineer + account manager, custom SLA
- HIPAA / BAA add-on $2,000/mo
Prices in USD as set by the vendor · last checked 2026-06-03 · vendor pricing →
Slide your expected monthly volume to see roughly what Vapi would cost.
A rough estimate from Vapi's sourced rates, not a quote. Always confirm on the vendor's own pricing page before you commit.
At a glance
- Speech-to-text
- Deepgram, Azure · Bring your own model: you can plug in your own AI model instead of the platform's default.
- Text-to-speech
- ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Rime AI, Deepgram, Azure, Vapi · Bring your own voice: you can upload or clone a custom voice instead of being limited to the platform's stock ones.
- Languages
- en, es, fr, it
- Integrations
- Twilio, SIP trunk providers, MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Compliance
Our full take
Vapi charges $0.05 a minute to host the call, and that is the only number Vapi actually sets. The three moving parts of any voice agent, turning speech into text, the AI working out a reply, and turning that reply back into a voice, are billed straight through from whoever you plug in (Deepgram, OpenAI, ElevenLabs and the rest) at their own rates, with no Vapi markup when you bring your own keys. The phone line comes from your carrier. So the headline is honest, but it is only the floor. Your real per-minute cost is whatever your chosen parts add on top.
That is the whole point of Vapi. It runs the call; you choose and pay for the pieces. Want to swap Deepgram for Azure, or run a cheaper model on simple questions? You can, and every piece shows up on the bill. If you would rather not think about any of that, Vapi will feel like more wiring than you wanted, and a platform that hides the parts behind one flatter rate may suit you better.
A few things worth knowing before you commit:
- HIPAA is available, at a price. It is a $2,000 a month add-on, and switching it on means no logs, recordings or transcripts are kept. Zero Data Retention, which keeps nothing at all, is a separate $1,000 a month.
- The compliance paperwork is there. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and PCI DSS v4.0.1 are covered at the platform layer, listed on Vapi’s Trust Center. One caveat for buyers: Vapi is only the layer that runs the call, so full end-to-end coverage also leans on your phone-line and storage suppliers holding their own certifications.
- It carries the operational features. You can plug in your own phone-number supplier (that is what SIP trunking means), hand a live call to a human with the AI’s summary attached (a warm transfer), launch whole outbound campaigns, and let other AI tools trigger calls through its MCP connection.
- It runs 10 calls at once to start. That is the concurrency limit; extra simultaneous lines are $10 each per month.
We have not placed our own test calls to Vapi yet, so you will not find Voxrater latency numbers on this page. Everything above is sourced from Vapi’s pricing page, docs and Trust Center, captured on 2026-05-30. The benchmark section stays blank until we run the calls ourselves and the harness fills it in.
Vapi compared
Our in-depth pieces that put Vapi side by side with the field, with the sourced numbers and a clear pick.
- Alternatives Alternatives to Bland: 5 voice-call platforms worth switching to
- Alternatives Alternatives to Retell: 5 voice-agent platforms worth switching to
- Alternatives Alternatives to Synthflow: 5 voice platforms worth a look
- Alternatives Alternatives to Vapi: 5 voice platforms worth switching to
- Best of Best AI receptionist platforms for small business
- Best of Best voice-agent tools for developers
- Best of Best voice AI platforms for HIPAA and healthcare
- Best of Best voice AI platforms for inbound customer support
- Best of Best low-latency voice platforms
- Best of Best multilingual outbound voice platforms
- Head to head Bland vs Vapi: turnkey on one stack, or build it your way?
- Head to head ElevenLabs vs Vapi: voice quality or call control, which do you need?
- Head to head OpenAI Realtime API vs Vapi: build the agent yourself or buy the platform?
- Head to head Vapi vs Retell: which voice-agent platform should you build on?
- Head to head Vapi vs Synthflow: build it yourself or click it together?
- Best of Best AI voice agents for outbound sales
Alternatives to Vapi
Other platforms that overlap with Vapi on the same kind of work, ranked by how many capabilities they share, then by cheaper all-in cost per minute. Compare any of them side by side on the compare page.
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Sources
- Vapi pricing page re-captured 2026-06-02 for the quarterly re-verification; pricing reviewed against the live page (screenshot in evidence/). · captured 2026-06-02
- Vapi plan page: Build + Scale plans, per-plan features (concurrency, support, SSO/RBAC/SOC2 gating) · captured 2026-05-31
- Vapi pricing page: platform fee, pass-through model, HIPAA/ZDR add-ons, concurrency · captured 2026-05-30
- Vapi docs: HIPAA capability and the compliant STT/LLM/TTS provider list · captured 2026-05-30
- Vapi Trust Center: SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, PCI DSS v4.0.1 · captured 2026-05-30
- Vapi docs: SIP trunking · captured 2026-05-30
- Vapi blog: MCP server announcement · captured 2026-05-30
- Vapi homepage: multilingual support, tool calling, named scale customers · captured 2026-05-30