Compared · checked 23 August 2026
Retell is cheaper than us per minute. It is also a set of parts, not a phone line.
Retell AI is infrastructure. You bring an engineer, wire up the LLM, the voice, the telephony and the logic, and you get a voice agent that does exactly what you built. This is a build-versus-buy comparison, not a like-for-like one, and the honest headline is that their raw platform cost is lower than our price.
A like-for-like month
200 minutes a month, using their cheapest published components.
AI Builders
$99
Retell AI
about $36 in platform fees
How that works out: Adding their own published rates: $0.055 voice infrastructure + $0.015 standard TTS + $0.045 GPT 4.1 + $0.015 US telephony is $0.13/min, so 200 minutes is $26, plus $2 for a number and $8 for a knowledge base.
That figure is platform cost only. It does not include building the agent, hosting anything around it, handling call logging and transcripts, writing the fallback behaviour, or maintaining any of it when a model or a voice changes. Those are the parts you are buying from us.
Both price lists, as published
AI Builders
- Receptionist
- $99/mo — 200 minutes, then $0.55/min
- Receptionist Plus
- $299/mo — 700 minutes, then $0.45/min
- Receptionist Pro
- $599/mo — 1,400 minutes, then $0.40/min
- Billing rule
- Charged on whichever plan is cheapest for the minutes you used
- Trial
- None. Month to month, cancel any time.
Retell AI
- Headline rate
- “$0.07-$0.31 / min for AI Voice Agents”
- Retell voice infrastructure
- $0.055/minute
- Text to speech
- $0.015/min standard voices, $0.040/min ElevenLabs
- LLM
- $0.045/min GPT 4.1, $0.08/min Claude 5 Sonnet, $0.16/min GPT 5.5
- Telephony (US)
- $0.015/min
- Phone number
- $2.00/month
- Knowledge base
- $8.00/month each
- Free to start
- $10 in free credits, 20 free concurrent calls
Quoted from www.retellai.com/pricing, checked 23 August 2026. Prices change — check theirs before deciding.
Not published on their page:
- — Enterprise pricing
- — Volume discount tiers
Where they differ, beyond price
| AI Builders | Retell AI | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get on day one | A working phone number answering with your hours, services and prices. | An API, documentation, and $10 of credit. |
| Who builds it | We do. Setup is a form. | You do, or someone you pay. |
| Platform cost at 200 min | $99 all in. | About $36, on their own published component rates. |
| Cost when something breaks | Ours. | Yours. |
When Retell is the better buy — and it often is
If you have engineering capacity and want control, use Retell and do not pay us. Their platform cost is genuinely lower, their component pricing is transparent, and you get to build precisely the behaviour you want instead of the behaviour we chose. Anyone building a voice product rather than answering a business line should be looking at platforms like theirs. We are a finished product built on managed voice infrastructure of the same class; if you would rather own that layer yourself, own it.
The short version
The $63 difference at 200 minutes is not a markup on minutes. It is the build, the integration, and the maintenance. If you were going to do those anyway, Retell is cheaper and you should use it.
Speaks in your browser. Nothing to install, no number to dial, no form.