Voice AI Cost Calculator
Compare what your call volume costs on managed platforms vs a custom LiveKit stack, using real production pricing, not vendor marketing.
$0.025/minute(2.5¢): our entire production voice stack, all in.
How we calculate this
Your stack = selected STT + selected TTS (at LiveKit's published assumption of 600 characters/minute of agent speech) + selected LLM (at 3,000 input / 175 output tokens/minute) + a fixed $0.0072/min telephony line (Telnyx SIP + LiveKit SIP fee) + a fixed $0.0051/min self-hosted infra line (agent workers, Redis, observability: the gap between list-price and our measured production cost).
Every provider rate traces to a published price: LiveKit's inference rate card, or the provider's own pricing page. See the full line-by-line breakdown in our build-vs-buy math. Competitor rows (Retell, Vapi, Bland) are their own published pricing, not affected by your stack picks. Rates checked Aug 2026. Vendor pricing changes, so treat this as directionally accurate, not a live feed.
Why the gap is usually this large: Retell's own pricing calculator attributes $0.055/min of its $0.11/min default configuration to "voice infrastructure": a platform fee charged on top of the underlying STT, LLM and TTS cost. Vapi's platform fee is $0.05/min, also on top of whatever STT/LLM/TTS you bring. A self-hosted stack has no platform markup, only the real component costs, plus the smaller infra line above.
$0.025/min is our measured steady-state production cost, not a promotional rate, and it's not subsidized by infrastructure credits. The defaults above reproduce it exactly.
Past the crossover point? See our AI voice agent development service: the migration that took production cost from 10¢ to 2.5¢/minute.
Common
questions.
Straight answers. If yours isn't here, ask on a 20-minute call.
How much does voice AI cost per minute in 2026?+
Managed platforms (Retell, Vapi, Bland) run roughly 8 to 15¢ per minute all-in once you add STT, LLM, TTS and telephony. A custom LiveKit stack with optimized providers runs around 2.5 to 4¢ per minute at production quality. The 2.5¢ figure is our own production number.
When is a custom voice stack worth it?+
Around 20,600 minutes per month the savings from owning the stack usually exceed the build cost within one quarter. Below that, managed platforms are the right choice. We say this even though we sell custom builds.
What's included in these per-minute estimates?+
Speech-to-text, LLM inference, text-to-speech, WebRTC/telephony transport and infrastructure. Platform fees are included for managed options; engineering cost is excluded on the custom side (that's the one-time build).
Want your stack at 2.5¢/minute?
Twenty minutes, straight to the engineer. No sales rep, no deck.