Bland AI charges $0.14 per connected minute on its free Start plan and $0.12 per minute on its $299-a-month Build plan. That rate covers the language model, speech recognition and the voice in one number. Telephony is billed on top, and so is time spent transferring a call. Bland bills call time to the exact second.
Those figures were read from Bland’s pricing page and its billing documentation on November 10, 2026. The docs list the current plans as effective from December 5, 2025, when Bland replaced its old single rate of $0.09 per minute with plan-based pricing. Older guides still quote $0.09, so check the date on whatever you are reading.
We build Cartesia, which sells a voice agent platform that competes with Bland, so we have an interest here. Every Bland number below comes from Bland’s own pages. Our prices are at the end.
Bland AI plans
| Plan | Platform fee | Connected minute | Transfer minute | Daily cap | Concurrency | Voice clones |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $0 | $0.14 | $0.05 | 100 calls | 10 calls | 1 |
| Build | $299/month | $0.12 | $0.04 | 2,000 calls | 50 calls | 5 |
| Scale | $499/month | $0.11 | $0.03 | 5,000 calls | 100 calls | 15 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Unlimited | Custom | Unlimited |
Start, Build and Enterprise are on the pricing page. Scale appears in Bland’s billing docs. Hourly caps are 100 calls on Start and 1,000 on Build and Scale.
The docs also list an Agent Phone plan at $19.99 a month, which swaps per-minute billing for unlimited voice minutes and SMS to the US and Canada. It is limited to 50 calls a day, 20 an hour and one call at a time, so it fits a single assistant line, not a call center.
Enterprise adds a dedicated orchestration server, a priority call queue, custom voice actors, SMS and web chat, and a forward-deployed engineering team. Bland lists SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR, PCI DSS (self-attested) and ISO 27001 on its compliance FAQ, with documents available under NDA on Enterprise.
What the per-minute rate covers
Bland’s FAQ says its rate includes “the LLM, STT, and TTS in one number.” Platforms such as Vapi and Retell quote a platform fee and bill each model on top, so Bland’s $0.14 is closer to their all-in number than to their headline.
What sits outside the rate:
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Telephony | Your carrier, or Bland’s Twilio at pass-through cost |
| Transfer time, Bland telephony | $0.03 to $0.05 per minute, by plan |
| Transfer time, your telephony | Free |
| Outbound minimum | $0.015 per call |
| Failed calls, Bland telephony | $0.015 per call |
| Voicemail | Billed as call time |
| SMS | $0.02 per message, inbound or outbound |
| Web widget | $0.01 per agent message |
Billing rules that change the total
Call time is prorated to the second. Bland’s docs say only active call time counts. A 61-second call bills as 61 seconds, not two minutes, which is kinder than carriers that round each call up to the minute.
Short outbound calls have a floor. Every outbound call on Bland’s telephony costs at least $0.015. Once a connected call’s time charge passes that, you pay the normal rate. Bland’s June 2025 changelog put the crossover at about 10 seconds, which was true at the old $0.09 rate; at $0.14 it is $0.015 ÷ $0.14 × 60 = about 6.4 seconds. The minimum mostly hits wrong numbers and quick hang-ups.
Failed calls cost money on Bland’s telephony. A dial that never connects still bills $0.015. On an outbound list where 3,000 of 10,000 dials fail, that is 3,000 × $0.015 = $45.
Warm transfers bill twice. In a warm transfer, Bland bills both the proxy agent’s time and the primary agent’s time at your plan rate. The merged call is free if you bring your own telephony. Our warm transfer guide covers how the handoff works.
Which Bland plan is cheapest
The plan with the lowest per-minute rate is not the cheapest until you use enough minutes to cover its fee.
- Build saves $0.02 per minute over Start. The $299 fee pays for itself at 299 ÷ 0.02 = 14,950 minutes a month.
- Scale saves $0.03 per minute over Start. The $499 fee pays for itself at 499 ÷ 0.03 = 16,634 minutes.
- Scale saves $0.01 per minute over Build. The extra $200 pays for itself at 200 ÷ 0.01 = 20,000 minutes.
Below about 15,000 minutes a month, most teams move to Build for the limits, not the rate: 100 calls a day on Start is low for anything with a real call list.
What a real workload costs
Two examples at the rates on Bland’s pages, November 10, 2026, before telephony.
An inbound support line at 10,000 minutes a month, with 1,000 minutes of transfers on Bland’s telephony.
| Plan | Calls | Transfers | Fee | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | 10,000 × $0.14 = $1,400 | 1,000 × $0.05 = $50 | $0 | $1,450 |
| Build | 10,000 × $0.12 = $1,200 | 1,000 × $0.04 = $40 | $299 | $1,539 |
| Scale | 10,000 × $0.11 = $1,100 | 1,000 × $0.03 = $30 | $499 | $1,629 |
An outbound campaign at 30,000 minutes a month, 20,000 dials with 4,000 failures. On Build: 30,000 × $0.12 = $3,600 for call time, 4,000 × $0.015 = $60 for failed dials, and the $299 fee, for $3,959. On Scale: 30,000 × $0.11 = $3,300, plus $60 and $499, for $3,859. The 20,000 dials need more than one day’s cap on either plan, which is fine for a campaign spread across a month.
Where Cartesia fits
Cartesia Managed Agents cost $0.03 per minute, with speech to text, the voice and orchestration in that rate. LLM usage is billed separately, unlike on Bland, and a Cartesia-provided US number adds $0.014 per minute. There is no Cartesia telephony fee if you import your Twilio numbers or connect a SIP trunk.
On the 10,000-minute support line above, Cartesia’s per-minute rate comes to 10,000 × $0.03 = $300, plus $140 on a Cartesia number, against $1,450 to $1,629 on Bland before telephony. The language model you choose is the line to add on Cartesia.
The voice is the other half of the comparison. In Artificial Analysis blind listening tests, Cartesia’s Sonic 3.6 scores 1276 against 1036 for Bland TTS (September 2026). Our Cartesia vs Bland agents page has the side-by-side and shows how to move a Bland pathway into a Cartesia agent, and the Bland AI alternatives guide compares the other platforms worth testing.
Cartesia pricing, for comparison
Cartesia’s plans bill speech to text and text to speech from one pool of credits: 1 credit per character of text to speech, and 3 credits per second of Ink-2 audio.
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits per month | Prepaid agent usage | Overage per 1M credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 20,000 | $1 | Not available |
| Pro | $5 | 100,000 | $5 | $65 |
| Startup | $49 | 1,250,000 | $49 | $45 |
| Scale | $299 | 8,000,000 | $299 | $38 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Volume pricing | Custom |
Managed Agents cost $0.03 per minute, drawn from the prepaid agent balance first. Unused credits roll over up to twice the monthly amount. Cartesia also deploys in your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped.
Talk to an agent in the playground and run the same call script on both platforms before you sign up for either bill.