Retell AI prices voice agents per minute, and the per-minute rate is a sum, not a single number. The headline on Retell’s pricing page is $0.07 to $0.31 per minute on pay as you go. What you actually pay is four line items added together: Retell’s voice infrastructure ($0.055), the text-to-speech voice you pick ($0.015 to $0.10), the language model you pick ($0.0016 to $0.32 on the standard tier), and telephony (free on your own carrier, $0.015 per minute on a Retell-managed US number).
On the pricing page as of October 2026, the cost estimator opens at $0.11 per minute: $0.055 voice infrastructure, $0.04 for the LLM, $0.015 for the voice, telephony at zero. New accounts start with $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls.
Two disclosures. Retell is a Cartesia customer: over 3,000 companies run Retell voice agents, and Retell reports 2 to 3 times faster time to first audio with Cartesia voices than with the next best provider on its platform. Cartesia also sells its own voice agent platform, so we have an interest in both directions. Every Retell number below comes from Retell’s pricing page; Cartesia’s prices are at the end so you can check both.
Retell plans
| Plan | Price | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | $0.07 to $0.31 per minute | Full platform, 20 concurrent calls included, $10 signup credit |
| Enterprise | Custom | No concurrency cap, dedicated server option, HIPAA/BAA, SSO, custom contracts |
Pay as you go has no platform fee and no commitment. Enterprise adds the compliance and support layer: custom MSA, DPA, and BAA terms, role-based access, a dedicated server add-on with a built-in fallback system, and a named account manager.
How the per-minute rate adds up
The four components, as listed on the pricing page:
Voice infrastructure: $0.055 per minute. This is Retell’s line for running the call: the orchestration, turn-taking, and audio plumbing. It applies to every voice agent call.
Text to speech: $0.015 to $0.10 per minute. Retell offers voices from seven providers, and the choice swings the total more than most teams expect:
| Voice provider | Per minute |
|---|---|
| Retell platform voices | $0.015 |
| Cartesia | $0.015 |
| OpenAI | $0.015 |
| Minimax | $0.015 |
| Fish | $0.015 |
| Inworld | $0.015 |
| ElevenLabs Flash | $0.040 |
| ElevenLabs v4 Turbo | $0.080 |
| ElevenLabs v3 Conversational | $0.080 |
| ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 | $0.060 |
| ElevenLabs v3 / v4 | $0.100 |
LLM: $0.0016 to $0.32 per minute on the standard tier. The two models Retell marks as recommended, GPT 5.6 Terra and Claude 5 Sonnet, cost $0.064 per minute each. GPT 5 nano is the floor at $0.0016. At the top end, GPT 6 Astra costs $0.32 standard and $0.64 on the fast tier, and GPT 6.1 Sol’s ultrafast variant is $0.384. Where a model offers a fast tier, it runs about double the standard rate (GPT 5.4 is $0.080 standard, $0.16 fast). Speech-to-speech models are their own list: OpenAI’s GPT Realtime and GPT Realtime 2.1 cost $0.345 and $0.38 per minute, and the mini variants cost $0.07. If you are weighing speech-to-speech against a cascaded pipeline, our speech-to-speech vs cascaded guide covers the trade-off.
Telephony: free or $0.015 per minute. Bringing your own carrier over SIP trunking costs nothing on Retell’s side. A Retell-managed number over Twilio or Telnyx bills per minute by country; the US rate is $0.015 per minute. The SIP trunking guide explains what bringing your own carrier involves.
The $0.31 top of the headline range is close to the most expensive recommended LLM (GPT 5.5 at $0.16) plus the most expensive voices (ElevenLabs v3 or v4 at $0.10). The newest models, fast tiers, and speech-to-speech options price above it.
Add-ons and monthly items
Beyond the per-minute sum:
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Phone number | $2 per month; free if you bring your own |
| Concurrency | First 20 simultaneous calls free, then $8 each per month |
| Knowledge base | First 10 free, then $8 each per month (prorated), plus $0.005 per minute when the agent reads it |
| Verified phone number | $10 per number per month |
| Retell SMS | $20 per month; $0.01 per message; free on your own telephony |
| Batch calling | $0.005 per dial |
| Branded caller ID | $0.10 per outbound call |
| Advanced denoising | $0.005 per minute |
| Safety guardrails | $0.005 per minute |
| PII removal | $0.01 per minute |
| AI quality assurance | $0.10 per minute; first 100 minutes free |
None of these are required, and the free allowances are real: $10 of credit covers about 90 minutes of a $0.11 build, which is enough to test an agent properly before spending anything.
What a real workload costs
Two examples at October 2026 list prices.
A support agent on the recommended stack. Voice infrastructure ($0.055), a recommended LLM ($0.064), Cartesia voices ($0.015), and a Retell-managed US number ($0.015) sum to $0.149 per minute. At 10,000 minutes a month that is $1,490, plus $2 for the number. Add PII removal and the total is $0.159 per minute, or $1,590.
A lighter agent on the cheapest stack. GPT 5 nano ($0.0016), platform voices ($0.015), your own SIP trunk ($0), and voice infrastructure ($0.055) sum to about $0.072 per minute, or $720 at the same 10,000 minutes. This is the configuration the $0.07 end of the headline range describes.
Both examples sit below $0.31 because that figure needs the expensive end of every menu at once. The range to plan around is $0.07 to $0.16 for cascaded agents; speech-to-speech builds land higher.
Where Cartesia fits
There are two ways to build with Cartesia here, and Retell’s rate card illustrates the first: Cartesia voices run inside Retell at $0.015 per minute, the joint low end of its voice menu. Retell chose Cartesia for production calls after measuring time to first audio at 2 to 3 times faster than the next provider on its platform, with an error rate under 0.1% at scale.
The second is direct. Cartesia Managed Agents cost $0.06 per minute all-in, with the voice model, speech to text, and orchestration in that rate, plus $0.014 per minute of telephony on a Cartesia-provided US number. LLM usage is included for a limited time for agents built in the playground; agents built in code bring their own LLM. On playground terms, the 10,000-minute workload above costs $600, plus $140 of telephony. If you are comparing the two builds, Retell’s agent platform is covered in our platforms guide, and Twilio’s pricing is the reference for the carrier line either way.
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 |
Voice agents cost $0.06 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.
Try the models in the playground, or read what a voice agent is before you price either platform.