Twilio prices almost everything per minute or per message, with no platform fee. In the US, an outbound call costs $0.014 a minute, an inbound call to a local number $0.0085, and the number itself $1.15 a month. A text message is $0.0083 per segment plus a carrier fee. If you put an AI agent on the line with Twilio’s Conversation Relay, add $0.07 a minute.
Those are the headline rates on Twilio’s voice pricing page (marked current as of August 2026) and SMS pricing page (October 2026), read on October 15, 2026. Twilio’s FAQ says there are no hidden fees, and that’s fair: every fee is listed. There are just a lot of them, and the add-ons are where a bill grows.
We build Cartesia, a voice agent platform. We sell phone numbers only as part of our agents, and those agents can answer calls on numbers you already have in Twilio, so plenty of teams pay both of us. Every Twilio number below comes from Twilio’s own pages. Our prices are at the end.
Twilio Voice pricing in the US
Pay-as-you-go rates for Programmable Voice:
| Call type | To make calls | To receive calls |
|---|---|---|
| Local numbers | $0.0140/min | $0.0085/min |
| Toll-free numbers | $0.0140/min | $0.0220/min |
| Browser or app (client) | $0.0040/min | $0.0040/min |
| SIP interface | $0.0040/min | $0.0040/min |
| BYOC trunking | $0.0040/min | $0.0040/min |
Outbound calls to Alaska cost $0.0945 a minute. Hawaii is the same as the rest of the US. Moving a call out of Twilio with a SIP REFER costs $0.10 per refer. Volume discounts start automatically past 100,000 minutes a month, and committed-use contracts go lower through sales.
Phone numbers
| Number type | Monthly price |
|---|---|
| US local | $1.15 |
| US toll-free | $2.15 |
| UK local | $3.50 |
| UK mobile | $2.50 |
| Emergency calling | +$0.75/number |
Twilio sells numbers in over 100 locales. The number fee is billed monthly whether it takes one call or ten thousand, which matters when you hold dozens of local numbers for caller ID.
How Twilio bills a call
Two rules change a voice bill more than the rate does. Both come from Twilio’s help article How much will my voice application cost per minute?
- Every leg is billed separately. An inbound call is one leg. Forwarding it to another phone adds a second, outbound leg at the outbound rate. A warm transfer to a human agent is a second leg too.
- Partial minutes round up. A 61-second call is two minutes. Twilio’s own example: a 61-second inbound call to a US toll-free number costs $0.044, not $0.022.
The rounding is easy to underestimate. If your calls typically last 2 minutes 10 seconds, each one bills as 3 minutes, so you pay for about 38% more voice minutes than you used. Short calls, such as reminders, verifications and wrong numbers, are hit hardest.
Voice add-ons and what they cost
The per-minute call rate is only the carrier part. Turn on any of these and it’s another line on the invoice:
| Feature | Price |
|---|---|
| Call recording | $0.0025/min |
| Recording storage | $0.0005/min per month |
| Recording transcription | $0.0500/min |
| Answering machine detection | $0.0075/call |
| Voice Insights advanced | $0.0024/min |
| Branded calling | $0.12/call |
| Media Streams (raw audio out) | $0.0044/min |
| Conversation Relay (voice AI) | $0.07/min |
| Gather speech recognition | $0.02 to $0.04 per use |
| Text to speech, premium voices | From $0.0008 per 100 characters |
Recording and storage are cheap on their own. The pattern to watch is stacking: a call that is recorded, transcribed and analyzed carries four or five meters at once, each billed on its own rule.
Elastic SIP Trunking pricing
Elastic SIP Trunking connects your own PBX, contact center or voice agent platform to the phone network without Programmable Voice. It’s cheaper per minute because Twilio does less.
| Direction | Price |
|---|---|
| Origination (inbound), local number | $0.0034/min |
| Origination (inbound), toll-free | $0.0130/min |
| Termination (outbound), 48 states | $0.0100/min |
| Termination (outbound), Alaska | $0.0862/min |
| Termination (outbound), to toll-free | $0.0011/min |
Numbers cost the same as above ($1.15 local, $2.15 toll-free), concurrency is unlimited, and SRTP/TLS encryption is included. Recording is $0.0025 a minute. A 911 call from a number without a registered emergency address costs $75. Our SIP trunking guide covers how a trunk connects to a voice agent.
International calling rates
Rates outside the US vary a lot, and mobile calls often cost more than landlines. Two examples from Twilio’s country pages:
| Country | Outbound local | Outbound mobile | Inbound, local number |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | $0.0158/min | $0.0305/min | $0.0100/min |
| India | $0.0699/min | $0.0496/min | Not listed |
An outbound call from Twilio to an Indian landline costs five times what a US call does. If you’re running outbound campaigns abroad, pull the country page (or Twilio’s CSV) before you build the budget.
Twilio SMS pricing
In the US, an SMS costs $0.0083 per segment to send or receive, on long codes, toll-free numbers and short codes alike. A segment holds up to 160 GSM-7 characters, or 70 once the message contains an emoji or other Unicode character. Longer messages split into more segments, and each is billed.
| Message type | Outbound | Inbound |
|---|---|---|
| SMS | $0.0083 | $0.0083 |
| MMS, long code | $0.022 | $0.0165 |
| MMS, toll-free | $0.022 | $0.020 |
Carrier fees come on top. On an outbound long-code SMS, AT&T adds $0.0035, T-Mobile $0.0045 and Verizon $0.005, and Twilio passes them through at cost. A message that ends in a failed state costs $0.001. US A2P 10DLC senders also pay carrier registration fees for their brand and campaign.
So 10,000 appointment confirmations to T-Mobile customers cost about $128, not the $83 the base rate suggests.
What a voice AI agent costs on Twilio
Twilio gives you two ways to put an AI agent on a call, and they price very differently.
Conversation Relay handles the speech for you. Twilio converts the caller’s audio to text, sends it to your server over a WebSocket, and speaks your replies with a text-to-speech voice from Google, Amazon or ElevenLabs. It costs $0.07 per minute of active session time, and Twilio’s docs say real-time transcription is included. The call’s voice minutes are separate, and so is the language model your server calls.
Media Streams sends you the raw call audio for $0.0044 a minute, and you bring the rest: speech to text, the LLM and text to speech, each billed by its own vendor. It’s cheaper on Twilio’s line and more work on yours.
For 10,000 minutes of inbound calls a month on a US local number:
| Setup | Twilio’s bill | Also pay for |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation Relay | $785 | LLM, hosting |
| Media Streams plus your own speech stack | $129 | STT, TTS, LLM, hosting, the engineering |
That’s $0.0785 a minute on Twilio’s side before the per-call rounding: the $0.07 relay fee plus the inbound call it rides on.
The cheaper route has a cost the table doesn’t show: you’re building and running a real-time audio pipeline, with turn detection, interruptions and latency to tune. Our P95 latency guide covers why that’s harder than it looks.
When Twilio is the right choice
Twilio is a communications platform first. It’s the right call when you need numbers in many countries, SMS and voice from one vendor, mature compliance tooling, or a contact center already built on it. Per-minute carriage at $0.0085 to $0.014 is competitive, and nobody gets fired for picking it.
Its voice AI layer is the most expensive line on the bill, and the voice your callers hear comes from the text-to-speech providers Conversation Relay supports (Google, Amazon and ElevenLabs). If the agent is the product, that’s the piece worth pricing separately.
Cartesia pricing, for comparison
Cartesia Managed Agents bills speech recognition, the agent runtime and Sonic voices as one rate:
- $0.06 per minute for agent calls.
- $0.014 per minute for telephony on a Cartesia phone number. No Cartesia telephony fee if you import your Twilio numbers or connect a SIP trunk.
- LLM usage is included for agents built in the Cartesia playground, for a limited time.
The same 10,000 inbound minutes cost $740 on a Cartesia number. On an imported Twilio number, they cost $600 to Cartesia, plus whatever Twilio bills for the call on your account (at least the $0.0085 per minute inbound rate on a local number). See Cartesia’s pricing for plans and included usage.
The per-minute figure is half the comparison. What matters is whether the call gets resolved, and that comes down to how well the agent hears and how natural it sounds. Run the same calls through both before you commit to either bill. Try an agent in the playground.