What is Retell AI?
Retell AI (Y Combinator Winter 2024) is a platform for building voice agents that answer and place phone calls, plus chat agents for text channels. You pick a language model, a voice and a phone number, write the agent's instructions, and Retell handles turn-taking, interruptions, transfers and call logs.
Pricing is pay as you go: $0.055 a minute for Retell's voice infrastructure, plus the voice and language model you choose, with $10 of free credit and 20 concurrent calls included. Retell says it powers more than 50 million calls a month and reported $50M in annual recurring revenue for 2025, on about $5M of outside funding.
How much does Retell AI cost?
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | $0.07 to $0.31 per minute | $10 free credit, 20 concurrent calls, no platform fee |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume pricing, no concurrency cap, custom BAA and SSO |
Pay as you go from $0.07 to $0.31 per voice minute ($0.055 voice infrastructure plus voice and LLM); $10 free credit; 20 concurrent calls free, then $8 per call per month; phone numbers $2/month. Enterprise custom.
Is Retell AI worth it?
Missed calls cost a small business money in a way that never shows up on a report: the caller simply rings the next name on the list.
Retell lets you put an AI agent on that line. You choose the voice, the language model and the script, connect a number, and the agent answers, books, transfers or takes a message. The same agent can also make outbound calls in batches, which is how most call centres use it.
The pricing page is unusually honest. Every piece is listed per minute: $0.055 for Retell's voice layer, $0.015 for most voices, and anything from a fraction of a cent to $0.38 for the model doing the talking. Retell's own worked example lands at $0.11 a minute. Calls are billed to the second, failed calls cost nothing, and there is no platform fee or feature gating. Retell also signs a HIPAA business associate agreement for free, by clicking through a form, where Vapi charges $2,000 a month for the same thing.
Growth backs this up. Retell said in April 2026 that it handles more than 50 million calls a month, about 1.7 million a day, and that it reached $50M in annual recurring revenue in 2025 on about $5M of funding.
The catch: by default Retell keeps call recordings and transcripts until you tell it not to, according to its support team, and recording links do not expire unless you switch on signed URLs. Silence and hold time are billed. Beyond 20 simultaneous calls you pay $8 per extra line each month, and the agent is only as good as the prompt and testing you put in.
Our take: for a team that wants to own its phone agent, Retell is the safer default than Vapi on price and paperwork, while Sierra or Decagon make more sense if you want a vendor to build and run the agent for you.
Where it earns its place
A three-location dental practice
Answer every call after hours and book appointments
An inbound agent with the practice's calendar as a tool, using a $0.015 voice and a mid-priced model, costs around Retell's $0.11 sample rate; 3,000 minutes a month is about $330. The free BAA covers patient details if storage is set to scrub PII.
An outbound team at a 40-seat insurance call centre
Run renewal reminder calls without adding staff
Batch calls cost an extra $0.005 per dial and branded caller ID $0.10 per call. Running 50 calls at once means 30 lines above the free 20, or $240 a month in concurrency on top of minutes.
A backend engineer at a healthtech startup
Ship a voice intake flow without building telephony
Bring your own SIP trunk at no charge, set the agent to store basic attributes only, and take transcripts from the webhook into your own database before the 10-minute recording link expires.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Sign up with $10 of free credit, build an agent in the dashboard or API, buy a $2 number or connect your own SIP trunk, and place a test call.
- Integrations
- Twilio and Telnyx numbers, custom SIP, webhooks and a REST API; knowledge bases (10 free); models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google; voices from ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Minimax and others.
- Data and privacy
- SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, HIPAA and GDPR per Retell's compliance docs; BAA and DPA self-signed for free. Storage per agent can be everything, everything except PII, or basic attributes only, with retention from 1 day to 2 years; data is processed in AWS US regions.
- Cost at scale
- 10,000 minutes a month at the $0.11 sample rate is about $1,100; add $240 a month to run 50 concurrent calls. Enterprise volume pricing starts at 50 or more concurrent calls.
- Limits
- 20 concurrent calls before extra charges; silence and hold are billed; AI quality assurance costs $0.10 a minute after the first 100 free minutes.
What's good
- Every cost component listed per minute, billed to the second
- No platform fee and no feature gating on pay as you go
- Free self-signed HIPAA BAA and DPA
- Per-agent storage controls, PII scrubbing and retention from 1 day to 2 years
- Wide model choice, from GPT and Claude to Gemini and speech-to-speech models
What's not
- Recordings and transcripts kept indefinitely unless you set retention
- Silence and hold time are billed
- Concurrency above 20 calls costs $8 per line per month
- You write, test and maintain the agent yourself
- Premium ElevenLabs voices cost up to $0.10 a minute extra
Best for
Developers and operations teams building their own inbound or outbound phone agents who want predictable per-minute costs and a free BAA.
Retell AI alternatives
Retell AI: common questions
- Is Retell AI worth it?
- Retell is the phone-agent platform with the clearest bill and the fewest compliance hoops, as long as you are happy to build the agent yourself. We rate it 4.4 out of 5.
- How much does Retell AI cost?
- Pay as you go from $0.07 to $0.31 per voice minute ($0.055 voice infrastructure plus voice and LLM); $10 free credit; 20 concurrent calls free, then $8 per call per month; phone numbers $2/month. Enterprise custom.
- What are the downsides of Retell AI?
- Recordings and transcripts kept indefinitely unless you set retention; silence and hold time are billed; concurrency above 20 calls costs $8 per line per month; you write, test and maintain the agent yourself; premium ElevenLabs voices cost up to $0.10 a minute extra.
- Who is Retell AI best for?
- Developers and operations teams building their own inbound or outbound phone agents who want predictable per-minute costs and a free BAA.
- How much does Retell AI cost for a team or in production?
- 10,000 minutes a month at the $0.11 sample rate is about $1,100; add $240 a month to run 50 concurrent calls. Enterprise volume pricing starts at 50 or more concurrent calls.
- Is Retell AI safe for company data?
- SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, HIPAA and GDPR per Retell's compliance docs; BAA and DPA self-signed for free. Storage per agent can be everything, everything except PII, or basic attributes only, with retention from 1 day to 2 years; data is processed in AWS US regions.
- What are the best Retell AI alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are Vapi, ElevenLabs, Sierra and Decagon.
Answers checked Oct 26, 2026.
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