Voice AI Pricing: What a Voice Agent Costs an Online Store

You ask what an AI voice agent would cost your store. The pages Google ranks first answer with anything from one cent to two dollars a minute.

The low end comes from CloudTalk, which puts AI voice agent pricing at one cent to one dollar a minute.^[1] The high end comes from Quo, which tells readers to expect “$0.59 to $2.00 per minute”.^[2] Neither figure is for a store.

This guide sets out voice AI pricing for an online store, in each vendor’s own unit, as listed in October 2026. I’m Stefano Bertoli, founder of RuleInside, and we build and run AI voice agents for WordPress stores. So I sell one of the options priced here. Our own prices are in the guide too, after the other options.

Voice AI pricing is the price of a phone conversation handled by software. That price has more parts than the headline shows. Five of them reach your bill:

Our guide to AI agents for ecommerce explains how one voice minute is built from several billed parts. This guide puts prices on those parts.

Vendors count usage in different units. A price in one unit tells you little until you work out what it comes to at your own volume.

A per-call price suits long calls, and a per-minute price suits short ones. Goodcall, which bills per caller, puts it plainly: “We never meter minutes”.^[3] So find your own numbers first: how many calls you get, and how long they last.

The lowest voice AI pricing belongs to platforms you build on yourself. You, or a developer, connect the agent, write its instructions and test it. Each headline rate covers a different set of parts.

The sources behind each row: Vapi,^[4] Retell,^[5] Bland,^[6] ElevenLabs,^[7] Telnyx^[8] and OpenAI.^[9] Vapi’s own documentation lists what sits on top: “the model, voice, transcriber, and telephony costs for each call.”^[10]

Vapi’s calculator shows what the parts add up to. At its default of 1,000 minutes, with its own choice of providers, the estimate is $82 to $129 a month.^[4] That is about $0.08 to $0.13 a minute, before you change a setting.

Retell lists its parts one by one. Its infrastructure is $0.055 a minute, its cheapest recommended models $0.064 and an ElevenLabs voice $0.040.^[5] Telnyx says “A production agent lands near $0.06 per minute”, an estimate it makes for its own platform.^[8]

Most platforms carry calls over a phone carrier, and the carrier charges too. Twilio lists US local numbers at $1.15 a month and incoming calls at $0.0085 a minute.^[11] On 1,000 minutes, that incoming rate adds about $8.50. Telnyx lists a US local number at $1.00 a month, and Retell at $2.00.^[8][5]

Check how a minute is counted. Telnyx says its estimates leave out “per-call voice-engine rounding to 60-second increments”, so short calls can cost more.^[8] Some lower rates come with a floor: Bland’s $0.12 rate needs its $299 monthly plan.^[6]

These platforms suit a store with a developer and the time to use one. The low rate buys the parts. You still do the build and the running yourself.

An AI receptionist is a finished product. The vendor has built the agent, and you add your business details. This is their voice AI pricing as listed in October 2026.

The sources behind each row: Smith.ai,^[12] My AI Front Desk,^[13] Goodcall,^[3] Rosie,^[14] ElevenLabs^[15][16] and Aircall.^[17]

The plan descriptions show who these were built for. Rosie’s entry plan is “For solo owners and small businesses who can’t always answer the phone”.^[14] Goodcall’s is “For a solo operator who misses calls while on the job”.^[3]

One company sells both the raw minute and the finished product. ElevenLabs charges $0.08 for an extra minute on its agent platform, with the AI model billed on top.^[7] Its ready-made receptionist charges $0.30 to $0.45 for an extra phone minute.^[16] My reading: much of the difference pays for the build you would otherwise do yourself.

Smith.ai shows the same split within one price list. Its Pro plan reads “Set it up yourself with dedicated support”. Its Enterprise plan reads “We build and run a custom solution for you”, at $500 a month.^[12]

An answering service puts a person on your line. In Ubersuggest’s US data, read on 14 October 2026, “answering service cost” gets about 260 searches a month. That is more than any AI phrasing of the same question. Two of the services I priced publish their prices:

• Smith.ai receptionists: $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300.^[18] That is $10, $9 and $7 a call. Calls past the plan cost $8.50 to $11.50 each.
• Ruby: $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, up to $1,725 for 500.^[19] That is $5.00 down to $3.45 a minute.

Pages without a price of their own give wider ranges. PATLive writes that “The average cost for per-minute rates is $0.75 to $1.50 per minute”, and names no source for it.^[20] Ruby, which does publish its prices, says it charges nothing extra “for activation, onboarding, setup, customization, or coverage during certain periods”.^[19]

Smith.ai sells both people and AI, which makes for a fair comparison. Its people cost $7 to $10 a call on the plans above. Inside its paid plans, its AI receptionist costs $1.60 to $2.00 a call.^[12] When the AI cannot handle a call, Smith.ai says it “can be transferred to a live North America-based receptionist”.

A person brings judgement to an unusual call. The AI makes every routine call cheaper. For a store, routine calls include order status, stock and returns.

In the US, a person costs about $3,168 to $3,731 a month in wages alone. Those are the May 2025 medians for a receptionist and a customer service representative. As a store grows, its owner starts asking who to hand work to. In our read of 160 Reddit posts with signs of an established store, 22.5% raised hiring or outsourcing. Only 11.9% raised the support workload itself. So the price to beat is often a person, not a cheaper app.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the wage. In May 2025, the median customer service representative earned $21.53 an hour, or $44,770 a year.^[21] In retail trade, the median was $17.96 an hour.^[21] The median receptionist earned $18.27 an hour, or $38,010 a year.^[22]

Those are wages only. The pages give no figure for benefits, payroll taxes or recruiting, so a hire costs more than this. Divided by twelve, the two medians come to about $3,731 and $3,168 a month.

A full-time person works about 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Calls outside those hours go to voicemail, or to a second person. Holidays and sick days come out of the same 40 hours.

A person also does more than answer the phone. They pack orders, answer emails and handle the odd case no script covers. So set a person’s cost against an agent’s cost plus the cost of the other work that person would have done.

Your own call log tells you more about voice AI pricing than any price page. Working out your own cost takes five steps:

One coffee-equipment brand on r/shopify wrote that it gets about 300 to 500 support calls a month.^[23] The example below takes 300 calls of 3 minutes each. Three minutes is an assumption for the example, not a measurement.

Our arithmetic on each vendor’s listed price, October 2026, before taxes. Each plan may round, cap or meter differently from this simple sum.

A busy month changes which options cost least. Say a sale doubles your calls. Extra minutes then cost about $0.25 at My AI Front Desk.^[13] At ElevenLabs Reception.ai they cost $0.30 to $0.45.^[16] Extra calls on Smith.ai’s AI plans cost $2.10 to $3.00 each.^[12] Our guide to AI agents for ecommerce shows how to estimate usage from your orders.

I read the top-ranking pages in the US for five searches. They are “voice ai pricing”, “ai receptionist cost”, “ai receptionist pricing”, “ai voice agent pricing” and “answering service cost”. That is 37 pages from 32 companies, plus 4 Reddit threads. Thirty of the 32 sell call answering or voice AI.

Voice AI pricing is everywhere in Google’s top results: all 32 companies state at least one price. Yet 20 of the 32 quote market ranges or other vendors’ prices without naming a source. That is how one page can say one cent a minute and another two dollars.

Where small businesses search, no page breaks the price into its parts. Eight companies split a minute into its parts, and all eight rank for “ai voice agent pricing”. None of the companies ranking for the receptionist or answering-service searches does.

The store is missing. Only two companies name ecommerce at all, and a single sentence mentions Shopify. None of the 12 worked examples is an online store, and none of the 32 names WooCommerce or WordPress.

For voice ai pricing, the first result is Voice.ai’s plan table. Voice.ai’s three pages take 55% of that search’s estimated clicks. Its free plan is pitched as “Great for trying AI audio”. Its cheapest paid plan, at $5 a month, buys “15 minutes of Voice Agents”.^[24] In three of the five searches, Reddit threads take more than half of the estimated clicks.

I searched three store subreddits for what owners pay to answer calls. In 33,029 posts from r/ecommerce, r/shopify and r/woocommerce, nobody wrote “answering service” once. Most of the posts date from October 2025 to September 2026. Store owners rarely talk about what answering the phone costs.

Then I read the posts and replies that did, from 2024 on, and checked who wrote each one. I kept 31. Nine came from people I could confirm run or work for a store. Eighteen came from accounts selling a service or a tool.

Two of the nine gave a figure. A coffee-equipment brand estimated “$200+/month for voice/call handling inside Gorgias”, and wrote “the cost is insane”.^[23] Another store pays “about $150/mo” for phone seats, and its own team answers.^[25] None of the nine named a price for an AI voice agent.

Some skip the phone altogether. One owner wrote: “It’s expensive. Cost outweighs benefit”.^[26] Three others offer no phone line and give other reasons, or none. One has had “exactly 2 customers call me in the last decade”.^[27]

Sellers crowd these threads. The coffee brand’s post drew 7 of the 18 posts and replies from sellers, each pushing a tool. Reddit’s archive search failed for most of my queries on the day I searched, so this read is not complete.

RuleInside charges for minutes, in euros. Self-serve plans start at €99 (about $111) a month. Managed plans start at €397 (about $444) a month, plus €1,200 (about $1,343) once to build each agent.

On a managed plan, we build the agent for you, around your store and connected to your products, orders and policies. Our pricing page puts it this way: “We deploy it, we run it, we tune it every week”. I lead every deployment personally, and my team runs the infrastructure.

Our prices are in euros, as on our pricing page. Each dollar figure in brackets converts a euro price at the European Central Bank’s rate of 13 October 2026. There are two ways to buy:

• Self-serve, you build it. The smallest plan comes to €0.30 (about $0.34) a minute. There is no setup fee. Unused minutes roll over for twelve months. Run out, and the same plan is charged again at the same price.
• Managed, we build and run it. Each agent costs €1,200 (about $1,343) to build, once. Extra minutes cost €0.45 (about $0.50) on Lite, down to €0.30 (about $0.34) on Scale, on monthly billing. Annual billing lowers each rate.

Talk time is “billed by the second and never rounded up”, and ringing and voicemail are free. We tell you when 80% of your minutes are used. A chat conversation takes half a minute from the same pool. Every plan uses your own phone number.

The managed plans carry a 30-day guarantee from the day your agent goes live. If it isn’t for you, we refund what you paid to start.

The worked example fits Lite: 900 minutes inside a 1,000-minute plan, at €397 (about $444) a month. Our page puts Lite at about 330 calls, which works out at three minutes a call. In year one, the €1,200 (about $1,343) build adds €100 (about $112) a month, spread over twelve months. If you build it yourself on Self-serve, the same month costs €309 (about $346) for 1,100 minutes.

In dollars, several ready-made receptionist plans cost less at this volume, Rosie’s $149 among them. What Lite adds is the build around your store and a team that runs it. Against a person, the comparison goes the other way. Our page sets a support hire at €2,500 (about $2,797) to €4,000 (about $4,475) a month for 40 hours a week. That range holds both US medians above.

Google’s top results cover the extras in voice AI pricing unevenly. Overage is mentioned by 23 of the 32 companies. Only 13 price a handover to a person, or say how it is billed. Ask every vendor these questions, and get the answers in writing:

None of these is a trick. Each one is a real cost that a headline rate leaves out, and a quiet month will not show it. A sale, a delivery delay or a long transfer will.

The right option depends on two things: how many calls you get, and who will build and run the agent.

• A few calls a week. A ready-made receptionist plan, from $29 to $149 a month among those I priced, or our Self-serve plan from €99 (about $111). Check the overage rate first.
• A developer on your team. A platform at headline rates of $0.05 to $0.31 a minute, plus the phone line. Budget the developer’s hours too.
• An agent built around your store and run for you. A managed plan. Smith.ai’s Enterprise plan sells this per call, and our four plans sell it as a pool of minutes.
• Every call taken by a person. An answering service, at $7 to $10 a call or $3.45 to $5.00 a minute at the two services I priced.

Whichever you pick, start from what support costs you today, in money and in hours. Set every voice AI pricing figure on this page against that number.

Then hear an agent on a call before you compare plans. Our guide to what voice AI is lists eight tests to run on any voice agent. Our AI voice agent page shows what ours reads on a call.