Guide · Voice agents · 5 min read
Retell AI pricing: what a booking agent really costs per minute
Retell's pricing page says $0.07 to $0.31 a minute. That range is honest, but it doesn't tell you what your agent will cost. I build booking agents on Retell, so here is the price broken into its parts, checked against real calls on my own demo agent, plus the monthly fees and the new credit billing that catch people out.
By MD Faizan Uzzaman · Verified n8n Creator · Prices checked 8 Oct 2026
How much does Retell AI cost per minute?
Retell lists $0.07 to $0.31 per minute. In practice a typical booking agent lands around $0.11 to $0.14 a minute on a phone line: my own Retell demo agent averaged $0.12 per minute across 9 real phone calls.
Here are my real numbers. My ABC Plumbing demo agent runs on Retell with a real phone number. Across 9 real phone calls (20.6 minutes) it cost $2.50, about $0.12 per minute, with single calls ranging from $0.10 to $0.14 a minute. A 3-minute call came to roughly $0.30 to $0.42. Browser test calls, which skip the phone line, averaged about $0.095 a minute.
What makes up the Retell per-minute price?
Four parts added together: $0.055/min voice infrastructure, the LLM you pick ($0.025 to $0.16/min), the voice ($0.015/min for most voices, up to about $0.10/min for premium ElevenLabs), and $0.015/min for US telephony.
Every minute of a call is the sum of these, from Retell's pricing page:
| Part | Price per minute | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Voice infrastructure | $0.055 | Fixed, every call |
| LLM | $0.025 to $0.16 | Claude 4.5 Haiku $0.025, GPT 4.1 $0.045, Gemini 3.5 Flash $0.048, Claude 5 Sonnet $0.064, GPT 5.5 $0.16 |
| Voice (text to speech) | $0.015 to about $0.10 | Retell, Cartesia, OpenAI and similar $0.015; ElevenLabs Flash $0.04; newer ElevenLabs models $0.08 to $0.10 |
| Telephony | $0.015 | US calls; skip it entirely for browser or web calls |
So the same agent can cost three times as much depending on two choices: the LLM and the voice. The model you pick matters more than anything else on the page.
What does a typical booking agent cost per minute?
Around $0.13 a minute with a mid-range LLM and a standard voice, which matches what I see on real calls.
| Setup | Infra + LLM + voice + phone | Per minute |
|---|---|---|
| Budget | $0.055 + $0.025 (Claude 4.5 Haiku) + $0.015 + $0.015 | $0.11 |
| Typical | $0.055 + $0.045 (GPT 4.1) + $0.015 + $0.015 | $0.13 |
| Premium | $0.055 + $0.16 (GPT 5.5) + $0.10 (ElevenLabs) + $0.015 | $0.33 |
For an appointment-booking agent, the budget and typical setups are usually enough. Booking is a structured job (check a slot, confirm details, book), and a tight Conversation Flow does more for reliability than a bigger model does.
What are Retell's monthly fees?
Phone numbers are $2 a month each ($10 for a verified number). The first 10 knowledge bases and the first 20 concurrent calls are free, then $8 a month each.
Other extras on the pricing page: branded caller ID adds $0.10 per outbound call, batch calling adds $0.005 per dial, and options like advanced denoising or PII removal add $0.005 to $0.01 a minute. For a single inbound receptionist you usually pay none of these.
Is Retell AI free?
No, but new accounts get $10 in free credits, which is enough to build and test one agent properly.
At $0.13 a minute, $10 buys you roughly 75 minutes of calls. Test calls add up faster than you expect once you start checking edge cases like reschedules and full calendars, so test in the browser where you can.
How does Retell's credit billing work?
Workspaces now prepay credits and usage is deducted in real time. Credits never expire but are non-refundable, and when the balance hits zero, calls stop until you top up or auto recharge runs. Legacy pay-later workspaces were converted on 30 September 2026.
From Retell's billing docs: usage is deducted from your credit balance in real time, while phone numbers, knowledge bases and extra concurrency still bill monthly to your card. Credits are scoped per workspace, so each workspace needs its own balance. The part that matters for a live client: at zero balance the agent stops taking calls, so turn on auto recharge before you hand an agent to a client.
How much would a clinic receptionist on Retell cost a month?
About $120 a month for 300 calls of 3 minutes each at $0.13 a minute, plus $2 for the phone number. Your price will move with the LLM and voice you choose.
| Monthly calls (3 min each) | Minutes | At $0.13/min + $2 number |
|---|---|---|
| 100 calls | 300 | $41 |
| 300 calls | 900 | $119 |
| 600 calls | 1,800 | $236 |
If you resell this to a clinic, price your monthly fee on these numbers plus your support time. The platform cost is rarely the expensive part; fixing a booking flow that breaks is.
How do you keep Retell costs down?
Pick a cheaper LLM and a standard voice, keep calls short with a tight flow, and test in the browser first, which skips telephony.
The other cost is minutes wasted on calls that go wrong: an agent that repeats itself, or books the wrong slot and has to be called back. A booking back-end that checks real availability and re-checks the slot right before booking keeps calls short. I wrote about that in Vapi vs Retell for appointment booking.