You have decided to buy. Someone has sent you a per-minute rate excluding VAT, and you want to know whether it is fair. That question cannot be answered yet, because a per-minute rate on its own does not tell you what a handled call will cost you.
The rate is real. It is also only one of four layers, and not the only one you will pay for. Underneath it sit telephony, speech recognition, the language model, speech synthesis, the build, and the ongoing work of keeping the scenario current. Above it sits the number that decides everything: the share of calls the agent finishes without handing off to a person.
A quote may cover only one layer, so ask which layers yours includes. Below is the arithmetic in the open, at three volumes, built from rates we publish. Every line built from our rates is checkable; the two inputs that are yours, call length and containment, are assumptions, and we flag them where they are used.
The four cost layers behind one minute
- Carriage. The phone call itself: the SIP trunk, per-minute termination, the numbers. Your carrier prices this, it changes by country and by direction, and it usually sits outside the vendor's per-minute rate. It is an easy line to leave out of the comparison.
- The speech stack. Recognition turns the caller's audio into text, a language model decides what to say, synthesis says it. Three separate costs, billed per second of audio or per token. Where a vendor rents all three from third-party APIs, that cost reaches you inside the rate, so it is worth asking which of the three are actually theirs. Recognition, synthesis and the model all run on our own servers, so call data stays in-region and does not depend on third-party APIs.
- The build. Gathering your context, writing and training the scenario, wiring the agent into your CRM and telephony, testing it before it takes a live call. One-time work, and worth confirming in writing whether it is inside the rate you were quoted.
- Keeping it right. Products, prices, objections and rules change. Someone has to update the scenario and check what the agent actually said on the line. If nobody owns this, the agent quietly gets worse and nothing in your bill tells you.
The advertised rate is a price for layer two. The bill is all four.
Per minute, per call, or per result
There are three honest shapes for this contract, and they move risk to different places. Per minute, you pay for talk time: easy to audit, and it bills duration rather than outcome. Per call, you pay a fixed amount per conversation whatever its length, which hands duration risk to the vendor, who then prices in a buffer for long calls. Per result, you pay per sale, per qualified lead, or per completed action, and the vendor carries the execution risk. Per minute is what we publish today; pay-for-results is our stated end state.
Whichever shape you sign, the number to compare is the same one, and it is not the rate.
The number that actually matters
Loaded cost per handled call = (all minutes billed x rate, plus any one-time build or maintenance a vendor bills you separately) divided by the number of calls the agent finished without a human. Everything else is an input to this. With us the bracketed extras are empty: billing is talk time only and call analytics is included, so every worked figure below is rate x minutes and nothing else.
Be clear-eyed about the divisor. A failed call still consumes minutes. Someone who hangs up forty seconds in is forty seconds of billed talk time and no result. A call the agent escalates gets paid for twice: once for the agent's minutes, then again for the person who finishes it. Per-minute pricing does not care which of those happened.
AI voice agent cost per minute at three volumes
Take Bene Hotline, our inbound reception and routing agent. Base rate EUR 0.20 a minute excluding VAT, the same nominal figure in USD. Volume discounts run 0, -5, -10, -15, -20 and -25% across the 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k, 400k and 1M minute tiers.
Two inputs are yours, not ours. Assume a three-minute average call and substitute your real figure. And assume the agent finishes 70% of calls without a person. We will not publish a single containment number, because it is set by your call mix and your scenario, not by our software. The 70% just makes the arithmetic visible.
Read the middle row slowly, because it is the whole argument. The raw cost per call attempted is EUR 0.54, which is the number that flatters the quote. The cost per call actually finished is EUR 0.77, and the gap is not a fee, it is the assumed 30% of conversations that consumed minutes and produced a handoff.
Now hold that row still. Same 100,000 minutes, same EUR 0.18, and move only the share the agent finishes alone.
Going from 25,000 minutes to 400,000 minutes moves the rate by a factor of 1.25. Across the illustrative 85%-to-45% range above, containment moves the cost per handled call by a factor of about 1.9 without the rate changing at all. Which is why negotiating two cents off the rate is close to a waste of a meeting.
Negotiate the rate and you win pennies. Fix containment and you win the invoice.
What to make a quote answer in writing
Take any quote, ours included, and make the vendor answer these in writing. Where a vendor will not, that is your answer.
- Which of the four layers the per-minute number covers, and which are passed through to you at cost plus a margin.
- Whether the build is a one-time line or quietly amortised into the rate, and what happens to it if you stop after two months.
- Who owns scenario maintenance after go-live, how often it happens, and what it is billed at.
- Whether non-productive minutes are billed. Voicemail, hold, abandoned calls, escalated calls: all of them consume talk time.
- How time is rounded. Per-second and rounded-up-to-the-minute are not the same product. On a forty-second call, minute rounding costs you 50%.
- Whether there is a minimum commitment, a subscription, or a shortfall charge in a month you use less than you forecast.
- Whether analytics is included or sold separately. Ours is included: Locator reviews and scores 100% of calls. Manual QA teams get through 3-5%, which is our own published claim rather than an industry study.
When per-minute pricing is the wrong deal for you
We sell per minute, so read this as a warning against us where it applies. There are two situations where a flat per-call or per-result price is genuinely better for the buyer, and no volume discount fixes either.
The first is when your calls are long by nature and each one is worth little. Compliance scripts your own industry requires you to read out, long verification reads, a base that likes to talk: if you cannot compress the duration and the value of the conversation does not grow with its length, per-minute pricing charges you for exactly the thing you do not benefit from. Ask for a per-call price and let the vendor own the duration.
The second is when the outcome is countable and you would rather not carry the execution risk. Under per-minute pricing, a scenario that escalates half its calls bills the same as one that closes them, and the difference lands entirely on you. If what you want can be counted, a sale, a qualified lead, a booked appointment, then ask to be priced on that. It is the harder deal for a vendor to sign, which is precisely why it tells you how confident they are.
Two conditions, stated plainly
Long calls worth little each, or a countable outcome you do not want to carry the risk on. In both cases a flat fee beats per minute, and you should say so.
Our rates in full
Base per-minute rates, excluding VAT. The same nominal figure applies in EUR and USD; that is regional parity, not a currency conversion. Latin America is priced at roughly half these rates.
Volume tiers are 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k, 400k and 1M minutes a month. The three agents discount 0, -5, -10, -15, -20 and -25%. Locator runs a steeper curve of its own: 0, -12.5, -25, -37.5, -50 and -62.5%.
Two things people expect and will not find. There is no subscription: billing is for talk time only, with call analytics included rather than sold on top. And the trial is priced 20% above base, not below, because trial volume sits below the first discount tier. If a trial is priced under the base rate, it is worth asking what was built into the base rate to make that possible.
If you want your own numbers rather than ours, the cost calculator is public, and it works from your call volume, your region and the product you are pricing; the pricing block on the homepage lists the rates. The lowest rate on that list is Locator at 0.10 a minute, on the calls your human team already makes: it reviews and scores 100% of them, where a manual QA team gets through 3-5%, which is our own published claim rather than an industry study.