Vapi AI: What It Is, Pricing, and Alternatives (2026)
Vapi is one of the biggest platforms for building AI phone agents. A million developers have built on it by its count, its agents have handled over a billion calls, and Amazon Ring runs every inbound support call through it.
It’s also a kit, not a phone agent. Every part of the call is something you pick, wire up and pay for by the minute.
The quick answer: Vapi is a developer platform for building AI voice agents that answer and place phone calls. You pick the transcriber, model, voice and carrier, write the prompt, wire up your calendar and CRM, then test and maintain it. It costs $0.05 a minute plus every provider at cost: $82 to $129 for 1,000 minutes on Vapi’s own calculator. If you want your business calls handled rather than a platform to build on, Carly answers and makes your calls, texts from the same number and runs your team inbox, set up by the Carly team with no code.
Vapi at a glance
Checked against Vapi’s pricing page, docs and changelog on October 3, 2026. US dollars.
| Vapi | |
|---|---|
| What it is | An API and dashboard for building voice agents for phone and web calls, plus chat and SMS |
| How you build | Assistants or Squads, through the dashboard, API, SDKs, CLI or Composer, an AI builder in alpha |
| Providers | Models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, transcribers like Deepgram, voices like ElevenLabs, or your own keys |
| Prebuilt integrations | Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Slack and GoHighLevel, plus guides for Make and n8n. Anything else is an API call your developer sets up |
| Phone numbers | One free US number (inbound only), or numbers imported from Twilio, Telnyx, Vonage or a SIP trunk |
| Speed | Under 500ms average latency, per Vapi |
| Compliance | SOC 2, HIPAA and PCI, per Vapi. HIPAA is a $2,000 a month add-on |
| Price | $0.05/min hosting plus providers at cost. $5 in free credits. Support packages from $29/month |
| Best for | Engineering teams putting voice inside their own product, and enterprises with developers on staff |
What Vapi is and does
A voice agent runs a loop: a transcriber turns speech into text, a model decides what to say, a voice speaks it. Vapi runs that loop and the phone connection; you choose each part and decide what the agent does. (Vapi is also a city in Gujarat, India. This page is about the voice AI company.)
Vapi raised a $50 million Series B in May 2026, led by Peak XV, for $72 million in total. Amazon Ring went live on it in two weeks, and staffing app Instawork screens candidates with over a million minutes a month.
You build with Assistants (one prompt plus tools such as transfer, send a text or call an API) or Squads (several assistants that hand a live call to each other, like triage passing to a scheduler). What shipped in 2026:
- Composer (February): describe the agent in plain English and Composer sets it up. Its docs say it can’t reach your CRM or test the agent for you.
- Simulations and versions (August): scripted callers to test against, and drafts you publish and roll back instead of edits going live instantly.
- Workflows retired (August 18): Vapi shut down its visual flow builder, and workflows still in use stopped running the next day. Vapi said models couldn’t reliably keep track of which step they were on, and customers rebuilt them as Squads.
- Campaigns rebuilt (August 31): outbound calling to lists of up to 10,000 contacts.
Agent Phone: Vapi for personal assistants
On September 30, 2026, Vapi launched Personal Agent Calling in beta, which is why it now turns up when people ask for an AI assistant that makes phone calls. Connect an assistant you already use (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Meta’s Muse) at phone.vapi.ai, and it can call a business for you: check stock, find an appointment, ask an airline for a better seat.
For a business, Carly does this on your own line: connect it to ChatGPT or Claude, and it calls and texts customers from your team’s business number, then logs each call with a summary and transcript (how it works).
Vapi pricing (October 2026)
Vapi bills prepaid usage by the minute, with optional monthly support packages. A minute is the sum of its parts:
| Component | Price |
|---|---|
| Vapi hosting | $0.05 a minute |
| Transcriber | At cost. Deepgram runs about $0.01 a minute |
| Model | At cost. OpenAI models run about $0.008 to $0.045 a minute |
| Voice | At cost. ElevenLabs runs about $0.015 to $0.024 a minute |
| Telephony | Free on Vapi’s number. Billed by the carrier on imported numbers: Twilio $0.008 a minute inbound and $0.014 outbound, Telnyx $0.0055 |
| Calls at once | 4 without a package. Extra lines $10 a month each |
| Support packages | Core $29 a month (10 calls at once, email support). Pro is 10% of hosting with a $999 monthly minimum. Premier is custom |
| HIPAA | $2,000 a month add-on, with a BAA |
Vapi’s calculator puts 1,000 minutes at $82 to $129, about 8 to 13 cents a minute, and the model moves it most. Take Michael Bennett’s HVAC company: 600 calls a month at three minutes, so 1,800 minutes, or $148 to $232 at the calculator’s rates. Calling customers back needs an imported number and its carrier fees. A cold Monday that rings five lines at once needs Core or an extra line. Then add whoever builds and maintains the agent.
Carly prices it the other way around: the phone line is priced on a short call with the Carly team, who set it up with you. Everything else: free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
Who Vapi is for, and what you build yourself
Vapi fits engineering teams adding voice to their own product, enterprises with developers, and agencies building agents for clients. What arrives is a voice loop with no business attached. Someone on your side still:
- Picks and tunes the transcriber, model and voice, and retests when a model is retired.
- Imports a carrier number for outbound calls or texting. The free number is inbound only, US only, and can’t be ported out.
- Writes the prompt, the qualifying rules and the handoffs.
- Connects the calendar and CRM. Google Calendar and GoHighLevel are prebuilt; Outlook, HubSpot or Salesforce mean an API request or code on your own server.
- Adds consent rules before calling anyone (see AI outbound calling).
- Rebuilds when the platform changes, as every Workflows customer did this August.
Vapi limitations: what users report
Vapi scores 2.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot, from only 15 reviews, so read it as a list of failure modes rather than a verdict:
- Latency in practice. A March 2026 reviewer reported 3 to 5 second pauses after each turn, and another said the agent lagged and ignored the prompt. In February 2026, several developers on Vapi’s support forum reported delayed voice output, one for three days.
- Bills above the headline. A November 2025 reviewer said real costs ran $0.17 to $0.50 a minute once the model and carrier were added.
- Support depends on the package. Without one, it’s the Discord community and email with no response time. A December 2025 reviewer said live issues waited a week and blamed bugs for $50,000 in downtime.
- Edits that didn’t stick. A January 2026 reviewer said settings reset while editing a draft agent. The August versions update targets exactly that.
Vapi alternatives
US list prices from each vendor’s pricing page, checked October 3, 2026.
| Alternative | Kind | Price | Who sets it up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carly | Business-ready: calls, texts and email in one team inbox | Phone line priced on a short call. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month | The Carly team, with you |
| Retell AI | Developer platform | $0.07 to $0.31/min, plus telephony. $10 in free credits | Your developer or a Retell partner |
| Bland | Developer platform | $0.14/min, or $0.12/min plus $299/mo. Telephony extra | Your developer |
| ElevenLabs Agents | Developer platform | Free (15 minutes) to $990/mo (12,375 minutes). Model billed on top | Your developer |
| Synthflow | Enterprise platform | Contracts from $30,000 a year | Synthflow, with your team |
If you want the phone agent, not the platform
1. Carly
Carly is an AI assistant for your whole team, and Carly for teams puts it on your business line. It answers and makes calls, texts from the same number and runs the team inbox. There’s no transcriber to choose and no server to deploy: you write instructions in plain English, and the Carly team sets up the number with you, the one you have or a new one.
Here’s a January morning at Bennett Heating & Air, with every tech out on a no-heat call:
- Carly picks up when the team can’t, or around the clock if you’d rather.
- It knows the caller. Emily Parker’s number matches her CRM record and last fall’s email about a furnace tune-up, so the call starts there instead of “can I get your name?”
- It qualifies and books. Michael’s questions run in order (no heat or routine? inside the service area?), then Emily lands on a real Google or Outlook calendar, round robin across the techs.
- It hands off and logs. If Emily asks for a person, Carly rings the right teammate. The transcript and summary land in the team inbox and on her CRM record.
What you’d wire up yourself on Vapi comes with it:
- Speed to lead. A web form comes in, and Carly calls the lead within about a minute and books them (tutorial).
- Texts on the same number. Carly answers texts on your business number, a teammate can take over any thread, and carrier registration is part of setup. “Missed call, text them back” is one workflow (how it works).
- One team inbox and CRM. Calls, texts and email share one timeline per customer, and a teammate replying pauses the AI. Carly works across all of your team’s Gmail and Outlook accounts and calendars at once, and writes back to HubSpot, Salesforce and Dynamics 365.
- Workflows on call events. Trigger on call ended, voicemail or text received. Carly connects to thousands of apps, so the outcome goes wherever your team works.
- More than the phone. Booking pages with round robin, and AI email agents for your support@ address.
You pick the voice (OpenAI or ElevenLabs voices), then call the number and read the log. The build-and-test tutorial walks through it.
Best for: Small and mid-sized teams that want calls answered, booked and logged without a developer. Pricing: Phone line priced on a short call. Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Setup: Done with the Carly team. Get started or book a call.
More business-ready options: the best AI receptionist and AI answering service guides.
If you’re building: developer platforms
2. Retell AI
Retell bundles infrastructure, voice and model into one per-minute rate, and it still has the drag-and-drop call flow builder Vapi retired in August. Full breakdown in our Retell AI guide.
Best for: Teams that want visual call flows and more calls at once out of the box. Pricing: $0.07 to $0.31 a minute, plus telephony ($0.015 a minute on a Retell US number, $2 a month per number). 20 calls at once included, then $8 a month per line. Limitations: Self-serve accounts get community and email support only, and a March 2026 Trustpilot reviewer reported 1.5 to 2.5 second pauses on a fast model.
3. Bland
Bland charges one per-minute rate covering model, transcription and voice, so the bill is easier to predict than Vapi’s stack of provider fees.
Best for: Teams that want one AI rate and plan to scale outbound. Pricing: $0.14 a minute on Start with no platform fee, or $0.12 a minute plus $299 a month on Build. Limitations: Start caps you at 100 calls a day and 10 at once. A BAA for health data is Enterprise-only.
4. ElevenLabs Agents
ElevenLabs, best known for its voices (Vapi’s pricing calculator assumes one), sells its own agent plans with call minutes included.
Best for: Products where the voice is the selling point. Pricing: Free for 15 minutes, then $22 a month for 275 minutes up to $990 for 12,375, billed monthly. Extra minutes are $0.08. Limitations: The model is billed on top, and calls over your concurrency limit bill at double rate.
5. Synthflow
Synthflow has moved upmarket: its pricing page sells only enterprise contracts.
Best for: Contact centers that want the vendor to scope and launch the rollout. Pricing: Contracts from $30,000 a year. Limitations: No self-serve plan. A May 2026 Trustpilot reviewer reported agents drifting from instructions and failing SMS triggers and webhooks.
Vapi or Carly: how to pick
- Pick Vapi if you have engineers, want to choose every component, and are building voice into your own product or contact center.
- Pick Retell AI for a visual flow builder and 20 calls at once included, Bland for one predictable AI rate, ElevenLabs Agents if the voice is the product, and Synthflow for an enterprise rollout with a $30,000-plus budget.
- Go with Carly if you want your calls answered, booked and logged in your team inbox without building anything. The Carly team sets it up with you.
More on the category: what an AI voice agent does and costs and AI voice agents for customer service.
FAQ
What is Vapi AI?
Vapi is a developer platform for building AI voice agents that answer and make phone calls or talk on a website. It runs the transcriber, model, voice and phone connection; you configure the agent through its dashboard, API or SDKs. If you’d rather have a phone agent set up for your business, Carly does that for teams.
How much does Vapi cost?
$0.05 a minute for Vapi’s hosting, plus the transcriber, model, voice and carrier at cost. Vapi’s calculator puts 1,000 minutes at $82 to $129. New accounts get $5 in credits, support packages start at $29 a month, and HIPAA is $2,000 a month. Carly’s phone line is priced on a short call, so book a call with the Carly team to scope yours.
Do you need to know how to code to use Vapi?
Not for a demo: the dashboard, its prompt generator and Composer get an agent talking quickly. A production agent still needs its calendar, CRM, carrier numbers, transfers and testing wired up, which usually means a developer. For a phone agent the Carly team sets up with you, get started with Carly.
Is Vapi or Retell AI better?
Vapi gives more control: you pick every provider and pay each at cost, with 4 calls at once before you buy a package. Retell bundles more into one rate ($0.07 to $0.31 a minute), includes 20 calls at once and keeps a visual flow builder. Both need a developer. If you’d rather skip the build, Carly runs your business line for you.
Can Vapi make phone calls for me?
In beta, yes. Vapi’s Agent Phone, launched September 30, 2026, lets assistants like Claude Code and Cursor call businesses on your behalf after you sign in at phone.vapi.ai. To call and text your own customers from your business number, connect Carly to ChatGPT or Claude, and every call lands in your team inbox.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
