How much does Retell cost per minute?

Retell starts around $0.07/min and typically lands at $0.13 to $0.31 per minute all in, once you add STT, LLM, TTS, and telephony. Retell bills your users and keeps the platform fee on every minute.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Retell?

Self-hosting a voice agent on LiveKit costs only the provider rate per minute (roughly $0.03 to $0.07), with no platform fee. Above about 20,000 minutes a month you usually keep more by owning the stack and billing your own users. ShipVoice is the boilerplate that wires the metering and billing in.

Compare / Retell

Retell pricing, and the self-hosting alternative

Retell is great for managed agents at some scale. Here is what it actually costs per minute, what you are renting, and when owning your own stack on LiveKit keeps more of the margin.

What Retell is

Retell is a managed voice-AI platform aimed at teams that want a hosted agent with solid call handling and less prototype-first tooling than Vapi. Like every managed platform, you rent the agent per minute and Retell is the one billing.

Retell pricing

$0.13 to $0.31/min

Retell starts around $0.07 per minute as a base fee, with STT, LLM, TTS, and telephony stacked on top, landing around $0.13 to $0.31 per minute all in. White-labeling comes through wrapper plans that run $79 to $499 per month.

Ranges are typical all-in estimates. Verify against Retell's current pricing page before you commit.

The catch: you rent, you do not own

The economics are the same as any rented platform: you do not own the code, you cannot set your own margin freely, and the per-minute fee never goes away. Your best customers are the ones costing you the most in platform fees.

When self-hosting wins

If you are building a product you intend to grow, owning the stack on LiveKit means the per-minute platform fee disappears and every minute you sell above your provider cost is margin you keep, not margin you rent.

Run your own numbers in the free margin calculator: pick your providers, set your price and call volume, and see the per-month difference between renting Retell and owning your stack.

Honest take

If you want to prototype fast and never touch infrastructure, a managed platform like Retell is a reasonable place to start. If you are building a product you want to own and grow, the per-minute fee you pay to rent it becomes the single biggest tax on your margin. See the full comparison across Vapi, Retell, Bland, Synthflow, and self-hosting.

Own the stack instead of renting it

ShipVoice is the LiveKit boilerplate with per-minute Stripe billing wired in, so you can bill your own users instead of Retell. Founding access, lifetime updates. Launches September 2. Full refund, no spam.

Founding price locked for the list. Launches September 2.