How much does Vapi cost per minute?

Vapi starts around $0.05/min and typically lands at $0.15 to $0.36 per minute all in, once you add STT, LLM, TTS, and telephony. Vapi bills your users and keeps the platform fee on every minute.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Vapi?

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.

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Vapi pricing, and the self-hosting alternative

Vapi is great for fast, no-code prototypes. 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 Vapi is

Vapi is a managed voice-AI platform. You wire up an agent in their dashboard, and Vapi runs it, meters it, and bills your users for you. It is one of the quickest ways to get a voice agent answering a phone, which is exactly why so many people start there.

Vapi pricing

$0.15 to $0.36/min

Vapi starts around $0.05 per minute as a platform fee, then you pay for STT, LLM, TTS, and telephony on top. All in, a real call typically lands between $0.15 and $0.36 per minute. White-labeling is not native (the Vapify add-on runs $29 to $149 per month).

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

The catch: you rent, you do not own

You never own the agent. It runs on Vapi rails, Vapi bills your users, and the per-minute fee is forever. There is no point at which the meter stops: the more minutes you sell, the more you pay Vapi for the privilege.

When self-hosting wins

Once you are past roughly 20,000 minutes a month, the platform fee you hand to Vapi every month is usually larger than the cost of running the same stack yourself on LiveKit, where you bill your own users and keep the spread.

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 Vapi and owning your stack.

Honest take

If you want to prototype fast and never touch infrastructure, a managed platform like Vapi 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 Vapi. Founding access, lifetime updates. Launches September 2. Full refund, no spam.

Founding price locked for the list. Launches September 2.