Vapi Pricing: Vapi AI Pricing and Cost Per Minute

How much does Vapi cost per month?

It depends on minutes, lines and the package, because Vapi has no flat monthly plan that includes minutes. On usage only you pay nothing until calls run, then $0.05 a minute for hosting plus each provider at cost, prepaid from a credit balance. New accounts get $5 of credit, 2 organizations, 1 Vapi phone number and 4 concurrent calls.

The success packages sit on top. Core is $29 a month, prepaid and auto renewing, and raises you to 10 concurrent calls, 5 numbers, 30 days of raw call data, Zero Data Retention and email support with a two business day response. Pro is billed as 10% of your Vapi hosting fee with a $999 monthly minimum, and brings 10 organizations, 10 numbers, 30 concurrent calls, 180 days of data, role based access, a dedicated Slack channel, a one business day response and a 99% uptime SLA. Premier is quoted by sales and adds a named Agent Strategist, a Forward Deployed Engineer Advisor, a one hour P0 response, 99.9% uptime and SSO.

So a small outbound test on usage only can cost well under $100 a month, and a production calling floor rarely costs less than several hundred once you add lines. We model three real volumes side by side on our AI voice agent pricing page.

How much does Vapi cost per minute, all in?

About $0.08 to $0.13 a minute before telephony, using the ranges in Vapi's own calculator. For 1,000 minutes it shows $50 of hosting, $10 for Deepgram transcription, $8 to $45 for an OpenAI model and $15 to $24 for an ElevenLabs voice, an estimated total of $82 to $129 a month.

The spread comes almost entirely from the model. Per minute, Vapi lists Deepgram at $0.0095 to $0.0099, OpenAI at $0.0077 to $0.0452 and ElevenLabs at $0.0146 to $0.0238. A small fast model keeps you near the bottom of the range. A frontier model on long calls pushes you to the top.

Telephony is the fourth line and Vapi lists the carrier rates itself: Vapi telephony and SIP are free, Twilio is $0.008 a minute inbound and $0.014 outbound, Vonage $0.00814 and Telnyx $0.0055. For an outbound team on Twilio that adds about a cent and a half, which puts a realistic all in minute at roughly $0.10 to $0.14. The same stack math for Retell is in our Vapi vs Retell AI cost comparison.

Vapi Core vs Pro: which success package do you need?

Core is the one most calling teams should look at first, and the arithmetic is simple. Usage only gives you 4 lines and each extra line is $10 a month. Core costs $29 and gives you 10. At 7 lines you would pay $30 for three extra lines on usage only, so Core is already cheaper, and above 10 lines Core stays exactly $31 a month cheaper at every size because both then buy lines at the same $10.

Pro is a different purchase. It costs 10% of your hosting fee but never less than $999 a month, and hosting is $0.05 a minute, so the percentage only passes the minimum at about 199,800 minutes a month. Below that volume, Pro is a flat $999. Its 30 lines are not the reason to buy it, since 30 lines on Core cost $229. You buy Pro for the 180 day retention, role based access, 10 organizations, the Slack channel and the uptime SLA.

Premier makes sense when a missed call is a missed sale at scale and you want Vapi engineers in the room. It is quoted, so budget as you would for any enterprise contract.

What does Vapi cost for outbound cold calling at 5,000 minutes a month?

Take a team working a list with 20 concurrent lines and 5,000 connected minutes a month on Twilio. From Vapi's published rates: hosting $250, Deepgram about $48 to $50, the OpenAI model $38.50 to $226, the ElevenLabs voice $73 to $119 and Twilio outbound $70. That is roughly $480 to $715 in usage.

Then the lines. On usage only, 16 extra lines add $160. On Core, $29 plus 10 extra lines is $129, which is the cheaper route. The Core month lands at about $608 to $844, or $0.12 to $0.17 per connected minute. Add the phone numbers you dial from beyond the 5 included, and any branded caller ID you buy elsewhere.

What that figure does not include is the agent itself. On Vapi you write the prompts, build the objection handling and qualification logic, connect the calendar and the CRM, add a DNC scrub and calling hour rules, and maintain all of it as models change. That is the honest trade: Vapi's raw minutes are cheaper than ours, and the gap is what you pay not to build. If your team has the engineers and wants that control, Vapi is a good choice. If you want booked meetings next week, our published plans price the finished outbound SDR, and the Vapi alternative page walks through the difference line by line.

Vapi HIPAA pricing, data retention and the other add-ons

Vapi sells three add-ons and they attach to any package, including usage only. HIPAA eligible data handling is $2,000 a month per organization and comes with a standard data processing agreement and business associate agreement. Extra concurrency is $10 per line per month. Extra organizations, meaning separate workspaces with their own agents, numbers and API keys, are $20 each a month.

Zero Data Retention, where Vapi does not store call content beyond processing, used to be a paid add-on. It is now included with any success package, so the cheapest way to get it is the $29 Core package.

For outbound in the US, retention matters more than it looks. TCPA claims can arrive long after a call, and your defense rests on consent records, DNC checks and the recording. With 14 days on usage only and 30 on Core, plan to export recordings and transcripts to your own storage from day one. Our TCPA compliance software page covers what an outbound calling record needs to hold.

Is Vapi worth it, and when a managed AI SDR is the better buy

Vapi is worth it when you are building a voice product or an unusual call flow and have engineers who will own it. The pricing is honest: models at cost, no markup, and no minimum on usage only. It gives you control that a finished product cannot, and it is the cheapest raw minute among the developer platforms once you bring your own model keys.

It is the wrong purchase when what you actually want is meetings on a sales calendar. Every outbound requirement (disclosure, DNC, state calling windows, voicemail handling, objection handling, CRM notes, booking) is work you do on Vapi and configuration you check on a finished AI SDR. Compare Vapi with the other builder platforms on Retell AI pricing and Bland AI pricing, and if booked meetings are the goal, see how our AI voice agent for sales runs the whole outbound call.