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Since there are so many moving parts to the voice pipeline that can incur cost, it would be ideal for us to get a good estimate of our final projected per-minute cost for calls.

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Dashboard Cost Estimates

The Vapi dashboard provides static cost projections on a per-assistant basis, so you can get a rough idea of the costs your assistant will incur during live execution.
You can view your dashboard at dashboard.vapi.ai & get started with our dashboard quickstart.

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Calling Your Assistant

One good way to get an empirical per-minute cost on your whole voice pipeline is to actually call in, use it for a few minutes, & observe the average cost/minute at the call level.
You can view a breakdown of your cost per call in your dashboard at dashboard.vapi.ai/calls
Your call cost breakdowns will look something like this:
Here is what each line item corresponds to:
  • STT: Speech-to-text (providers often bill per-minute, prorated)
  • LLM: LLM inference (providers often bill per-million or per-thousand tokens)
  • TTS: Text-to-speech (providers often bill per-character)
  • Vapi: the Vapi platform fee of 5¢/minute (prorated per-second)
  • Transport: telephony costs (incurred for inbound/outbound phone calls to/from a phone number) (providers often bill per-minute)
This method can be effective because per-minute costs will not scale with the amount of call minutes you consume. The cost for the 1st minute will be the same as the 10,000th minute.
Bulk discounts are available on enterprise plans which can make the per-minute cost cheaper as volume increases. View pricing to learn more.

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General Provider Estimates

The provider costs listed below are subject to change as we get more data, but they will always reflect our best estimate of the provider costs per minute:

Speech-to-text Provider Estimates (Transcription)

Speech-to-text Provider

Deepgram: $0.01/min (=$0.60/hr)

Model Provider Estimates

Model Provider

  • OpenAI (gpt-4-turbo): $0.20/min (=$12.00/hr)
    OpenAI (gpt-3.5-turbo): $0.02/min (=$1.20/hr)

Voice Provider Estimates

Voice Provider

  • ElevenLabs: $0.04/min (=$2.40/hr)
    PlayHT: $0.07/min (=$4.20/hr)
    Deepgram: $0.02/min (=$1.20/hr)
    OpenAI: $0.02/min (=$1.20/hr)
    RimeAI: $0.03/min (=$1.80/hr)
    Azure: $0.02/min (=$1.20/hr)
    Neets: $0.005/min (=$0.30/hr)
    LMNT: $0.03/min (=$1.80/hr)