All-in cost per minute

What it is

Voice-agent pricing is advertised as a per-minute rate, a per-call rate or a monthly subscription. Almost none of those figures is the whole bill. The all-in cost per connected minute adds the layers: the platform's own fee; usage charges for speech recognition, the language model and text-to-speech when they are billed separately or passed through; telephony for the inbound leg, the outbound leg and both legs of a transfer; the share of a human's time consumed by transfers and by fixing agent errors; and the amortised cost of integration and prompt maintenance. Divided by connected minutes, that is the number to compare across vendors and against a human baseline.

The human baseline is not an hourly wage. It is the loaded cost of a person, adjusted for occupancy, after-hours premiums and the minutes per call they actually spend.

Why it matters when buying

Two vendors advertising the same per-minute price can differ by a large factor once model usage and telephony are included, and a low containment rate moves cost back onto people. Regional multipliers matter too: telephony in India or the Philippines is priced differently from the United States, and a second language may be an add-on. Treat every figure as an estimate, not a quote; the calculator on this site uses public list-price ranges and states its assumptions.

What to ask

Ask for a line-item breakdown at your volume, including model and telephony pass-through, transfer legs and overage. Ask what happens to the price if the language model changes. Ask for the contract's minimum commitment and the notice period on price changes. Then compute your own number with the calculator and compare.