All-in cost per minute

The advertised per-minute price is one of six or seven lines. This model adds the rest, plus the human time on transferred calls, and compares the total with staffing the same calls.

Defaults reviewed 30 Sept 2026. Everything runs in your browser; the URL carries your inputs so you can share them.

Start from a preset

Volume

Calls per month

Minutes per call

Containment (completed by the agent): 80%

Transferred to a human mid-call (counts within the non-contained share): 10%

Outbound share of calls: 100%

Market (telephony and language multipliers)

Unit rates (list-price ranges; edit to the vendor’s quote)

Orchestration platform feeper connected minute · range 0.02 to 0.15 · Many platforms quote this number alone as "the price per minute".

Speech-to-textper audio minute · range 0.004 to 0.015

Text-to-speechper minute of agent speech · range 0.01 to 0.06 · Premium cloned or expressive voices sit at the top of the range.

Language modelper minute (tokens converted at typical turn lengths) · range 0.005 to 0.06 · Long system prompts and tool-heavy turns push this up fast.

Telephony, inbound legper minute · range 0.0085 to 0.03

Telephony, outbound legper minute · range 0.013 to 0.06 · International and mobile termination rates vary widely by country.

Phone number rentalper number per month · range 1 to 10

Testing, monitoring and QA toolingper connected minute (amortised) · range 0 to 0.02

Build, run and the human baseline

Integration one-off (USD)

Amortise over (months)

Prompt and flow maintenance (hours/month)

Maintenance rate (USD/hour)

Loaded human cost (USD/hour)

All-in cost per connected minute

$0.497

Advertised base rates in this market run $0.05 to $0.07 per minute. Your all-in is 7.1× the top of that range.

Monthly, all-in: $35,750
Monthly run cost (minutes, numbers, maintenance): $12,308
Cost per contained call: $0.42
Human time on non-contained calls: $22,400
Human-only baseline for the same calls: $112,000
Break-even on the one-off: 0.3 months

Where the minute goes (72,000 connected minutes per month)
Orchestration platform fee	$0.0500
Speech-to-text	$0.0080
Text-to-speech	$0.0300
Language model	$0.0200
Testing, monitoring and QA tooling	$0.0050
Telephony (blended by direction, market multiplier applied)	$0.0200
Numbers, maintenance, integration and transfers (per minute, amortised)	$0.3635

Sensitivity: containment ±10 points
Containment	All-in per minute	Monthly saving vs human
70%	$0.652	$65,050
80%	$0.497	$76,250
90%	$0.341	$87,450

Estimates for planning, not quotes. Unit rates are list-price ranges from public pages; replace them with the vendor’s line items. Containment counts only calls completed in your system of record.

Worked examples at list prices

The same model with the default unit rates, United States multipliers, and each preset’s volumes. These render without JavaScript.

Preset	All-in per minute	Monthly all-in	Human-only baseline	Break-even
Dental practice, inbound scheduling	$0.565	$1,897	$3,360	1.6 mo
Home services, missed-call capture	$0.554	$1,247	$2,520	1.1 mo
Lender, outbound payment reminders	$0.497	$35,750	$112,000	0.3 mo
Enterprise contact centre, inbound servicing	$0.445	$224,399	$336,000	0.5 mo

Assumptions

Per-minute layers are charged on connected minutes; telephony is blended by the outbound share and scaled by the market multiplier.
Speech layers carry the market’s language multiplier; multilingual and code-switching deployments typically cost more per minute.
Human time on transferred calls uses the loaded hourly rate divided by occupancy and the default handle time of 4.5 minutes.
The integration one-off is amortised over the chosen months; maintenance is prompt, flow and test upkeep.
Numbers are rented one per 2,500 calls per month as a rough concurrency proxy.
Containment counts only calls completed in your system of record. Break-even is months until savings repay the one-off.