Retell AI is live · free plan; paid plans on request · last verified 25 Oct 2026 · viability healthy
Retell AI
Retell AI builds, tests and deploys AI voice agents that answer and route real phone calls from $0.07/min.
Pick Retell when the call flow is yours to own and you want to keep improving it without a vendor ticket. The simulate-then-ship loop in Conductor plus component-level minute pricing makes both the logic and the invoice auditable. Budget carefully: cost tracks talk time almost linearly, and SSO, RBAC and a dedicated server are Enterprise-only, so model the volume bill before you standardise.
Verdict generatedVerified 5d ago · liveness 89/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/retell-ai
- Support teams fielding high inbound volume with multi-turn, nuanced conversations
- Sales teams running outbound qualification and batch dialling campaigns
- Healthcare, insurance and debt-collection operations needing HIPAA/BAA on Enterprise
- Engineering-led teams that want API and model-level control over their voice stack
- Small businesses wanting a finished, zero-configuration receptionist with no setup
- Teams that cannot absorb usage-based spend rising roughly linearly with call minutes
- Organisations needing SSO, RBAC or a dedicated server without an Enterprise contract
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Skip Retell AI if you want a finished receptionist that works from a template with nobody owning prompt edits and flow changes, or if your only requirement is a basic touch-tone menu.
The quoted per-minute rate is only the voice layer: LLM cost and TTS cost stack on top of $0.055/min Retell voice infrastructure, so a premium model like GPT 6 Astra pushes a call well past the headline number.
Pay-as-you-go starts at $0 with $10 in free credits and no commitment, which is cheaper to trial than most voice agent platforms that want an annual contract first. It fits a pilot or an SMB with variable volume; it stops fitting when you cross into needing SSO, RBAC and a BAA, where Retell's custom-priced Enterprise is comparable to Vapi's and Bland's enterprise tiers but you should benchmark the per-minute blend against your actual model and voice choices.
In short
Retell AI — Retell AI builds, tests and deploys AI voice agents that answer and route real phone calls from $0.07/min. Best for Support teams fielding high inbound volume with multi-turn, nuanced conversations, Sales teams running outbound qualification and batch dialling campaigns, Healthcare, insurance and debt-collection operations needing HIPAA/BAA on Enterprise. Free to start; it also has paid plans whose price we could not confirm — see the pricing table.
What is Retell AI?
Retell AI — Retell AI builds, tests and deploys AI voice agents that answer and route real phone calls from $0.07/min. Best for Support teams fielding high inbound volume with multi-turn, nuanced conversations, Sales teams running outbound qualification and batch dialling campaigns, Healthcare, insurance and debt-collection operations needing HIPAA/BAA on Enterprise. Free to start; it also has paid plans whose price we could not confirm — see the pricing table.
Retell AI is a platform for building production AI voice agents that handle inbound and outbound phone calls, plus chat and SMS. It targets ops and engineering teams with real call volume — support, sales, healthcare, insurance, debt collection, logistics — who need a call flow they can own and keep iterating on rather than a locked receptionist box. Agents are assembled on a drag-and-drop canvas: functions, call transfers, DTMF capture, SMS steps, appointment booking, knowledge base lookup and IVR navigation, then deployed to an inbound number, batch outbound campaign, web call, chat, SMS or website widget. Developers can script the same logic via a flexible API. Latency is the headline: Retell quotes roughly 600ms on a proprietary turn-taking model, so multi-turn calls don't collapse into overlap. You pick the brain and the voice separately — the LLM menu includes GPT 5.6 Terra, GPT 6 Astra, GPT 6.1 Sol and Claude 5 Sonnet, with speech from Retell platform voices, ElevenLabs (v3, v4), Cartesia, Minimax, Fish, OpenAI or Inworld. The published estimator itemises LLM, Retell voice infrastructure ($0.055/min), TTS and telephony so the bill is legible before you commit minutes. Recent releases matter more than homepage copy. Retell Workflows (August 2026) adds pre- and post-call orchestration, an integration library, a tool store and preset functions. Conductor, live since 2 July 2026, simulates scenarios without dialling, validates proposed changes and turns failed production calls into regression tests — and since September 2026 puts observability on every product page. October 2026 brought a memory update for carrying context across a call. Contact-centre basics are covered: batch outbound with pacing and voicemail handling, agentic human handoffs that brief the rep first, live monitoring with take-over, post-call extraction, AI QA scoring up to 100% of calls and CRM write-back. HIPAA/BAA, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 27001, SSO, RBAC and a dedicated stable server
Key features
- AI voice agents on phone, chat and SMS from one platform
- Proprietary turn-taking model at roughly 600ms latency
- Drag-and-drop call flow canvas with functions, transfers and DTMF
- Retell Workflows: pre- and post-call orchestration with integration library and tool store
- Conductor copilot: simulate scenarios and generate regression tests from failed calls
- Conductor observability across product pages
- Batch outbound campaigns with pacing, retries and voicemail handling
- IVR navigation that detects menus, presses digits and enters extensions
- Agentic human handoff that briefs the rep before connecting
- Live call monitoring with real-time transcripts and instant take-over
- AI Quality Assurance scoring on up to 100% of calls
- Post-call extraction with sentiment scoring and CRM write-back
- Model-agnostic LLM menu including GPT 5.6 Terra, GPT 6 Astra and Claude 5 Sonnet
- TTS choice across Retell, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Minimax, Fish, OpenAI and Inworld
- API, webhooks and website widget for web and in-app chat
Behind the verdict
Retell's pitch is control. You get a canvas, an API, and a testing loop, and the vendor expects your team to operate the thing. That suits companies with a support or sales engineer who can own call flows. It suits them less if nobody wants that job — in which case a finished receptionist product will get you on the phone faster. Where it earns its keep is iteration. Conductor lets you simulate a scenario before dialling a real number, validates the proposed change, and turns failed production calls into regression tests. We'd reach for this the moment a voice agent stops being a demo and starts being a business process, because changes need a safety net. The cost model is refreshingly itemised: Retell voice infrastructure at $0.055/min, TTS from $0.015/min on platform voices up to $0.10/min on ElevenLabs v3, LLM from cents to $0.384/min, telephony separate. That legibility is the point — you can see where a call gets expensive. The flip side is that a busy month is a busy invoice, and minute spend rises almost linearly with volume. Teams used to flat SaaS seats often underestimate this. On models, the menu keeps moving: GPT 5.6 Terra and Claude 5 Sonnet sit at the recommended tier, with GPT 6 Astra and GPT 6.1 Sol available at higher per-minute rates. Voice choice spans Retell, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Minimax, Fish, OpenAI and Inworld. In practice, cheaper models handle scripted qualification fine; the expensive tiers matter when the conversation is genuinely open-ended. Watch the plan boundary. SSO, RBAC, custom MSA/DPA, a HIPAA BAA or a dedicated stable server are Enterprise items, so regulated buyers should scope that contract early rather than discovering it mid-rollout. Pay-as-you-go does include 20 concurrent calls and webhooks/API access, which is enough for
Models under the hood
as of 2026-10-22
Limitations
- Retell is pure pay-as-you-go: $0.07–$0.31 per AI voice minute and $0.002+ per AI chat message on the published estimator, with spend scaling directly with talk time and no published cap.
- LLM cost is on top of the $0.055/min Retell voice infrastructure and TTS, so picking a premium model like GPT 6 Astra or GPT 6.1 Sol Ultrafast moves the per-minute number materially.
- Enterprise governance — custom SSO, RBAC, custom MSA/DPA/BAA, dedicated stable server, 24/7 support with a dedicated portal — is custom-priced and sits behind a sales conversation.
- Retell's own vCX-Hard benchmark reports the best of 27 leading models clears only about 88% on the hardest turns of real contact-centre calls, which implies an ongoing iteration cycle rather than one-shot perfection.
- Someone on your team has to own prompt edits, flow changes and QA review.
as of 2026-10-20
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Is Retell AI still active?
Retell AI is live · free plan; paid plans on request · last verified 25 Oct 2026 · viability healthy.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is Retell AI? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →What's new in Retell AI
Checked 10 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 2 feature updates, 1 launch and 2 news mentions.
Smarter Memory for AI Voice Agents
Retell published a post on memory improvements for voice agents, aimed at carrying context across a conversation. No version or release date is given beyond the post date.
What's New in Conductor: Voice Agent Observability on Every Page
Conductor gained observability surfaces across the product, extending the simulate-and-review copilot launched in July 2026.
Retell Workflows and more
Retell Workflows launched with orchestration before and after the call, an integration library for Slack, Google Drive and Salesforce, a tool store and preset functions. GPT-5.6 and GPT Realtime 2.1 went live in the agent builder.
Conductor, higher free-tier token limits, and more
Conductor went live: it simulates a scenario without dialling a real number, validates every proposed change against the platform, and surfaces changes for review rather than applying them. The free LLM token allowance was raised to 4,000.
Introducing Conductor: the most operationally aware agent for building voice agents
Retell announced Conductor, its copilot for building and maintaining voice agents, which the changelog later confirmed shipped on 2 July 2026.
What do users say about Retell AI?
What people actually say about Retell AI — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
Researched36 mentions across 3 sources (Hacker News, Product Hunt, Lemmy) · researched Aug 18, 2026.
Average across the 3 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +Sub-second (~600ms) latency delivered as promised.
- +Handles interruptions naturally — a missing feature in competitors.
- +Sounded most natural among voice AI products tested by reviewer.
- +Handles different accents and background noise effectively.
- +Quick setup: no need to build from scratch, saves weeks.
- −Lack of long-term user reviews; feedback is launch-day heavy.
- −No community discussion on pricing pain points yet.
- −Proprietary platform; no self-hosted option for full control.
- −No critical voices in data; hidden issues unknown.
- −Phone call use cases may not translate to broader voice AI.
- • Potential per-minute usage fees that can escalate with call volume
- • Custom pricing for Enterprise may include setup or onboarding fees
How we verified this
Every listed fact about Retell AI— pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 25 Oct 2026. Pages mix model-assisted synthesis with human review; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified Retell AI 20 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed SSL certificate
- — changed features, our verdict, pricing tiers, summary, who it suits, who should skip it, description, integrations
- — changed pricing page
- — changed our verdict, switching in, description, switching out, who should skip it, models, summary, setup time, pricing fit, features, who it suits, hidden costs, use cases, pricing tiers, limitations
- — changed description, pricing tiers, summary, who should skip it, our verdict, who it suits, features
- — changed pricing page, limitations
Showing the 6 most recent of 20 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does Retell AI cost in 2026?
Retell AI: Free to start; it also has paid plans whose price we could not confirm — see the pricing table. Pricing last verified 25 Oct 2026.
Plans compared
Every published Retell AI tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | FreeVendor: “$0/mo + usage” | — | A team piloting a voice agent or an SMB with variable call volume that wants to go live without an annual contract.Adds: Starting tier: $0 to start with $10 in free credits, full platform access, 20 free concurrent calls, then $0.07–$0.31/min for voice plus LLM and TTS cost. |
| Enterprise | Custom | quote | Regulated or high-volume operations in healthcare, insurance or debt collection that need a signed BAA and named support.Adds: Adds custom SSO, role-based access control, custom MSA/DPA/BAA terms, no cap on concurrent calls, a dedicated stable server add-on and 24/7 support with a dedicated portal. |
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Retell AI's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Pay-as-you-go starts at $0 with $10 in free credits and no commitment, which is cheaper to trial than most voice agent platforms that want an annual contract first. It fits a pilot or an SMB with variable volume; it stops fitting when you cross into needing SSO, RBAC and a BAA, where Retell's custom-priced Enterprise is comparable to Vapi's and Bland's enterprise tiers but you should benchmark the per-minute blend against your actual model and voice choices.
Has Retell AI's pricing changed?
No plan price for Retell AI has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick Retell AI?
Pick Retell AI if you are Support teams fielding high inbound volume with multi-turn, nuanced conversations, Sales teams running outbound qualification and batch dialling campaigns, Healthcare, insurance and debt-collection operations needing HIPAA/BAA on Enterprise, Engineering-led teams that want API and model-level control over their voice stack.
Look elsewhere if you are Small businesses wanting a finished, zero-configuration receptionist with no setup, Teams that cannot absorb usage-based spend rising roughly linearly with call minutes, Organisations needing SSO, RBAC or a dedicated server without an Enterprise contract, Simple touch-tone IVR replacements where a basic menu is the entire requirement.
Skip it if Skip Retell AI if you want a finished receptionist that works from a template with nobody owning prompt edits and flow changes, or if your only requirement is a basic touch-tone menu.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Retell AI actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You build an inbound agent on the flow canvas with knowledge base lookup and a transfer node, run it in the Playground and through simulation tests, then deploy to a purchased Retell number.
Outcome: FAQ-level calls resolve without a human, complex cases arrive at a rep who has already been briefed by the agent, and AI QA scores every call so you can see which intents fail.
You upload an audience, schedule a batch campaign with pacing and retry rules, enable voicemail handling, and let the agent qualify and book meetings into Cal.com or Calendly.
Outcome: Qualified meetings land on reps' calendars without a separate dialer, and post-call extraction pushes contact details back to HubSpot or Salesforce.
A production call fails, so you ask Conductor to reproduce it as a simulation, review the proposed fix in place on the exact setting it affects, and accept it one change at a time.
Outcome: The failure becomes a permanent regression test, and nothing reaches the live agent until you approve it — the iteration loop runs without an engineering ticket.
Use cases
- Answer inbound support calls, resolve FAQ-level issues and hand complex cases to a human with an AI briefing.
- Run outbound lead qualification campaigns that gather prospect details and book meetings without a separate dialer.
- Schedule and confirm appointments over the phone for healthcare or home services, with a BAA on the Enterprise plan.
- Navigate legacy IVR menus, press digits and enter extensions to reach the right destination mid-call.
- Replace a receptionist with an agent that takes messages, routes calls and books appointments.
- Score up to 100% of production calls with AI QA and turn failures into regression tests via Conductor.
- Automate dispatch communication for logistics, coordinating delivery windows and status updates by phone.
- Deploy a voice widget or web call on a website so visitors can talk to an agent without a phone number.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Retell AI — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
A developer can go from signup to a working inbound agent in about 15 minutes following the docs' first-phone-agent guide, using the $10 free credits and 20 included concurrent calls. A non-technical operator should budget an afternoon for a first flow plus simulation testing, and longer if Conductor-reviewed changes and CRM write-back need configuring.
Switching to or from Retell AI
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From a touch-tone IVR: rebuild the menu as conversation-flow nodes with an IVR navigation step for downstream legacy systems.
- →From Vapi or Bland: recreate agents as single prompts first, connect your existing Twilio, Vonage or Telnyx numbers over SIP, then A/B the old and new agents on live traffic.
- →From a human-staffed reception desk: start with the receptionist template, add message-taking and call routing, and run it in shadow mode alongside the desk before cutover.
- →From a separate outbound dialer: replace it with batch calls, uploading the same audience list and mapping pacing and retry rules to your current settings.
- ↗To a managed contact-centre suite: export call and chat history, keep the phone numbers via SIP trunking, and expect to rebuild flows in the new vendor's designer.
- ↗To a self-hosted stack: use the documented API, SDKs and custom LLM support to port agent logic, but you take on telephony, speech and orchestration yourself.
Resources & guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Retell AI”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Retell AI” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Retell AI.
Official links
What are the best Retell AI alternatives?
The closest alternatives to Retell AI we list are Vapi, Bland AI and Slang.ai. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vapi | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Bland AI | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Slang.ai | Paid | Pricing not published | — |
Alternatives to Retell AI
View all
Tools that pair well with Retell AI
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Retell AI, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Vapi
Vapi is an API-first platform for building voice AI agents that answer and place real phone calls at sub-500ms latency.
Bland AI
Bland AI builds enterprise voice AI phone agents on its own LLM, STT, and TTS stack from $0.14/min.
Slang.ai
Slang AI is a voice AI phone host for restaurants that answers calls 24/7, books reservations and routes VIPs to staff.
Retell AI vs its closest rival
Retell AI's closest head-to-head is with Minimax Audio — If you need a TTS API for voiceovers or customer service prompts, MiniMax Audio is the straightforward pick with its low-latency streaming and multilingual voices. If you're automating phone conversations end-to-end, Retell AI's agentic framework, drag-and-drop call flows, and CRM integrations make it the clear winner. Choose based on whether your use case is speech output or conversational voice agents. Verdict generated
Head-to-head comparisons
Minimax Audio vs Retell Ai
If you need a TTS API for voiceovers or customer service prompts, MiniMax Audio is the straightforward pick with its low-latency streaming and multilingual voices. If you're automating phone conversations end-to-end, Retell AI's agentic framework, drag-and-drop call flows, and CRM integrations make it the clear winner. Choose based on whether your use case is speech output or conversational voice agents.
GeneratedTurboscribe vs Retell Ai
If you need unlimited, high-accuracy transcription for pre-recorded audio/video in many languages, TurboScribe's freemium model (free + $10/mo unlimited) is a no-brainer. For teams automating live phone calls with AI voice agents, Retell AI offers lower latency and richer telephony integrations, but its pricing lacks transparency — contact sales. Choose based on your primary use case: offline transcription vs. live voice automation.
GeneratedMp3 To Text vs Retell Ai
Choose MP3 to Text if you need accurate, batch transcription of audio files into text with multi-language support. Choose Retell AI if you need a real-time voice agent platform for automating phone calls with low latency and rich integrations. They solve different problems and are not direct competitors.
GeneratedTypecast Ai vs Retell Ai
Verdict being re-reviewed against current pricing and data.
Ttsmaker vs Retell Ai
Retell AI and TTSMaker serve completely different needs. Retell AI is a powerful platform for automating phone conversations at scale, ideal for businesses that need low-latency, human-like voice agents with deep integrations. TTSMaker is a free, basic text-to-speech tool for simple audio generation. Choose Retell AI if you need a full-featured voice call solution; choose TTSMaker if you just need quick, no-frills voiceovers without any cost.
GeneratedTalk To Chatgpt vs Retell Ai
For individuals who want free voice access to ChatGPT on Chrome, Talk-to-ChatGPT is a simple, costless choice. For businesses needing to automate phone conversations at scale with near-human latency and deep integrations, Retell AI is the powerful platform. They serve completely different needs—choose based on your use case and budget.
GeneratedOpenclaw Voice vs Retell Ai
If you need a turnkey, scalable phone call automation platform for your business with low-latency voice agents and CRM integrations, choose Retell AI. If you're a developer wanting a free, privacy-first, self-hosted voice chat interface for AI assistants, OpenClaw Voice is the obvious pick.
GeneratedMimo V2 5 Voice vs Retell Ai
Choose MiMo-V2.5 Voice if your core need is cost-effective, noise-robust speech recognition for Mandarin/English/dialects at scale. Choose Retell AI if you need a full-stack conversational voice agent platform for phone call automation with low latency and out-of-the-box integrations. They solve fundamentally different problems.
GeneratedUplift Ai vs Retell Ai
Choose Uplift AI if you need authentic Urdu/Punjabi TTS for content or apps, with low cost and on-premises option. Choose Retell AI for enterprise-grade phone call automation with sub-second latency, CRM integrations, and omnichannel support – but expect higher costs and English-language focus.
GeneratedSupertonic vs Retell Ai
Choose Supertonic if you need free, on-device multilingual TTS with zero cloud dependency—it's perfect for privacy-sensitive edge deployments and hobby projects. Retell AI is the right pick for enterprises automating high-volume phone calls with low-latency, human-like voice agents, despite opaque pricing. Both tools excel in their niches; the choice hinges on deployment location and use case.
GeneratedTalkifytts vs Retell Ai
For Android users who want natural, LLM-powered TTS in reading apps, TalkifyTTS is a free, open-source gem. For businesses automating phone calls with AI agents, Retell AI provides enterprise-grade features but at a cost. Choose based on your platform and use case.
GeneratedFish Audio S vs Retell Ai
If you need expressive, emotionally controllable TTS and voice cloning on a budget, Fish Audio S is the clear winner—especially with its new free API and studio-quality cloning. For automating phone calls at scale with low latency and rich integrations, Retell AI is purpose-built. Choose based on your core task: voice generation vs. call automation.
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