Best Vapi Alternatives (2026)
Vapi charges a $0.05/min hosting fee and passes transcriber, LLM, voice and phone costs through at cost; its own calculator estimates $82–$129 for 1,000 minutes with a common stack. The alternatives below bill differently: itemized per minute (Retell), one all-in rate (Bland), a flat speech-native model rate (Ultravox), or open-source infrastructure with included session minutes (LiveKit). Prices are from each vendor's own pricing page.
Retell AI, Bland AI, ElevenLabs Agents, Ultravox and LiveKit Agents compared with Vapi on published pricing.
| Tool | Starting price | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| $0 platform fee; $0.07–$0.31/min for voice agents | Teams that want a no-code flow builder plus an API with itemized per-minute pricing | |
| $0.14/min, $0 platform fee | Teams that want one flat per-minute price with no model pass-through bills | |
| Agents: $0.08 per minute | Builders who want ElevenLabs' voices and speech models in one agent pipeline | |
| $0.05/min (first 30 min free) | Developers wanting a speech-native model at a flat per-minute rate | |
| Free; Ship from $50/mo | Developers building on open-source realtime infrastructure |
Vapi vs Retell AI →Vapi vs Bland AI →Retell AI vs Bland AI →ElevenLabs Agents vs Vapi →Cartesia vs ElevenLabs →Vapi vs LiveKit Agents →Ultravox vs Vapi →
Prices from vendors' official pricing pages, checked October 14, 2026. Not sponsored; order isn't a ranking.