Retell AI pricing and review

Reachkit, which makes cold email software rather than voice agents, wrote this page. All prices were checked on October 15, 2026 against Retell’s pricing page and billing docs.

Retell AI pricing is a sum of per-minute parts, and the headline “$0.07 to $0.31 a minute” on retellai.com/pricing starts at a real floor, but $0.31 isn’t a cap. There are two plans: Pay as you go, with no seats, contract or minimum, and Enterprise at a custom price through sales. Rates as of October 15, 2026:

Monthly items are charged to your card: $2 per Retell number, the first 20 concurrent calls free and then $8 per extra concurrent call, and 10 knowledge bases free and then $8 each. Per-call extras include $0.005 a minute for a knowledge base, $0.005 per batch dial, $0.10 per branded outbound call and $0.01 per SMS.

What a typical setup costs: GPT 5.1 ($0.04) plus a Retell voice, the infrastructure fee and a Retell US line comes to $0.125 a minute, so 1,000 minutes is about $127 a month with one number. Swap in GPT 5.4 and ElevenLabs Flash with a knowledge base and it’s $0.195 a minute. Retell’s own calculator defaulted to $0.11 a minute on your own phone line.

Since September 30, 2026, every non-Enterprise Retell workspace runs on prepaid credits, per the billing docs. Usage comes off the balance in real time, and at $0 calls and chats stop until you top up. Credits never expire but can’t be refunded, and the move from the old monthly invoices can’t be undone.

Four rules raise the bill past the headline rate:

• Calls are billed per second for their whole length, silence and hold included.
• Prompts over 4,000 tokens, counting transcript, tool history and retrieved knowledge, scale the billed duration by tokens divided by 4,000 (billing exceptions).
• Calls over your concurrency limit can burst through with a $0.10 a minute surcharge on the whole call.
• Test calls bill at production rates.

Retell AI lets you build a voice agent from a prompt or a drag-and-drop conversation flow. You pick the model (OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, or your own) and the voice, and add knowledge bases. Retell says agents work in 60+ languages and answer in about 600ms.

Agents go live on inbound numbers, outbound calls through the API, batch call campaigns, a web widget or SMS and chat. You can use a Retell number or bring your own over SIP from Twilio, Vonage or Telnyx.

Developers get a REST API, TypeScript and Python SDKs, webhooks and a hosted MCP server, the standard way AI assistants like Claude use other apps. CRM sync covers Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics 365, GoHighLevel and Zoho, and Retell has its own built-in CRM since June 2026.

Strengths

• Open price list. Component rates are public, there’s no platform fee or contract, and new accounts get $10 to test with (pricing).
• Quick to get working. Ease of use is a common plus in third-party summaries of G2 reviews, and a Trustpilot reviewer wrote “So easy to use and the product comes out so good”.
• Room for parallel calls. 20 concurrent calls are free on pay as you go, with burst capacity above that (concurrency docs).
• Ships often. The changelog shows releases most months of 2026, including Conductor, an AI that builds and edits agents.

Drawbacks

• The cheapest rate is hard to hit. $0.07 needs a near-free model and your own phone line.
• Less visible multipliers. Long prompts, billed silence and paid testing add cost.
• Support on lower tiers. Pay as you go gets community and email support; 24/7 support is Enterprise. Some Trustpilot reviews from 2026 mention slow or missing answers.
• Learning curve. Summaries of G2 reviews tag a learning curve, though the visual builder and Conductor are newer than many of those reviews.

Retell AI scores 4.9 on Trustpilot from 810 reviews on October 15, 2026. Many are invited reviews, and Trustpilot notes Retell hasn’t replied to negative ones. G2 shows about 4.8 from roughly 2,600 reviews per search results in October 2026.

Praise centers on fast setup and call quality. Summaries of G2 reviews flag cost and a learning curve, and Trustpilot complaints are mostly about support. One 3-star reviewer in March 2026 wrote that “customer support was rather slow”, and a 1-star review in July 2026 described batch calls that weren’t going out with “no one here to help”.

Retell AI fits businesses that get a lot of phone calls or want to call leads back fast: receptionists, appointment setting and lead qualification in fields like healthcare, insurance and home services. Teams that need a BAA for HIPAA, SSO or a named account manager should expect the Enterprise plan.

Look elsewhere if you hoped to cold-call a scraped list. Retell’s terms treat AI voices as “artificial or prerecorded voice” under the TCPA and put the job of getting prior written consent on you. In my outbound work, the reply is where the real conversation starts, so a voice agent earns its cost calling people who already raised their hand, not a cold list.

• Vapi: a voice agent platform for developers, $0.05 a minute for hosting with model, voice and carrier costs on top. See the Vapi profile.
• GoHighLevel: an all-in-one CRM for agencies whose Voice AI runs $0.045 a minute for the engine plus voice, model and phone charges. See the GoHighLevel profile.
• Close: a sales CRM with calling built in and an AI calling agent called Chloe, from $49 per user a month on monthly billing, with Chloe’s calls paid in credits. See the Close profile.
• Reachkit (our product): for cold outreach by email, not calls: describe a campaign and the AI writes the sequence and finds verified leads (1,000 credits a month on the $39 Growth plan). It labels replies like Interested, but doesn’t answer or book meetings.