AI agents · Answer and make phone calls · Prices checked October 21, 2026
Voice & phone agents for small businesses: prices and real use cases
Agents that talk on the phone: answering calls, booking appointments, qualifying leads. For ready-made small-business phone answering, see our AI receptionist rankings; the platforms here are for building your own.
Want something that answers your business phone today? Our AI receptionists page and industry rankings compare ready-made tools for 10 industries by real monthly cost.
The agents 5
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VoiceFree tier
ElevenLabs Agents
ElevenLabs' platform for building voice agents that talk on the phone and web, using its speech models.
Subscription · 4 use casesFree; from $6/mo
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Voice platform
Retell AI
Pay-as-you-go platform for building voice agents. Cheapest per minute, but you (or an agency) build the receptionist yourself.
≈ $115/mo at 300 calls
Ranked in 1 industry$0.07/min
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Voice platform
Vapi
Developer platform: $0.05/min hosting plus pass-through model, speech and voice costs. Very flexible, very DIY.
≈ $74-116/mo at 300 calls
Pay per use$0.05/min
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Voice platform
Bland AI
Developer platform with all-in per-minute pricing (LLM, speech and voice included). Warm transfers and scheduling nodes are Enterprise-only.
≈ $126/mo at 300 calls
Pay per use$0.14/min
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Receptionist
Synthflow
No-code voice-agent platform that has moved to enterprise contracts. Listed because it's widely recommended; it is not a small-office product at current pricing.
≥ $2,500/mo at 300 calls
Subscription$30,000/yr
Listed, not ranked: we haven't tested these hands-on, and we'd rather not rank on marketing pages. Tip: Build-your-own platforms bill per minute plus telephony; count the build time, not just the per-minute rate.
What people are doing with them
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Use caseVoiceVendor case study
Klarna runs a voice agent built on ElevenLabs as the first line of US phone support, resolving eligible calls up to 10x faster.
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Use caseVoiceVendor case study
Revolut chose ElevenLabs Agents as first-line voice support for customers.
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Use caseVoiceVendor case study
Solar installer Freedom Forever uses ElevenLabs Agents for inbound customer calls and says it cut support costs by 90%.
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Use caseVoice
A freelance automation builder made a Retell AI voice agent for a residential estate agency that answers after-hours calls and shares property details from the agency's listings.
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Use caseVoiceVendor case study
Ally Solutions, an IT service provider, automated 92% of inbound IT-support calls with ElevenLabs Agents.
Open-source options from the Hub
Free, open-source agents, skills, MCP servers and recipes for the same job, from the AITeamGuide Hub. You run them yourself.
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Agent
Pipecat
A Python framework for real-time voice agents: speech-to-text, the model and text-to-speech wired into a phone or web call.
Customer support · Sales★ 17k
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Agent
LiveKit Agents
A framework for building voice and video AI agents that join real-time calls, including phone calls through SIP.
Customer support · Sales★ 15k
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Playbook
Pipecat examples
Example voice apps built with Pipecat, including a phone bot on Twilio and other telephony examples.
Customer support · Healthcare admin★ 399
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PlaybookBy AITeamGuide
Answer missed calls and book appointments for a dental office
Catch the calls your front desk misses, offer the next open slots and text the patient a confirmation, with a person approving anything clinical.
Healthcare admin · Customer support4 steps
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PlaybookBy AITeamGuide
Follow up on property inquiries and book showings
Answer listing inquiries fast by phone or text, offer showing times and keep every lead in a CRM so none go cold.
Real estate · Sales4 steps
Prices change. We track them.
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