Vapi Alternatives
The closest alternative to Vapi is Retell AI. 4 more are listed below, ranked by how much of Vapi each one replaces.
The closest replacement and the comparison every buyer actually runs: both sell developer voice infrastructure by the minute with no seats. The difference is where the model cost sits. Retell publishes a per-minute rate for each of twenty-two LLMs and six voice providers, so one page prices a call end to end; Vapi charges $0.05 a minute for hosting and passes the same components through at provider cost, or $0 on your own API key.
Also a per-minute voice agent platform sold to developers building phone automation rather than to a support team buying seats. Same purchase decision: which meters stack, and what the floor costs once telephony and a model are added on top.
The opposite trade in the same category. PolyAI sells a managed enterprise phone agent with no published price, no plan ladder and no self-serve signup, where Vapi publishes a rate card and lets you place a call the same afternoon on a $10 credit top-up.
Overlapping use case, opposite billing unit and opposite division of labour. Sierra is sales-gated and bills outcomes rather than minutes, and builds the agent for you; Vapi bills wall-clock connected time whatever the call achieved and expects you to write the prompt, the tools and the escalation path.
The billing-unit contrast on the same channel. Lorikeet charges credits per resolved ticket and nothing when the customer is unhappy, so a failed voice conversation is free; Vapi bills every minute from call start to call end, including silence and including the minutes before an escalation.
What Vapi costs
- Billing unit
Pure consumption against a prepaid credit balance - Free tier
No - AI pricing
$0.05 per minute - Vendor calls it
Vapi Hosting - Human handoff
Still billed - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Full
2 of 9 not published by Vapi, checked
