Bland AI

Bland sells phone agents to teams that must clear a security review before shipping one. It trained its own speech-to-text, language model and text-to-speech instead of reselling anyone else's, so its published sub-processor list names no AI vendor and a call can be pinned to one of four AWS residency regions.

Billing is one rate per connected minute, prorated to the exact second, covering the model, transcription and voices with no token charges. Start is $0.14 a minute with no platform fee, Build $0.12 on top of $299 a month, Scale $0.11 on top of $499. Transfer time bills separately, $0.05 down to $0.03, and free on your own Twilio.

Telephony is not inside that rate. The pricing page says carrier cost is yours, while the docs index claims the per-minute rate bundles telephony. Bland's own numbers add a $0.015 minimum per outbound attempt, charged again on calls that never connect. SMS, web chat, warm transfers, guardrails, citations, outcomes, SSO, a BAA and region selection are all Enterprise, priced nowhere. Knowledge base contents cannot be read back: the API returns a filename and a byte count.

Retell AI and Vapi sell the same minute as parts you assemble, a platform fee plus a model plus a voice plus a carrier, so their floor reads lower and their ceiling floats. PolyAI publishes no rate at all. Bland is the AI voice agent easiest to forecast and hardest to tune, and its pathways pull down as YAML.