Vapi
Developer-first voice AI platform for building, testing, and deploying phone agents at scale.
Vapi is a developer platform for voice AI agents: APIs and tooling for building phone agents with configurable STT/LLM/TTS pipelines, tool calling, and telephony. Like Retell, it's infrastructure — products are built on top of it rather than bought off the shelf by SMB owners.
Billing is usage-based per minute on top of the model and telephony providers you choose. Exact totals depend on the stack you assemble, so treat per-minute figures as configuration-dependent.
Pricing
Usage-based per minute — Platform per-minute fee plus pass-through costs for the STT/LLM/TTS and telephony providers you configure. Totals are configuration-dependent — see the vendor's pricing page for current rates.
Verified 2026-06-11 against the vendor's pricing page. Pricing changes — always confirm with the vendor before buying.
Pros & cons
Pros
- Highly configurable: swap STT, LLM, and TTS providers per use case
- Developer-friendly APIs, SDKs, and testing tools
- Usage-based pricing scales from prototype to production
Cons
- Requires engineering to ship anything customer-ready
- All-in per-minute cost depends on the providers you stack
- No done-for-you onboarding or human fallback
Feature checklist
| Feature | Vapi |
|---|---|
| 24/7 call answering | ✓Agents run continuously once deployed |
| Appointment scheduling | ✓Via tool calling |
| SMS follow-up / texting callers | PartialVia tools/integrations you build |
| Email follow-up | Not published |
| CRM / back-office integrations | ✓Tool calling and webhooks |
| Live transfer to a human | ✓Call forwarding/transfer |
| Spanish / bilingual support | ✓Multilingual voices |
| Custom call scripts & flows | ✓Fully programmable |
| Outbound calling | ✓ |
| Call analytics dashboard | ✓ |
| Industry-specific packaging | ✕ |
| Self-serve signup | ✓ |