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Retell AI Review: Scored 84/100

Published:

Written By Research Team

AI Outbound Calling

Fact Checked

All pricing verified against vendor documentation

Updated

Ranked #4 · Autonomous AI agent

The most granular, itemised pricing in the category — and the easiest honest cost model to audit.

Our Verdict

Retell publishes a full component breakdown: voice infrastructure, TTS, each LLM, and every add-on priced separately. That is unusual and genuinely pro-buyer — you can model your real cost per minute before signing anything. It is also the most generous free start, with $10 in credits and 20 concurrent calls at no cost. The trade-off is that the headline '$0.07–$0.31/min' is a wide band, and your actual rate depends entirely on which model you pick.

Best for: Builders who want to model exact unit economics and tune cost per minute by swapping models.

Score Breakdown

Total 84/100 — grade A−. Scored against the published rubric.

Pricing transparency
18/20
Outbound capability
17/20
Compliance & security
15/20
Integrations & extensibility
12/15
Time to first call
14/15
Scale & reliability
8/10

Pricing

Pricing model
Published publicly
Headline cost
$0.07–$0.31/min depending on voice and model, from $0 with $10 free credits
Plans
$0 on pay-as-you-go; custom on Enterprise
Concurrency
20 free concurrent calls; additional concurrency $8/mo each
Free trial
$10 in free credits and 20 free concurrent calls
  • Components: Retell voice infra $0.055/min, platform voices $0.015/min, ElevenLabs voices $0.040/min.
  • LLM cost is separate: GPT-4.1 $0.045/min, Claude 5 Sonnet $0.08/min, GPT-5.5 $0.16/min.
  • Add-ons: knowledge base $0.005/min or $8/mo, branded calls $0.10/call, PII removal $0.01/min, extra concurrency $8/mo each, verified numbers $10/mo.
  • No rounding up per call; you are charged only for connected calls, but billing continues during silence and hold.

Compliance & Security

  • SOC 2 certified
  • HIPAA-ready
  • Custom SSO
  • Dedicated server on Enterprise

Integrations

  • REST API
  • Knowledge base
  • Branded calling
  • PII removal

Pros And Cons

What We Liked

  • Component-level pricing you can audit line by line before committing
  • $10 free credits and 20 free concurrent calls to start
  • Billing does not round up, and only connected calls are charged
  • Branded caller ID available as a priced add-on

Watch Out For

  • The $0.07–$0.31/min band is wide — real cost depends heavily on model choice
  • 'HIPAA-ready' is weaker language than a signed BAA
  • Add-ons stack quickly: knowledge base, PII removal and concurrency are each billed separately
  • Billing continues during silence and hold time

What Users Say On Reddit

We pulled 4 comments about Retell AI from 3 public Reddit threads. These are unverified individual opinions, not our findings — we quote them verbatim and they do not affect the score.

r/AiAgentsss

View thread ↗

“After 3 weeks of using retell ai for my business”

  • Man you should look at NLPearl AI. Just launch PearlVibe doing all integrations and flows alone. The ai call agent lovable style ! Love it 😍
  • bit late to this but you can just buy a number and have your current number forward all calls to the twilio one, you can also set it to just forward when u dont answer, or when busy etc

r/AIReceptionists

View thread ↗

“Struggling with empathy using retell ai for”

  • Yeah empathy will come. Some TTS like elevenlabs you can put tags on the input to emulate emotions. So you can add into your LLM prompt the tags it should use and when. Tbh the tech isnt there just yet for emotion but its friggen close. Like this space is moving fast, id give it like 1 or 2 years and itl be hard to tell who is human vs ai. The biggest advice I can give is response time. Thats the thing that really matters. Try to keep that sub 500ms if you can, this can help with a user feeling heard and can get past maybe some empathy issues. Good luck!

r/AI_Agents

View thread ↗

“Retell ai appointment booking problem”

  • First test the availability call directly, outside the voice flow. If Cal.com returns slots there, log the exact start, end, and timezone values Retell sends; a past date or an overly narrow window can also look like a full calendar. Check the event type’s schedule, minimum notice, and buffers too—not just the API key. That will tell you whether the failure is Cal.com availability or the agent’s tool arguments.

Comments are quoted as written from public Reddit threads and may contain errors, bias or out-of-date information. We filtered out obvious vendor and competitor pitches, and excluded threads matching the vendor's name but not the product. We do not endorse these views.

Featured Partner Offer

i

Retell AI

  • Component-level pricing you can audit line by line before committing
  • $10 free credits and 20 free concurrent calls to start
  • Billing does not round up, and only connected calls are charged
Try Retell AI

On retellai.com

Featured Partner · Our Company

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TheLeadRouter

Scored 87/100 · Ranked #2

Lead distribution, call routing and TCPA consent infrastructure — with AI dialing built in.

  • The most transparent pricing in this review — every service has a published per-unit rate
  • One $147/mo plan includes every feature, with no tier-gating of compliance tools
  • Consent evidence stored on the lead record with DNC checks and an audit trail
  • Ping-post, waterfall routing and RTB for buyer delivery that voice platforms do not offer
Get Started

On theleadrouter.com

Read our full review

Ownership disclosure: AI Outbound Calling and TheLeadRouter are owned by the same company. This is a paid placement by us. TheLeadRouter is also scored on the same published rubric as every other platform — it earned 87/100 and ranks #2 on merit, not because we own it.

Sources

  1. 1.Retell AI pricing page — retrieved 2026-09-12