How much does an AI agent cost? At current list prices, a 3-minute AI voice call works out to about $0.28 — roughly $0.09 a minute. The tables below hold the published price of every component behind that number — tokens, voice minutes, speech, and orchestration, across per-token, per-minute, and per-seat pricing models. Each figure links to the vendor page it was read from, on the date it was read.
| Product | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
Claude Fable 5 Anthropic Anthropic's most capable widely released model, GA 2026-06-09. Added 2026-08-05 -- the index had been missing it entirely, so anything treating this file as the complete model canon could not see it. platform.claude.com— source for Claude Fable 5 pricing, opens in a new tab | $10.00 | $50.00 |
Claude Opus 5 Anthropic platform.claude.com— source for Claude Opus 5 pricing, opens in a new tab | $5.00 | $25.00 |
Claude Sonnet 5 Anthropic platform.claude.com— source for Claude Sonnet 5 pricing, opens in a new tab | $3.00 | $15.00 |
Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic platform.claude.com— source for Claude Haiku 4.5 pricing, opens in a new tab | $1.00 | $5.00 |
GPT-5.6-sol OpenAI Standard tier, short context. Was $5.00 / $30.00 when read on 2026-08-03; long-context prompts are billed higher. developers.openai.com— source for GPT-5.6-sol pricing, opens in a new tab | $4.00 | $20.00 |
GPT-5.6-terra OpenAI developers.openai.com— source for GPT-5.6-terra pricing, opens in a new tab | $2.00 | $12.00 |
GPT-5.6-luna OpenAI developers.openai.com— source for GPT-5.6-luna pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.20 | $1.20 |
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview Google Prompts at or under 200k tokens; $4.00 / $18.00 above that. ai.google.dev— source for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview pricing, opens in a new tab | $2.00 | $12.00 |
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Google ai.google.dev— source for Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.30 | $2.50 |
DeepSeek-V4-flash DeepSeek Off-peak cache-miss input / off-peak output. Peak doubles both ($0.44 / $1.32). Cache-hit input is $0.007 off-peak. Was a flat $0.14 / $0.28 on 2026-08-03 — DeepSeek has since split pricing by peak window and cache state, so no single figure describes it. api-docs.deepseek.com— source for DeepSeek-V4-flash pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.22 | $0.66 |
DeepSeek-V4-pro DeepSeek Off-peak cache-miss input / off-peak output. Peak doubles both ($1.32 / $3.96). Cache-hit input is $0.022 off-peak. Was a flat $0.435 / $0.87 on 2026-08-03; the peak-hour pricing this row previously flagged as announced is now live. api-docs.deepseek.com— source for DeepSeek-V4-pro pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.66 | $1.98 |
| Product | Platform fee |
|---|---|
Vapi Vapi Hosting only. STT, LLM and TTS are passed through at cost, or $0 if you supply your own API keys. vapi.ai— source for Vapi pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.05 |
Retell AI Retell AI Voice infrastructure only. Vendor quotes $0.07–$0.31/min all-in depending on configuration, and shows $0.11 in its own calculator example. retellai.com— source for Retell AI pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.055 |
| Product | Price |
|---|---|
Flash / Turbo TTS ElevenLabs ~75ms latency tier. elevenlabs.io— source for Flash / Turbo TTS pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.05 / 1,000 characters |
Multilingual v2/v3 TTS ElevenLabs ~250–300ms latency tier. elevenlabs.io— source for Multilingual v2/v3 TTS pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.10 / 1,000 characters |
Scribe v2 STT ElevenLabs elevenlabs.io— source for Scribe v2 STT pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.22 / hour |
Scribe v2 Realtime STT ElevenLabs ~150ms latency, word-level timestamps. elevenlabs.io— source for Scribe v2 Realtime STT pricing, opens in a new tab | $0.39 / hour |
| Product | From |
|---|---|
Make — Core Make 10,000 credits/mo, billed annually; $16/mo on monthly billing (both toggle states read in-browser 2026-08-26). Free tier gives 1,000 credits/mo. make.com— source for Make — Core pricing, opens in a new tab | $12/mo |
Zapier — Professional Zapier Annual billing, lowest task tier (750 tasks/mo). Monthly billing starts at $29.99. zapier.com— source for Zapier — Professional pricing, opens in a new tab | $19.99/mo |
n8n — Starter n8n Billed annually, 2,500 workflow executions. Priced in EUR by the vendor. n8n.io— source for n8n — Starter pricing, opens in a new tab | €20/mo |
n8n — Pro n8n Billed annually, 10,000 workflow executions. n8n.io— source for n8n — Pro pricing, opens in a new tab | €50/mo |
One 3-minute inbound call, answered by a voice agent. This is a model, not a measurement — every input is a published price from the tables above, and every assumption is listed so you can substitute your own.
| Component | Calculation | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Vapi platform hosting | 3 min x $0.05 | $0.150 |
| STT — ElevenLabs Scribe v2 | 0.05 h x $0.22/h | $0.011 |
| TTS — ElevenLabs Flash | 1,350 chars x $0.05/1,000 | $0.068 |
| LLM — Claude Haiku 4.5 | 4,000 x $1/M + 800 x $5/M | $0.008 |
| Telephony | 3 min x $0.015 (Retell published floor) | $0.045 |
| Total | ≈ $0.09/minute | $0.28 |
This lands inside Retell AI's own published $0.07–$0.31/min range and close to the $0.11/min shown in its pricing calculator, which is a useful sanity check on the model rather than an independent confirmation.
Swap in your own call length, speaking ratio, and monthly volume to see how these unit costs add up.
Project your costsChoosing between platforms rather than pricing one? See the AI agent pricing comparison — 20+ platforms compared head-to-head with ROI math.
Published under CC BY 4.0. Reproduce any table, in whole or in part, commercially or otherwise — attribution is the only condition. Every figure is a list price read from the vendor's own pricing page on September 2, 2026, and each row links to the page it came from, so anything here can be checked rather than trusted.
Cite it as:
PxlPeak. “AI Agent Pricing Index.” Prices verified September 2, 2026. https://pxlpeak.com/research/ai-agent-pricing-index
Prices move. If you are citing a figure, cite the verification date with it — this page is re-checked against the vendor pages rather than left to age.
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