Vapi pricing: what a minute of calls costs and what the plans add

How much does a minute of calls cost with Vapi?

Vapi hosting costs $0.05 per minute of call time. That is the only per minute figure the company publishes, and it covers its own platform only. The language model that holds the conversation, the transcription engine and the voice are passed through at provider cost, and Vapi states that models carry no markup.

So $0.05 is a floor, not a landed cost. Until you have settled on your model, your speech to text engine and your voice, the price of a minute stays open. We score Vapi 3.5 out of 5 on price and 2.5 out of 5 on ease of use, and that second number comes straight from this: every part is yours to assemble.

What do you pay on top of Vapi hosting?

Three families of providers sit on top of the Vapi line item: the language model, the transcription, and the voice synthesis. Telephony is a separate question again. Vapi does not publish a rate card for those third party components in the documents we verified, so their cost depends on which provider you connect.

In our reading, that is the real difficulty with Vapi for a small business owner. The company is clear about its own share ($0.05 a minute, no markup on models), but it leaves the final math to you. If you need an all-in per minute number to quote a client, a platform that publishes a single range will save you time. Retell AI does, and we break its grid down in our guide to what a minute of Retell AI calls really costs.

What does the $29 Core plan change?

Core costs $29 a month billed monthly, on top of per minute usage. It does not cut the price of a minute. It raises the technical ceilings and the level of support. You move from 1 to 5 Vapi numbers, from 4 to 10 concurrent calls, and retention goes from 14 to 30 days. ZDR, meaning zero data retention, is included, and email support answers within 2 business days instead of the community Discord.

Core’s annual price is not verified, and neither is Pro’s. All amounts are published in US dollars.

Why does Pro start at $999 a month?

Pro is not a flat subscription. It is calculated as 10% of your Vapi hosting fees, with a floor of $999 a month. Below a very high call volume, the floor is what you actually pay. In exchange you get 10 organizations, 10 numbers, 30 concurrent calls, 180 days of retention, role based access control, dedicated Slack support and a 99% uptime SLA.

This is the clearest weak spot in the lineup: between $29 and $999 a month, there is nothing. A team that needs more than 10 concurrent calls, or a written SLA, jumps straight to the four figure tier. The Premier plan, on custom quote, adds a 99.9% SLA, SSO, a named support team and an optional dedicated SIP, with organizations, concurrency and retention set to your requirements.

How far do the $5 in free credits go?

Sign up gives you $5 in credits, with no subscription and no commitment. At that level you have 2 organizations, 1 Vapi number and 4 concurrent calls, with raw data kept for 14 days and support handled by the Discord community. We score this entry point 3.5 out of 5 on the free tier criterion.

How many minutes does $5 buy? There is no way to say. Only the $0.05 hosting fee is known, provider costs add to it, and they vary with your setup. Treat the credits as a sandbox for validating one call flow and measuring your own consumption, not as a trial run of production. That approach holds whichever platform you pick, as we cover in our guide to how an AI receptionist works and what it costs per minute.

Can Vapi keep your data in the EU?

The infrastructure runs mainly on AWS, with deployments in the United States and the European Union. An EU region is documented, and each Vapi organization belongs to a single region, so you do not mix the two inside one workspace. On certifications, the Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 for the July 2025 to July 2026 period, plus HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA and PCI DSS v4.0.1.

That is what puts our GDPR score at 4.5 out of 5, the highest of the three voice agent platforms in our database. One caveat: the documentation does not spell out how access to the EU region is granted, whether self serve or on request. In our reading, if data location is a contractual requirement on your side, ask before you build rather than after. HIPAA compliance, with a standard DPA and BAA, is a separate add-on billed at $2,000 a month.

Who is Vapi the right fit for?

Vapi is aimed at developers and product teams that want to choose every component of their voice agent through an API: model, voice, transcription. Our overall score is 3.7 out of 5, with 4.5 on features and 2.5 on ease of use. That last number is the most useful filter.

• You have a developer in house and an EU data requirement. Vapi belongs at the top of your list: the EU region is documented and models are passed through without markup. The full record sits on our Vapi tool page.
• You want a readable per minute price right away, without assembling the parts. Look at Retell AI first. It publishes $0.07 to $0.31 per minute depending on model, voice and telephony, with $10 in credits at sign up and 20 concurrent calls included. Its processing and storage are in the United States, with no service inside the EU to date.
• You run a contact center with a substantial annual budget. Synthflow no longer offers a self serve plan: contracts start at $30,000 a year, deployment support included.
• You have no technical resource. None of these tools gets configured in an afternoon. Start by scoping which calls you want handled, which we work through in our comparison of AI voice agent platforms.

One last budget point to keep in view: the jump from $29 to $999 a month. If your project implies more than 10 concurrent calls at peak hours, build that tier into your numbers from the start, because it will weigh more than the minutes themselves.