Comparison hub, updated October 2026
DILR.ai compares five AI voice platforms on figures each vendor publishes itself. Vapi is $0.05 a minute plus your own model stack, Retell AI $0.07 to $0.31 itemised, Bland AI $0.14 falling to $0.11 on paid tiers, Synthflow $30,000 a year, and DILR Voice a flat $0.14 plus a monthly phone-number fee. Two of the five verdicts below go to a rival.
Headline per-minute rates are not comparable to each other. Vapi's $0.05 is a hosting fee with the model stack billed on top. Retell's $0.07 to $0.31 is a real all-in range because Retell itemises every component. Bland's and ours are bundled rates. Synthflow publishes no per-minute figure at all. Comparing the four headline numbers directly tells you almost nothing, which is why the table below has a structure column.
Volume decides more than the rate card does. Under roughly 15,000 minutes a month, a flat rate with no platform fee usually wins. Above it, Bland's tiers win on arithmetic we have published rather than hidden. And for one number taking a few hundred calls a month, Bland's $29.99 Agent Phone tier beats every metered rate here, including ours.
Certifications and call compliance are different purchases. SOC 2 and a BAA answer questions about a vendor. They do not stop a call reaching a number on a DNC register. Retell and Bland win the first; DILR Voice is built for the second, and carries neither badge. For clinical data that cannot leave your estate at all, that is Dilr Mira, not a voice platform.
All five, side by side
Every cell is a figure the named vendor publishes, read on 19 October 2026. Where a vendor publishes a range, the range is shown rather than a midpoint we made up. Where we could not verify something, the cell says so.
| Platform | Headline rate | What that rate actually is | How you start | Certifications and compliance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DILR Voice | $0.14 per minute | Flat on Growth with the models, multi-agent handoff, RAG and post-call automation inside the rate, plus a monthly fee per phone number. | Free with $10 of trial credits, no card. | No SOC 2, no HIPAA. Per-country call compliance instead: DNC checks, consent capture, opt-out recognition and a per-call audit trail across eight countries. |
| Vapi | $0.05 per minute, plus your stack | Hosting fee only. Speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech are passed through at cost, or $0 to Vapi if you bring your own provider key. Success packages from $29 a month add concurrency, numbers and zero data retention. | $5 of free credits with no success package, 4 concurrent calls, 1 number. | Trust centre lists CCPA, GDPR, SOC 2 and PCI DSS v4.0.1. HIPAA is a $2,000 a month add-on. |
| Retell AI | $0.07 to $0.31 per minute | Itemised and the most transparent in this group: voice infrastructure $0.055, text-to-speech $0.015 to $0.10, the LLM from $0.0016 to $0.64 depending on model, telephony $0.015. Knowledge base, denoising and guardrails are $0.005 a minute each. | Self-serve pay as you go. Numbers $2 a month, verified numbers $10. | SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA with a self-serve BAA signed before any PHI flows. No fee is published for the BAA either way. |
| Bland AI | $0.14 falling to $0.11 per minute | Tiered. Start $0 a month at $0.14, Build $299 at $0.12, Scale $499 at $0.11 (in the billing docs, no longer on the pricing page). A $0.015 minimum applies to every outbound attempt, connected or not. Agent Phone is $29.99 for one number with unlimited voice minutes. | Start tier, $0 platform fee, no card required. | Trust page lists SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS v4.0. |
| Synthflow | $30,000 a year | One tier on the pricing page: Enterprise, scoped by volume, concurrency, telephony, integrations and security. Older self-serve tiers are widely quoted elsewhere, contradict each other, and appear nowhere on the live page, so we do not repeat them. | Not published. Contact sales is the only route shown. | We could not verify. The trust page returned no readable content on both our July and October 2026 reads, so the badges secondary sources attribute to Synthflow stay unconfirmed by us. That is a limit of our research, not evidence against them. |
Sources, all re-read 19 October 2026: vapi.ai/pricing, retellai.com/pricing, docs.bland.ai billing, synthflow.ai/pricing, plus each vendor's trust and compliance pages. DILR Voice figures from our own product page. Vendors change pricing often, so check the source link before you buy. We do not publish G2, Capterra or Trustpilot ratings for any platform here, including our own: those pages block automated reads, the counts we could find disagreed with each other, and an unverifiable rating has no business on a page that claims to be honest.
A winner per job
Not an overall number one, because there is not one. Five jobs, and the platform that wins each on published evidence. Two of them are not ours.
The same agents, RAG knowledge base and post-call automation serve a 24/7 frontdesk and an outbound dialer on one bill, at a flat $0.14 a minute plus a monthly number fee. Nobody else in this table prices inbound and outbound as one thing.
Build overtakes our flat rate at 14,950 minutes a month ($299 divided by the $0.02 gap) and Scale at 16,633. Above that Bland is simply cheaper, Pathways gives deterministic scripted control, and pretending otherwise would not survive five minutes of a buyer's own arithmetic.
SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, GDPR, and a self-serve HIPAA BAA. DILR Voice has none of those badges, and a lean Retell model mix comes in around $0.13 a minute, under our rate. If a security questionnaire is the blocker, Retell answers it better than we do.
Bring-your-own-everything is the architecture, not a workaround: pick the speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech per assistant and pay near-wholesale. No other platform here publishes that as a pricing model.
Certifications answer questions about the vendor. They do not stop a call being placed into a DNC list or made outside permitted hours. DNC checks, consent capture, opt-out recognition and a per-call audit trail across the UK, US, India, Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Ireland are platform features here, and are not published as platform features by the other four.
Go one level deeper
Each page carries that vendor's itemised pricing, the breakeven maths where it applies, and a section conceding where they genuinely beat us. That concession section is the reason these pages are worth reading at all.
What people actually ask
We do not reproduce Reddit quotes, because we cannot link you to a thread we have verified. Read the live discussion and judge the sentiment yourself:
Book 30 minutes and we will run a live inbound and outbound call against your actual use case, with no slideware. Bring your minute volume and we will do the arithmetic against whichever of the other four you are considering. If one of them fits your job better, we will say so on the call.
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