Telnyx
Get the voice agent and the phone network it runs on from one provider, useful when you want billing in one place.
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The carrier-grade option. Telnyx owns the phone network its agents run on, so SIP, numbers and the AI are one first-party stack, with native warm transfer and MCP. Pricing is itemised from a $0.05/min base. The catch: it is built for developers, not drag-and-drop.
About $0.06 to 0.20 for a minute of conversation, once the phone line and the AI are added in.
That's roughly $3.60–12.00 an hour. Plans: $0/mo (Pay as you go).
Pricing
Show the cost breakdown
| What the platform charges to run the agent, before the phone line and the AI usage are added on. | $0.05 /min |
|---|---|
| The step that turns what the caller says out loud into text the AI can read. | — |
| The AI 'brain' that reads what the caller said and works out what to say back. | $0.01 /min |
| The step that turns the AI's written reply back into a spoken voice. | — |
| The phone line itself: the service that connects the call to a real phone number. Usually billed on top of the platform. | $0.01 /min |
| The total you actually pay for one minute of conversation once every piece is added up: the platform, the AI, the voice and the phone line. | $0.06–0.20 /min |
Pricing is itemised, pay-as-you-go. The Voice AI Agent base is $0.05/min for real-time orchestration; speech-to-text is included. Text-to-speech is billed per character (from about $0.000008/char on the cheaper voices) and the language model per 1,000 tokens (Telnyx-hosted open-source models are cheapest, or bring your own key for GPT/Claude). Telephony is separate: Call Control and WebRTC $0.002/min, PSTN/SIP termination from about $0.005/min. The llm and telephony components here are representative estimates for a cheap Telnyx-hosted model plus a PSTN call; a frontier model and premium voice push the all-in toward the $0.20 end. SOC 2 Type I and II, SOC 3 and GDPR are stated on Telnyx's compliance article; HIPAA is referenced on some Telnyx pages but is not listed there, so it is left unticked here.
Every plan in one place: the monthly fee, what each one includes, and the features it unlocks. Anything beyond a plan's allowance, or on a pay-as-you-go tier, is billed at the per-minute rate above. A blank in the features means the vendor's plan page does not state it for that plan, not that it is unavailable.
| Pay as you go | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Custom |
| Included | Pay per use | — |
| Plan notes | $0.05/min base + per-character TTS + per-token LLM + telephony; no subscription | Volume-based contracts; Startups program offers up to $20k credits |
| What each plan unlocks | ||
| Priority support | — | 24/7 support + dedicated CSM |
- Pay as you go FreePay per use
$0.05/min base + per-character TTS + per-token LLM + telephony; no subscription
- Priority support
- —
- Enterprise Custom—
Volume-based contracts; Startups program offers up to $20k credits
- Priority support
- 24/7 support + dedicated CSM
Prices in USD as set by the vendor · last checked 2026-06-03 · vendor pricing →
Slide your expected monthly volume to see roughly what Telnyx would cost.
A rough estimate from Telnyx's sourced rates, not a quote. Always confirm on the vendor's own pricing page before you commit.
At a glance
- Speech-to-text
- Telnyx (included)
- Text-to-speech
- Telnyx Natural / NaturalHD / Ultra, ElevenLabs (BYO key), AWS Polly, Azure · Bring your own voice: you can upload or clone a custom voice instead of being limited to the platform's stock ones.
- Languages
- en, es, fr, de, it, pt, nl, pl
- Integrations
- Native Elastic SIP trunking, Twilio number porting, OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Telnyx-hosted open-source LLMs, ElevenLabs (BYO TTS), LiveKit, CRM + calendar webhooks
Compliance
Our full take
Most voice-agent platforms rent their phone lines from someone else, usually Twilio, and stack the AI on top. Telnyx is the someone else. It is a licensed carrier that owns its network, so the SIP trunk, the phone numbers, the call routing and the AI agent all sit on one first-party stack. If telephony reliability and control are the things you actually lose sleep over, that single fact is the reason to look here.
The pricing is itemised rather than a single all-in number, which is honest but takes a minute to read. The core agent runs $0.05 a minute for the real-time orchestration, speech-to-text is included, and then text-to-speech and the language model are billed on top, TTS by the character and the model by the token. Telephony is a couple of tenths of a cent a minute on top of that. Bring a cheap Telnyx-hosted open model and a standard voice and you are around $0.06 to 0.07 a minute all in; reach for a frontier model and a premium voice and it climbs toward $0.15 to 0.20.
What you get for the carrier roots is depth that the newer platforms are still building. Warm transfer with context passing, outbound and batch calling, and Model Context Protocol support for tools are all in the product rather than on a roadmap. You can bring your own language model or your own voice (ElevenLabs and Azure plug in by key), and there are more than a thousand voices across twenty-nine or so languages, with cloning if you need a specific one.
The honest catch is that this is a developer platform, not a drag-and-drop builder. Reviewers are clear that you will be wiring up functions, routing and a little backend yourself, and that the itemised pricing makes the final bill harder to predict than a flat per-minute rate. A few also report onboarding and number-provisioning friction, which is worth weighing if you need to be live next week.
On compliance, Telnyx publishes SOC 2 Type I and Type II, SOC 3, and GDPR, which is what you want from a carrier. HIPAA is referenced on some of its pages but is not listed on the compliance article we read, so this page leaves it unticked until we can confirm a BAA in writing.
The 1 to 10 scores here are an editorial preview, our provisional read, not a measured result. We have not call-tested Telnyx yet, so there is no Voxrater latency figure on this page. The pricing, capability and compliance detail is sourced from Telnyx’s pricing, product and compliance pages, captured 2026-05-31.
Telnyx compared
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Alternatives to Telnyx
Other platforms that overlap with Telnyx on the same kind of work, ranked by how many capabilities they share, then by cheaper all-in cost per minute. Compare any of them side by side on the compare page.
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Sources
- Telnyx Conversational AI pricing verified 2026-06-02: $0.05/min base, STT included, TTS and LLM billed per component (pass-through), Call Control telephony $0.002/min. · captured 2026-06-02
- Telnyx pricing page re-captured 2026-06-02 for the quarterly re-verification (screenshot in evidence/). · captured 2026-06-02
- Telnyx Conversational AI plan page: usage-priced, no per-tier gating except Enterprise dedicated support · captured 2026-05-31
- Telnyx Conversational AI pricing: $0.05/min base, STT included, per-char TTS, per-token LLM, $0.002/min call control · captured 2026-05-31
- Voice AI Agents product page: 1,300+ voices, 29+ languages, BYO LLM/TTS, voice cloning, latency claim · captured 2026-05-31
- Telnyx compliance article: SOC 2 Type I and II, SOC 3, GDPR and CCPA (HIPAA not listed) · captured 2026-05-31
- Telnyx Elastic SIP Trunking: native carrier telephony on Telnyx's own network · captured 2026-05-31
- Warm transfer with context passing for Voice AI · captured 2026-05-31
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool support for Voice AI · captured 2026-05-31