Bland AI Pricing in 2026: Subscription Plus Per-Minute Math
Bland prices differently from Vapi and Retell. Rather than pure pay-as-you-go, Bland charges a flat monthly platform fee per tier (covering the platform, concurrency, and support level) plus a per-minute rate for all talk time. The per-minute rate steps down as you move up tiers. Here is the 2026 plan-by-plan decode.
Last verified June 2026; tiers and rates re-read from Bland's pricing page on 23 September 2026. Bland pricing changes periodically; always confirm before purchase.
$0.14/min
Per-minute (Start, free tier)
$0.12/min
Per-minute (Build, $299/mo)
Start, Build, Enterprise
Published tiers
Custom quote
Enterprise
§The Bland Pricing Model: Platform Fee + Per-Minute
Bland bundles platform features into a flat monthly fee per tier, then meters every minute of talk time at the tier's per-minute rate. Two rates are published: $0.14/min on the free Start tier, and $0.12/min on Build ($299/month). There is no large pool of free included minutes on Build; you pay the platform fee and the per-minute rate on top.
Because Build adds a fixed monthly fee, it only pays off once your volume is high enough that the $0.02 per minute saving recovers the $299. That crossover sits at 14,950 minutes a month: below it Start is cheaper, above it Build is. Bland previously published a third paid tier, Scale, at $499 a month and $0.11 per minute; it is no longer on the pricing page, so the cheapest published rate is now $0.12 and the volume floor for a custom rate is whatever Enterprise quotes.
The model is most directly analogous to a Twilio SendGrid (transactional email) tier structure: a flat monthly fee plus per-unit usage, with the flat fee bundling capability and concurrency that competitors might charge separately.
§Bland Tier Pricing
| Tier | Monthly platform fee | Per-minute (all-in) | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start (free) | $0 | $0.14 | 2 free credits, 1 free inbound number |
| Build (for teams) | $299/mo | $0.12 | Team features, lowest published per-minute rate |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Unlimited concurrency, VPC/on-prem, dedicated support, BAA |
Concurrency caps deserve attention. Build raises concurrency over the free Start tier, but Bland only quotes "unlimited concurrent calls" at the Enterprise tier; the exact caps on Start and Build are not published, so confirm them for any high-burst outbound use case. A single-agent inbound qualifier rarely hits the cap, but a 5,000-call-per-day outbound dialer can. With Scale withdrawn there is now no published tier between Build and Enterprise, so high-volume outbound buyers go straight to a quote.
§Bland vs Retell vs Vapi: Sales Call Cost Comparison
| Monthly volume | Bland (platform fee + per-minute) | Retell mid stack ($0.149) | Vapi published ($0.082-$0.129) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3,000 min | Start: $0 + ($0.14 * 3K) = $420 | $447 | $245-$387 |
| 15,000 min | Build: $299 + ($0.12 * 15K) = $2,099 | $2,235 | $1,227-$1,934 |
| 50,000 min | Build: $299 + ($0.12 * 50K) = $6,299 | $7,450 | $4,090-$6,445 |
| 250,000 min | Enterprise: custom quote | $37,250 at list | $20,450-$32,225 at list |
The honest reading, corrected: On published rates Bland now undercuts Retell at every volume in the table, which reverses what this page said when Retell was believed to bundle a production stack at $0.07 a minute. Retell prices four lines separately and a realistic sales configuration comes to $0.149 a minute, above Bland's $0.12 even after the $299 fee. Vapi is cheaper than both: its own calculator puts an all-in minute at $0.082 to $0.129, and Vapi charges nothing for its own telephony. So the price order on list is Vapi, then Bland, then Retell. That does not settle the decision. Bland is the only one of the three that bundles a dialer and sequencer, and its single all-in rate with no model pass-throughs is the easiest of the three to forecast. On raw conversational realism Bland is widely regarded as slightly behind Retell, with both behind an ElevenLabs-stacked Vapi. Pick Bland when you want a turnkey outbound dialer and a predictable bill; pick Vapi when per-minute cost and component control matter most; pick Retell when a single invoice with a published add-on menu is worth paying for.
§Where Bland's Built-In Dialer Earns the Subscription
Bland's structural advantage over Vapi and Retell is the bundled dialer and sequencer. With Vapi or Retell, an outbound sales use case requires writing custom Twilio (or Telnyx) orchestration to handle: call queueing, concurrency limits, retry on no-answer, retry on voicemail, time-of-day dialing windows, do-not-call list compliance, time-zone-aware scheduling, and CRM disposition logging. This typically takes 2 to 6 engineering weeks to build correctly.
Bland includes all of the above as platform features. The dialer is configurable through the UI without engineering, retry policies are templated, time-zone-aware scheduling is built in, and DNC compliance hooks integrate with major DNC providers. For a team that does not want to build dialer infrastructure, this is a meaningful saving, and on published 2026 rates it no longer comes with a per-minute penalty against Retell.
For a team that already has dialer infrastructure (existing Salesloft, Outreach, Aircall, Five9 deployment), the Bland dialer overlap is wasted spend. Vapi is the platform that unlocks better per-minute economics by reusing existing dialer capacity, at $0.082 to $0.129 a minute on its own calculator against Bland's $0.12 to $0.14; Retell does not, because a comparable Retell stack is $0.149. The build-vs-buy decision here is about whether dialer is a problem you want to solve once at the platform layer.
§Hidden Costs and Things to Negotiate
Phone number rental
Bland includes a free inbound number on the Start tier and a small number of phone numbers on the paid tiers; the exact per-tier allotment is not published. Additional US local numbers run $2 to $5 per month each. Toll-free and international numbers price significantly higher.
A2P 10DLC registration fees
US outbound calling requires carrier A2P 10DLC registration to avoid spam filtering. Bland passes this through to Twilio's underlying fees ($4 setup plus $1.50 per number per month plus throughput tier fees). For 50-number campaigns this is $75 per month before the actual usage line begins.
Custom voice cloning
Default voices on Bland are included in the subscription. Custom-cloned voices (ElevenLabs, PlayHT integrations) incur the voice provider subscription on top of the Bland tier. ElevenLabs publishes Creator at $22 a month with professional voice cloning included, Pro at $99, Scale at $299 with 3 professional clones, Business at $990 with 10, and custom Enterprise, checked 23 September 2026.
Recording retention beyond 30 days
Standard tier recording retention is typically 30 days. Compliance retention (90 days, 12 months, multi-year) is custom and adds storage fees. Negotiate the retention period at tier purchase rather than as an upsell after the fact.