Bland AI Pricing (2026): Plans, Real Costs and What You'll Actually Pay

Prices checked September 19, 2026 on bland.ai/pricing and Bland's billing docs.

Our Bland AI complete guide covers what Bland is, who backs it and how its pathways work. This page is about the bill.

How Bland's price changed in December 2025

Until late 2025, every self-serve Bland plan paid the same rate. Bland's billing docs explain that "connected minute rates are now plan-based for all self-serve customers," effective December 5, 2025. Start users went from $0.09 to $0.14 a minute, Build from $0.09 to $0.12 and Scale from $0.09 to $0.11, and transfer rates became plan-specific at the same time.

Bland gave every organization a one-time credit worth the difference on its previous 30 days of usage. The docs' own example: a Start account that spent $40 at $0.09 (444 minutes) would now pay $62.22 for the same minutes, so it received $22.22. Any review or comparison quoting Bland at $0.09 a minute predates this change.

What's in a Bland minute

Bland's pricing page puts the model, speech-to-text and text-to-speech inside the per-minute rate: "No token charges. No model-provider pass-throughs." That's the main structural difference from Retell and Vapi, where you pay for each component separately.

Telephony is where Bland's own pages disagree. The pricing page FAQ says "Telephony is billed separately, on your own carrier or Bland's at pass-through cost." The billing docs' SIP table says calls through Bland's SIP endpoints are billed at the plan rate with "SIP cost included," and Bland's developer index describes per-minute pricing that "covers LLM, TTS, STT, and telephony in a single line item." If you bring your own Twilio (BYOT), your carrier bills you directly and Bland still charges its rate. Ask which applies to your numbers before you sign; the rest of this page prices minutes at the plan rate only.

The docs' voice billing table lists the smaller charges:

• Call time is prorated to the second, active time only.
• Transfers on Bland numbers bill at the plan's transfer rate; on your own Twilio number they're free.
• Outbound calls carry a $0.015 minimum per attempt on Bland's telephony, and failed calls pay the same minimum.
• Voicemail is billed as normal call time.

Transfers and warm transfers

Transfer time is the second meter on a Bland call, and it runs at a lower rate. Bland's docs work one example: a 10-minute call where the agent hands off to a human for the last 2 minutes costs $1.50 on Start, $1.28 on Build and $1.16 on Scale.

A warm transfer runs two AI legs at once. While Bland's agent holds the caller, a second "proxy agent" call dials your team at the plan rate; once the calls merge, the time switches to the transfer rate.

If the caller hears hold music while the proxy call rings, that waiting time is billed at the transfer rate; if the agent keeps talking to them, it's billed at the full rate. On a line where half your calls end in a warm transfer, that configuration choice shows up on the invoice.

What Bland costs at three call volumes

These are inbound support lines with 4-minute calls, where 20% of calls are transferred to a person for 3 minutes on Bland numbers. We assume weekday-heavy traffic over 22 working days.

The caps decide the plan before the rates do. On our transfer mix, Build's lower rates would only repay its $299 fee at about 13,900 minutes a month, but a weekday-heavy line hits Start's 100-calls-a-day cap at about 2,200 calls, or 8,800 minutes. Between those two points you pay for Build to get headroom, not savings. Scale's extra $200 pays for itself at about 17,400 minutes on our mix (20,000 with no transfers), so by 50,000 minutes it's $375 a month cheaper than Build, if Bland will sell it to you: the pricing page shows only Start, Build and Enterprise.

Outbound dialing: what a campaign costs

Outbound adds two charges an inbound line never sees: the $0.015 minimum on attempts that don't connect, and voicemail billed as call time. Take 10,000 dials a month on Build, where 30% connect for 2 minutes, 30% reach voicemail for 30 seconds and 40% don't answer:

• Connected: 3,000 × 2 = 6,000 minutes
• Voicemail: 3,000 × 0.5 = 1,500 minutes
• Minutes: 7,500 × $0.12 = $900
• No-answer attempts: 4,000 × $0.015 = $60
• Platform fee: $299
• Total: $1,259, or about $0.13 per dial

The same campaign can't run on Start: 100 calls a day caps it at roughly 2,200 dials in a month.

Chat, SMS and the other meters

Bland prices text separately from voice:

• Web widget: $0.01 per message the agent sends. A team handling 3,000 chats a month at 6 agent replies each pays 18,000 × $0.01 = $180.
• SMS: $0.02 per message, inbound and outbound. The same 3,000 conversations at 6 messages each way is 36,000 × $0.02 = $720, and SMS is an Enterprise feature.
• Norm, Bland's agent-building assistant, bills on tokens, separately from calls, with no rate published.
• Agent Phone Plan: $29.99 a month ($14.99 the first month) for one number with unlimited US and Canada calls and texts, but only one concurrent call, 50 calls a day and 1,000 minutes a day. It's built for a single bot, and a support line with overlapping calls would send the second caller to a busy message.

What drives a Bland bill up

• Plan caps. Hitting the daily or hourly cap rejects calls instead of billing them, which is safe for the budget and bad for callers. Growth forces a plan change before the rate would.
• Transfers on Bland numbers. At 20% of calls, transfer minutes add roughly 4% to 6% to the bill; BYOT makes them free.
• Warm-transfer configuration. Keeping the caller talking to the agent while the human is dialed bills two full-rate legs.
• Outbound misses. Every unanswered attempt costs $0.015, and voicemail runs at the full rate.
• Telephony, depending on which of Bland's two descriptions applies to your account.
• Messaging. SMS bills both directions at $0.02 and needs an Enterprise plan.

What Bland's pricing rewards

Bundling the model into the minute moves model cost from you to Bland. You can't cut your bill by choosing a cheaper model, the lever Retell and Vapi hand you, and Bland keeps the margin between its rate and whatever the model costs it. That's the incentive behind "No model-provider pass-throughs": Bland's margin widens if model prices fall, and you get one predictable number in exchange.

The plan structure prices headroom. Start and Build differ by 2 cents a minute, but they differ by 20 times in daily calls and 5 times in concurrency, and the December 2025 change raised the rate most on the free tier. Bland's billing FAQ says the change "aligns pricing with the value each plan provides," which in practice means the cheapest way to run volume is a paid plan.

How Bland's price compares

At the mid volume, 10,000 minutes a month, before transfers:

Rival prices are from each vendor's live page on September 19, 2026.

Retell prices the voice engine, voice, model and telephony separately, so its cost moves with your model choice; our configuration comes to about $1,144 with 20 concurrent calls included. See our Retell AI guide.

Vapi adds $0.05 a minute to providers at cost and counts its own telephony as free. It's the cheapest of the component-priced options at this volume if you keep the model small. Our Vapi guide has the details.

ElevenLabs Agents includes minutes in each plan and bills $0.08 for the rest, with the model added per minute and telephony separate. See our ElevenLabs Agents guide.

Bland is the most expensive of the four at this volume, and the simplest to forecast. Its rate doesn't move when you change models, and on Build it includes 50 concurrent calls where Vapi's Core includes 10. For contact centers that want a vendor-built deployment instead, Parloa sells on contract, as Bland's own Enterprise tier does.

What users say about Bland

Public review data on Bland is thin. G2 rates it 5 out of 5 from 11 reviews (checked September 19, 2026), with no pricing complaints among the top con tags. Bland's Trustpilot profile is unclaimed and has 2 reviews (2.9), and TrustRadius lists none. That leaves no reliable sample of what customers think about the price, and we won't quote the few reviews there are as if they were one.

What we can check is the billing FAQ's own admission that the December change raised rates for every self-serve plan. The pricing page frames the result as "Clear pricing across every call," and on the rate itself that holds: one number, no model line. The less visible costs are the caps, the transfer meter and the telephony question above.

Who Bland's pricing suits

Bland's pricing fits teams that want one per-minute number they can budget without tracking model and voice providers, and that need concurrency: 50 simultaneous calls on Build is a lot of headroom for $299. It suits regulated buyers heading for Enterprise anyway, since BAA, SSO, on-prem deployment and SMS sit there. It's the wrong fit if you want to cut cost by choosing a cheaper model, if your volume is small but spiky enough to hit Start's 100-a-day cap, or if your support volume is mostly email and chat tickets.

For that ticket queue, Macha is an AI agent layer on the help desk you already run (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom), billed per ticket: one thread with one person is one charge however many replies it takes, from $299 a month for 750 tickets, with setup and monitoring by the Macha team included. The tiers are on our pricing page, and our guide to AI agents for customer service covers where voice and ticket agents each fit.

How we researched this

We read Bland's pricing page with a scripted browser on September 19, 2026, and checked every figure against Bland's billing, Agent Phone Plan and SMS documentation the same day; the Scale plan, transfer rates, minimums and message prices come from those docs. We searched AWS Marketplace in Chrome and checked Vendr, read G2 in Chrome (5 out of 5 from 11 reviews, checked September 19, 2026), and read Trustpilot and TrustRadius. Rival prices come from Retell's, Vapi's and ElevenLabs' own pricing pages. We did not open a Bland account or place calls, so every total here is list-price arithmetic with our stated assumptions.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Bland AI cost per minute? $0.14 a minute on Start, $0.12 on Build and $0.11 on Scale, with the model, transcription and voice included. Transfer time to a human costs $0.05, $0.04 or $0.03 a minute on Bland numbers, and nothing if you bring your own Twilio.

How much does Bland AI cost per month? Start has no platform fee, Build is $299 a month and Scale is $499. With our assumptions, 1,000 minutes costs about $148 on Start, 10,000 minutes about $1,559 on Build and 50,000 minutes about $6,224 on Scale.

Is there a free AI caller available on Bland? Bland's Start plan has no platform fee and needs no card; it includes 2 credits and an inbound number. Every minute after that bills at $0.14, and Start caps you at 100 calls a day and 10 at once.

What is the Bland Scale plan? Scale appears in Bland's billing docs at $499 a month, $0.11 a minute, 5,000 calls a day and 100 concurrent calls. The pricing page lists only Start, Build and Enterprise, so confirm availability with Bland.

Does Bland charge for failed calls or voicemail? Failed calls and outbound attempts on Bland's telephony carry a $0.015 minimum each. Voicemail is billed as normal call time.

Does Bland charge for telephony? Bland's pricing page says telephony is billed separately, on your own carrier or Bland's at pass-through cost, while its billing docs say SIP cost is included in the plan rate on Bland's endpoints. Bring-your-own Twilio customers pay their carrier directly and pay no transfer fees.

Is Bland AI any good? Public reviews are too few to judge on: 2 on Trustpilot and none on TrustRadius when we checked, and 11 on G2 (5 out of 5, checked September 19, 2026). Judge it on a test with your own call flow; Start costs nothing to try beyond the minutes.

How does Bland compare with Retell and Vapi on price? At 10,000 minutes a month, Bland's Build plan costs $1,499 before transfers, against about $1,144 for our Retell configuration and $848 to $1,319 for Vapi with Core. Bland costs more but bundles the model, so the price doesn't change with your model choice.

How much does an AI phone agent subscription cost in general? Across the self-serve platforms we priced, 10,000 minutes a month costs roughly $800 to $1,500. Contract-only platforms start higher; Synthflow's contracts start at $30,000 a year.

If your support runs through a help desk rather than a phone line, you can start a Macha trial with $50 of free usage and no card, or see our tiers on the pricing page.

Sources: Bland pricing · Bland: Billing & Plans · Bland: Agent Phone Plan · Bland: SMS · Bland developer index · Vendr: Bland AI · Retell pricing · Vapi pricing · ElevenLabs Agents pricing · Synthflow pricing