Bland AI Pricing and Bland AI Alternatives: Bland AI Cost per Minute on Start, Build and Enterprise

Bland charges $0.14 a minute on its free Start plan and $0.12 a minute on Build, which adds a $299 monthly platform fee. Both rates include the language model, speech to text and the voice, so there are no token charges, but telephony and transfer time are billed on top. Build becomes the cheaper plan above 14,950 minutes a month, and Start's cap of 100 calls a day usually forces the move earlier than that.

Most Bland pricing guides still quote the flat $0.09 rate that ended on December 5, 2025, or a Scale plan that no longer appears on Bland's pricing page. The figures below come from bland.ai/pricing and Bland's billing documentation, read on September 18, 2026. If you are weighing Bland against a platform that bills the model separately, our Retell AI pricing page prices every model on Retell's rate card the same way.

Bland AI pricing plans compared

All three main plans list a 99.9% uptime SLA. Enterprise adds dedicated infrastructure, on-premises or VPC deployment, a BAA, SSO, data residency and forward deployed engineers. Start comes with two credits and an inbound number that Bland values at $15 a month.

Two plans need a note. Bland's billing docs still list a Scale plan at $499 a month with $0.11 minutes, $0.03 transfer time, 100 concurrent calls and 5,000 calls a day, but the public pricing page did not show it on September 18, and the docs carry a banner saying they are being updated. And the Agent Phone plan is built for a single bot with its own number, not for a business line: one call at a time across the whole account means a second caller hears a busy signal.

What Bland costs per month at real call volumes

This table multiplies Bland's published rates by monthly connected minutes, before telephony and transfer time. The Scale column uses the rate in Bland's docs.

Three break-even points fall out of this. Build beats Start on price above 14,950 minutes a month ($299 divided by the 2 cent saving). Scale, if you can still buy it, beats Build above 20,000 minutes. And Start's 100 calls a day works out to about 3,000 calls a month, so at an average call of three minutes you run out of Start around 9,000 minutes, well before price alone would move you.

In practice that means the cap, not the rate, picks your plan. A front desk averaging 80 calls a day stays on Start and pays $0.14. A busy line averaging 120 calls a day has to be on Build even though it would pay less on Start's rate at its volume. Outbound campaigns hit the caps fastest: Start allows 100 calls a day in total, and a dialer working a list of form fills can use that up before lunch.

What else shows up on a Bland bill

The per-minute rate covers the AI. These items are billed separately:

• Telephony. Billed on your own carrier, or on Bland's built-in Twilio at pass-through cost.
• Transfer time. When the agent transfers to a human on a Bland number, the transferred minutes cost $0.05 on Start and $0.04 on Build. If you bring your own Twilio, transfers are free.
• Outbound minimum. Each outbound attempt on Bland's telephony carries a $0.015 minimum, and failed calls are charged the same $0.015. On a 10,000 dial campaign that is at least $150 before anyone answers.
• SMS. $0.02 per message, inbound or outbound.
• Web widget. $0.01 per agent message.
• Norm. Bland's agent-building assistant is billed on tokens, separately from calls.

Voicemail is billed as normal call time at your plan rate. Calls are prorated to the second, and only active call time counts.

Why Bland raised its per-minute rate

Until December 5, 2025, every self-serve customer paid the same $0.09 per connected minute, and plans only differed by limits. Bland's billing docs say the change aligns pricing "with the value each plan provides," so higher tiers now get lower rates. For Start users the change was a 56% increase, from $0.09 to $0.14. Bland gave each organization a one-time credit worth the difference on its previous 30 days of usage. Existing Enterprise contracts were not affected.

If you are reading a guide, a review or an old internal budget that says Bland costs 9 cents a minute, it predates this change. Budgets built on it now come in about a third low on Start.

Bland AI alternatives, priced the same way

The alternative platforms mostly bill the model separately, so compare all-in minutes, not headline rates. These figures use each vendor's own published pricing.

Bland's own pricing FAQ argues that Retell stacks land at about $0.11 to $0.25 a minute and Vapi at $0.13 to $0.30 once you add a leading model, transcription, voice and telephony. That is fair for large models and generous to Bland for small ones: on Retell's own rate card, GPT 5.4 mini with a Retell voice and a US Twilio number comes to $0.109 a minute, which undercuts Bland Start by about 3 cents. The honest summary is that Bland costs more per minute than a build-your-own stack on a small model, and less than one on a frontier model, with the bonus that its number never moves when model prices do.

For the per-minute detail on each rival, see Vapi pricing and our side-by-side of Vapi alternatives at three call volumes.

Which Bland plan should a US business pick?

Stay on Start if your line takes fewer than about 90 calls a day and never bursts past 100 in an hour. You pay no platform fee and the $0.14 rate is predictable. Move to Build when the caps bite or when you pass roughly 15,000 minutes a month, and use your own Twilio account so transfers to your staff cost nothing. Go to Enterprise for a BAA, SSO or VPC deployment, which US healthcare and financial services teams will need regardless of volume.

Bland is strongest on outbound work: speed-to-lead callbacks, appointment confirmations and qualification calls to people who filled in a form. Those leads usually come from paid campaigns, so the calling budget and the ad budget belong in the same spreadsheet. If the same small team also runs the ads, an AI media buyer that runs the paid campaigns feeding those forms is worth pricing alongside the dialer.

Before you commit to per-minute calling at all, check what share of your calls could be handled without a phone. Order status, refund requests and repeat support questions cost nothing per minute when a ready-made agent answers them by email or chat first. Our catalog of AI agents for customer service lists support, order and refund agents at a flat monthly price with their permissions shown before you deploy, and our page on Fin's per-resolution pricing shows the outcome-priced route.

Bland AI pricing questions

How much does Bland AI cost per minute?

Bland charges $0.14 a minute on the Start plan and $0.12 a minute on Build, which also has a $299 monthly platform fee. The rate includes the LLM, transcription and voice. Telephony is billed separately, and transfer time costs $0.05 or $0.04 a minute on Bland numbers.

Is Bland AI still $0.09 per minute?

No. Bland moved every self-serve customer to plan-based rates on December 5, 2025. The old flat $0.09 connected-minute rate became $0.14 on Start and $0.12 on Build, and existing organizations received a one-time credit covering the difference for one month of usage.

Does Bland AI have a Scale plan?

Bland's public pricing page listed only Start, Build and Enterprise on September 18, 2026. Its billing documentation, which carries a notice that it is being updated, still lists Scale at $499 a month and $0.11 a minute with 100 concurrent calls. Confirm with Bland sales before you plan around it.

Is Bland AI cheaper than Retell AI?

Not on small models. Retell on GPT 5.4 mini costs about $0.109 a minute on a US line against Bland Start's $0.14 plus telephony. Bland is cheaper once you run a large model on Retell, where GPT 5.4 brings Retell to about $0.165 a minute, and its rate does not change when model prices do.