Bland AI costs $0.14 a minute on its Start plan, which has no monthly fee, or $299 a month plus $0.12 a minute on Build; Enterprise is priced by quote. Unless your calls run long, your call count decides which one you pay: Start stops at 100 calls a day, 100 an hour and 10 at once, and Build at 2,000 a day. I read every price here on Bland’s pricing page and billing docs on 15 October 2026.
The per-minute rate is the headline, and the obvious move is to set it against Vapi’s pricing and Retell’s and take the cheapest minute; Bland’s own FAQ invites exactly that comparison. But between Bland’s Start and Build plans the rate moves by two cents. The 101st call of the day adds a $299 monthly fee.
Between Start and Build the minute rate moves by two cents. The 101st call of the day adds a $299 monthly fee.
Key numbers
| Item | Number |
|---|---|
| Start plan, per connected minute (no monthly fee) | $0.14 |
| Build plan, monthly platform fee | $299 |
| Build plan, per connected minute | $0.12 |
| Start plan, daily call cap (100 an hour, 10 at once) | 100 calls |
| Build plan, daily call cap (1,000 an hour, 50 at once) | 2,000 calls |
| Minutes a month before Build’s fee pays for itself | 14,950 |
| Outbound attempt minimum on Bland’s lines (failed calls too) | $0.015 |
| Transfer time, Start and Build (free with your own Twilio) | $0.05 and $0.04 a minute |
| Each extra phone number | $15 a month |
| Agent Phone plan, after the first month (one call at a time, 50 a day) | $29.99 a month |
| Scale plan, listed only in the billing docs | $499 a month |
| Start rate before 5 December 2025 | $0.09 a minute |
Read on 15 October 2026 from Bland’s pricing page, its billing, Agent Phone and number purchase docs, and its terms of service.
Why the per-minute rate is the wrong comparison
Run the arithmetic on Bland’s own numbers. Build saves $0.02 a minute against Start, so its $299 fee pays for itself only past 14,950 minutes a month, nearly 250 hours of talk. If your calls average two minutes, that is about 7,500 calls a month. Start’s cap allows at most 3,100 calls in a 31-day month, so unless your calls average nearly five minutes, Start can never reach that point.
The caps decide first. Start allows 100 calls a day, 100 in an hour and 10 at once. Build allows 2,000 a day, 1,000 an hour and 50 at once, and above Build the pricing page offers only Enterprise, “contracted to your volume”. So the count picks your plan. Dial 150 leads a day and Start runs out on day one, however short the calls, which puts you on Build and its $299 fee whether or not your minutes would ever earn it back. Those dials still need the consent records covered in our TCPA-compliant AI calling setup.
For an inbound front desk the open question is the daily cap: Bland’s pricing table does not say whether inbound calls count toward it, so ask before you put a busy line on Start.
Bland is $0.14 a minute, so line it up against Vapi and Retell and take the cheapest.
Build’s $0.02 saving needs 14,950 minutes a month to repay its $299 fee.
Count your busiest day and your busiest hour first. That count picks the plan.
Start stops at 100 calls a day and 10 at once; Build at 2,000 a day and 50 at once.
What a month adds on top of the minutes
Bland’s pricing page promises “No surprise bills”, and its rate does cover the model, the transcription and the voice. The billing docs list what sits beside it.
Every outbound attempt on Bland’s phone lines carries a $0.015 minimum, and so does every failed call, so 1,000 dials that never connect cost $15. Voicemail is billed as ordinary talk time. Talk time is prorated to the second, which works in your favour on short calls.
Transferred minutes are billed twice in Bland’s own example. Transfer time costs $0.05 a minute on Start and $0.04 on Build, and a 10-minute call where the agent talks for 8 minutes and then hands over for 2 is billed as 10 connected minutes plus 2 transfer minutes: $1.50 on Start, $1.28 on Build. Each minute your person spends on that call costs $0.19 on Start and $0.16 on Build. Connect your own Twilio account and the transfer fee drops to zero. On Start and Build the transfer is the basic cold kind, where the caller is put straight through; warm transfer, where the agent briefs your person first, needs an Enterprise account.
Each extra phone number is a $15-a-month subscription; Start includes one inbound number. Whether you pay for the phone line itself depends on which Bland page you read. The pricing page says telephony is billed separately, at pass-through cost on Bland’s own lines. The llms.txt file Bland publishes for AI assistants says per-minute pricing covers telephony “in a single line item”, and the billing table lists no per-minute phone charge at all. Ask which one your invoice follows before you budget.
The $29.99 unlimited plan takes one call at a time
Search for Bland’s price per month and you may land on a plan that is not in the pricing table: Agent Phone, $14.99 for the first month and then $29.99, with unlimited minutes and texts in the US and Canada. That is what Start charges for about 214 minutes. Bland pitches it to Claude, Codex, Muse and Grok Bot agents that book tables and move dentist appointments, and its docs say it is built “for one agent doing one thing at a time”.
The limits match that job, not a busy front desk: one number, one call at a time across the whole account, 20 calls an hour, 50 a day and 1,000 minutes a day. While a call is live, a second caller hears a busy message. Bland’s docs also still list a Scale plan, $499 a month at $0.11 a minute with 5,000 calls a day and 100 at once, which the pricing page does not show. If you outgrow Build, ask whether Scale can still be bought before you assume the next step is a quote.
What I would check before paying Bland
Four checks decide the plan before anything is built. If you take patient calls, a BAA is on that list, and on Bland it is an Enterprise feature; compare how the HIPAA-compliant AI receptionists price theirs.
Count calls, not minutes
Take your busiest day and busiest hour from your phone bill or CRM. More than 100 calls a day or 10 at once rules out Start; more than 2,000 a day or 50 at once rules out Build.
Price the handoff
If your people take over calls often, connect your own Twilio account so transfers carry no fee. If the agent must brief them first, that is warm transfer, and it means Enterprise.
List what only Enterprise includes
Warm and live transfers, texts during a call, the appointment scheduling node, SSO and a BAA are all Enterprise-only on the pricing table. Need one and you are pricing a quote.
Save the price list the day you sign
Download the pricing page and the billing docs. Start moved from $0.09 to $0.14 a minute on 5 December 2025, set out in the billing docs with a one-time transition credit.
The bottom line
Bland’s terms of service, last updated 28 August 2026, call themselves the entire agreement and never use the words price, plan, payment, billing or refund. The only dollar figure in them is the $100 cap on Bland’s liability. Every number in this article lives on pages Bland can edit, which is why the saved copy matters.
I have built inbound and outbound calling for more than 200 businesses. On any per-minute platform, size the plan from your busiest day and hour first and compare minutes second. If you run an HVAC, plumbing or roofing company and want the agent built on the platform that fits your call pattern, with your own number and a human handoff designed in, that is our AI calling for home services work. If you would rather buy a finished product, compare the AI answering services built for HVAC.