October 20, 2026. Deepgram's Voice Agent API costs $0.075 a minute on pay-as-you-go for its Standard tier, which bundles speech recognition, a Deepgram-managed language model and Deepgram's voices, and $0.163 a minute for Advanced, according to its pricing page, read today. Streaming speech-to-text on Nova-3 is $0.0048 a minute at what Deepgram labels a limited-time promotional rate, against a regular $0.0077, and new accounts start with $200 in free credit. Here is each rate, the concurrency caps that decide how many calls can run at once, and what 1,000 calls cost.
Key numbers
| Item | Number |
|---|---|
| Voice Agent API, Standard ($0.068 on Growth) | $0.075 per minute |
| Voice Agent API, Advanced ($0.146 on Growth) | $0.163 per minute |
| Voice Agent API, own model and voices | $0.050 per minute |
| Nova-3 streaming, monolingual (promotional; regular $0.0077) | $0.0048 per minute |
| Flux English streaming (promotional; regular $0.0077) | $0.0065 per minute |
| Flux TTS (Aura-2 $0.030) | $0.045 per 1,000 characters |
| Free credit for new accounts | $200 |
| Growth plan (up to 20 percent off) | from $4,000 a year |
| Simultaneous Voice Agent sessions, Pay As You Go (60 on Growth) | 45 |
| 1,000 three-minute calls on Standard (telephony extra) | $225 |
Prices and limits read on 20 October 2026 from Deepgram's pricing page and developer docs.
Deepgram's rates, read October 20
- Voice Agent API. Standard is $0.075 a minute ($0.068 on Growth), Standard with your own voices $0.065 ($0.051), Custom with your own model $0.059, Custom with your own model and voices $0.050 ($0.041), Advanced $0.163 ($0.146) and Advanced with your own voices $0.122 ($0.110). Per 1,000 minutes on pay-as-you-go that is $75, $65, $59, $50, $163 and $122. Every tier is billed on WebSocket connection time.
- Streaming speech-to-text. Nova-3 monolingual is $0.0048 a minute (regular $0.0077), Nova-3 multilingual $0.0058 (regular $0.0092), Flux English $0.0065 (regular $0.0077) and Flux Multilingual $0.0078. Pre-recorded Nova-3 is $0.0043 monolingual and $0.0052 multilingual.
- Text to speech. Flux TTS is $0.045 per 1,000 characters, Aura-2 $0.030 and Aura-1 $0.015. Until December 31, 2026 Deepgram matches Flux TTS spend with credits, up to $500.
- Add-ons. Redaction is $0.0020 a minute, keyterm prompting $0.0013, entity detection $0.0017 and speaker diarization $0.0020; smart formatting is included.
- Plans. Pay As You Go has no minimum, no expiry and needs no credit card. Growth starts at $4,000 a year in prepaid credit and saves up to 20 percent.
Which models Standard and Advanced cover
Deepgram's LLM models list puts each managed model in a pricing tier. Smaller models such as OpenAI's gpt-5.4-mini and gpt-5.6-luna, Anthropic's claude-haiku-4-5 and Google's gemini-3.5-flash are Standard; larger ones such as gpt-5.5, claude-sonnet-5 and gemini-3-pro-preview are Advanced. The list still offers gpt-4o-mini and gpt-4.1-mini as Standard options, and OpenAI retires both from its API on January 14, 2027, as our GPT-4o shutdown piece details, so pick another model for a new build. Deepgram's TTS docs say Deepgram-managed Cartesia voices are included in Standard; the own-voices rates are for bringing ElevenLabs, OpenAI or another voice you pay for separately.
What 1,000 calls cost
For 1,000 three-minute calls, 3,000 agent minutes, Standard costs $225 on pay-as-you-go and $204 on Growth, Advanced costs $489, and Custom with your own model and voices costs $150 plus those vendors' bills. The $200 credit covers about 2,666 Standard minutes, roughly 889 such calls. The phone line is extra: a Twilio local number adds $0.0085 a minute inbound, $25.50 for the same calls, as our Twilio Voice pricing guide breaks down. Assembling the pieces yourself is cheaper on the speech side, $19.50 for 3,000 minutes of Flux English, but you then pay for the model and the voices and orchestrate the call yourself.
Concurrency is the real plan limit
Pay As You Go allows up to 45 simultaneous Voice Agent API sessions, 150 streaming speech-to-text connections and 45 text-to-speech streams; Growth raises those to 60, 225 and 60. An agency answering phones for several clients at a busy hour can reach 45 live calls long before its bill looks large, so plan on peak concurrency, not monthly minutes. For healthcare, the pricing page says Deepgram signs Business Associate Agreements for Enterprise customers.
What it means for operators
Budget at the regular rates, since Deepgram publishes no end date for the streaming promotion, and close the WebSocket the moment a call ends, because the agent meter runs on connection time, not talk time. If you want one vendor for the whole voice stack, Standard at $0.075 a minute is a fair benchmark against the platforms in our best AI voice agents list and our HVAC answering service review. For a home-services business that wants every call answered without building any of this, see our AI receptionist for home services.
Frequently Asked Questions
Read on October 20, 2026: streaming Nova-3 is $0.0048 a minute at a limited-time promotional rate (regular $0.0077), Flux English $0.0065 (regular $0.0077), pre-recorded Nova-3 $0.0043, and the Voice Agent API $0.075 a minute on its Standard tier.
New Pay As You Go accounts get $200 in free credit with no credit card, no minimum and no expiry. That covers about 2,666 minutes of the Standard Voice Agent API, or more than 41,000 minutes of Nova-3 streaming at the promotional rate.
$0.075 a minute for Standard and $0.163 for Advanced on Pay As You Go, or $0.068 and $0.146 on Growth. Bringing your own voices or model lowers the rate, down to $0.050 a minute with both. Every tier is billed on WebSocket connection time.
Deepgram's pricing page says it signs Business Associate Agreements for Enterprise customers handling electronic protected health information. It names Enterprise customers only, so plan on an Enterprise contract before patient calls run through it.