Vapi Review, Pricing & Alternatives (2026)

Vapi is a San Francisco company that sells the plumbing behind AI phone agents. Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, classmates from the University of Waterloo, went through Y Combinator with a productivity app called Superpowered. In 2023 Dearsley built an AI therapist to talk to on walks, found that startups wanted the low-latency voice layer underneath it, and the pair relaunched as Vapi in 2024. In May 2026 it raised a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV at about a $500 million valuation, bringing total funding to $72 million, according to TechCrunch. The company says it has handled more than 1 billion calls and has over 1 million developers on its self-serve platform. Enterprise customers include Amazon Ring, which routes all of its inbound support calls through Vapi, plus Intuit, New York Life and Kavak.

A Vapi agent is a configuration that wires together three parts: a transcriber that turns caller speech into text, a language model that decides what to say, and a voice that speaks the reply. You set these up in the dashboard or through the API, write a system prompt, and attach tools so the agent can book appointments, look up orders or transfer to a human. Vapi supplies phone numbers, or you bring your own through Twilio, Vonage or SIP. Squads let several specialised agents hand a call to each other. Testing and simulation features run scripted calls against an agent before it reaches customers, and observability dashboards flag failed calls. Web and mobile SDKs cover in-app voice. Common uses are customer support lines, lead qualification, appointment scheduling and outbound sales calls.

Vapi does not train its own speech or language models. Its job is orchestration: streaming audio between providers, detecting when a caller has finished a turn, handling interruptions and keeping round-trip latency under the 500 milliseconds the company advertises. The pricing page lists Deepgram as a default transcriber, OpenAI models for reasoning and ElevenLabs for voice, but the catalog also includes Cartesia, Anthropic, Google and others, and you can point it at a custom model endpoint. This model-agnostic design is the main reason engineering teams choose it, because they can swap a voice or LLM without rebuilding the agent. Dearsley told TechCrunch that Ring picked Vapi over more than 40 vendors because its engineers had fine control over agent behaviour. Compliance options include SOC 2, HIPAA with a business associate agreement, PCI and zero data retention.

Pricing has two layers. Every minute carries a $0.05 Vapi hosting fee plus the cost of the models you choose, which Vapi passes through at cost. The pricing page shows Deepgram transcription at about $0.01 a minute, OpenAI models from $0.008 to $0.045 and ElevenLabs voices from $0.015 to $0.024, so a typical call lands between roughly $0.09 and $0.13 a minute before telephony. New accounts get $5 in credit, four concurrent calls and 14 days of call data retention. The Core package raises limits to 10 concurrent calls, five phone numbers and 30 days of retention with email support. Pro charges 10% of hosting fees with a $999 monthly minimum and adds 30 concurrent calls, Slack support and a 99% uptime SLA. Premier is negotiated and includes dedicated SIP and a one-hour response time for outages.

Vapi expects you to write prompts, configure tools and read logs, so non-technical teams usually need a developer or an agency to get an agent into production. Total cost is harder to predict than a flat per-minute rate because it depends on which models you pick. Retell AI offers a similar developer platform with simpler bundled pricing and strong turn-taking, and Bland AI targets enterprises that want a more managed service with its own hosted models. ElevenLabs Agents is the easier choice if you already use ElevenLabs voices and want one vendor. Pick Vapi if you have engineers, expect high call volumes and want freedom to change speech, language and voice providers as models improve. Choose Retell or a no-code tool if your team wants a working receptionist this week without touching an API.