How Much Does Voice AI Cost? Real Production Data
Voice AI infrastructure costs range from $0.017 to $0.10+ per minute depending on architecture and cache efficiency. Loqui Auris achieves $0.017-0.022 per minute in production across 680+ minutes of real conversations — 60-80% cheaper than standard implementations. The primary cost driver is audio output (42% of total cost), followed by audio input (39%). Achieving 85-89% cache efficiency is the key to sustainable voice AI economics.
How Much Does Voice AI Cost Per Minute, by Platform?
| Provider | Cost/Min |
|---|---|
| Loqui Auris (production verified) | $0.017-0.022 |
| OpenAI Realtime API (direct) | $0.08-0.12* |
| Bland.ai | $0.07-0.12* |
| Vapi.ai | $0.05-0.10* |
| Retell AI | $0.06-0.10* |
| Human phone support | $0.71-2.14 |
* Competitor figures are estimates based on published pricing as of February 2026. Verify current pricing on provider websites.
What Drives Voice AI Costs?
Audio processing dominates voice AI costs. Audio output (TTS) and audio input (STT) together account for 81% of total cost. Optimizing these pipelines — through provider selection, caching, and parallel processing — is how Loqui Auris achieves sub-$0.02/minute pricing.
| Component | % | Per Min |
|---|---|---|
| Audio Output (TTS) | 42% | $0.0074 |
| Audio Input (STT) | 39% | $0.0069 |
| New Text Tokens | 9% | $0.0016 |
| Cached Text | 6% | $0.0011 |
| Cached Audio | 2% | $0.0004 |
| Text Output | 1% | $0.0002 |
How Will Voice AI Costs Decrease?
Voice AI costs are on a clear downward trajectory. Open-source TTS models, enterprise volume pricing, and self-hosted inference will drive per-minute costs below $0.01 within 18 months.
| Timeline | Target Cost/Min |
|---|---|
| Today (verified) | $0.017-0.022 |
| 6 months | $0.015 |
| 12 months | $0.012 |
| 18 months | $0.009 |
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