# Vs · Voice Support — element 37 of 58 > Phone support without the queue. Turns calls into handled conversations. - **Group:** 8 · Support & Success - **Necessity:** Optional - **Price band:** $$ · $30–150/mo - **Maturity:** Experimental - **Edition:** v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-09-13 ## Leading tools (v2026.Q3) - **Vapi** — the developer default - **Retell AI** — ops-ready call automation - **ElevenLabs Agents** — best voices, cheapest entry - **Sierra (voice)** — pay-per-resolution enterprise - **Bland** — flat-rate, self-hosted stack ## Our take Real and improving, but tolerance for failure is lower on the phone. Deploy behind chat, not before it. ## Combines with Vo, Sa ## The top 5 — deep dossier (verified 2026-09-13) Vapi, if your engineers are building the phone line — it has handled 1B+ calls, grew enterprise revenue 10x in the year to its $50M Peak XV Series B (May 2026), and runs 100% of Amazon Ring's inbound support. Retell is the pick when an ops-led team wants agents live this week with transparent all-in per-minute pricing — $60M ARR on ~$5M raised is the category's efficiency story. ElevenLabs Agents wins on voice quality and the cheapest credible entry ($0.08/min); Sierra when you're enterprise-scale and want to pay per resolution, not per minute; Bland when you want one flat rate and a VPC-deployable full stack. Whoever you pick: deploy voice behind chat, not before it — tolerance for failure is lower on the phone. 1. **Vapi** (Vapi (YC W21)) — $0.05/min platform + models/voices at cost ($0 BYOK) · 10 concurrent lines incl., +$10/line/mo · HIPAA +$2k/mo, zero-retention +$1k/mo · enterprise volume-based. Best for: Developer teams who want full control of the voice stack — pick your own STT/LLM/TTS, test it, and ship a production support line as code. Why: The developer default: 1B+ calls handled and enterprise revenue up 10x in the year to its $50M Series B (Peak XV, with M12 and Kleiner Perkins, May 12, 2026; $72M total). Amazon Ring routes 100% of inbound calls through it. The 2026 platform run — Monitoring (Apr), Model Intelligence with production-data model recommendations (Jul), agent test suites — is the deepest tooling in the category. Watch: Orchestration-only means you own the debugging across four vendors' models. Add-ons bite: HIPAA is $2,000/mo before a single call. Ops teams without engineers ship faster on Retell or no-code tools. Series B valuation undisclosed. [https://vapi.ai](https://vapi.ai) 2. **Retell AI** (Retell AI (YC W24)) — Pay-as-you-go $0.07–0.31/min all-in (infra $0.055 + TTS + LLM menu) · 20 concurrent incl. · $10 free credit · AI QA +$0.10/min · enterprise custom. Best for: Ops-led teams who want production support agents this week — dashboard-built, transparent per-minute menu pricing, monitoring and QA included. Why: The capital-efficiency outlier: $60M ARR by April 2026 (650% YoY) on roughly $5M ever raised, running 40M+ real-time AI phone calls a month. Its 2026 releases — the Conductor agent runtime, MCP server, and the vCX-Hard benchmark (best model clears only ~88% of hard contact-center turns, Jun 2026) — show a team publishing honest evals of its own stack. Watch: A ~$5M war chest against $11B-and-up rivals is a real asymmetry if the category turns capital-intensive. Component pricing stacks: knowledge base, PII redaction, and QA add-ons push the effective rate toward the top of the range. ARR and call-volume figures are Sacra-sourced, not company-published. [https://www.retellai.com](https://www.retellai.com) 3. **ElevenLabs Agents** (ElevenLabs) — Free 15 min/mo · Starter $6/mo (75 min) · Creator $22 (275 min) · Pro $99 · Business $990 (12,375 min) · overage $0.08/min; LLM/telephony at cost. Best for: Teams for whom the voice itself is the product — best-in-class synthesis, 70+ languages, and the cheapest credible entry into phone support. Why: The best voices in the business now bundled with an agent runtime: 4M+ agents deployed, phone/web/WhatsApp channels, and Eleven v3 Conversational (Feb 2026) tuned for turn-taking. Backed by an $11B company — $500M Series D, Feb 4, 2026 — so the model layer keeps compounding. At $0.08/min flat overage it undercuts most pure-plays. Watch: The agents platform is younger than the pure-plays; contact-center depth (warm transfers, compliance workflows, QA tooling) trails Vapi and Retell. Company attention is split across music, dubbing, and TTS — support agents are one product among many. Case-study stats (83.4% resolution, 4.6/5 CSAT) are vendor-published single customers. [https://elevenlabs.io/agents](https://elevenlabs.io/agents) 4. **Sierra (voice)** (Sierra (Bret Taylor)) — Outcome-based — pay per resolution, enterprise contracts only, no public rate card. Best for: Enterprises that want one agent across chat and phone, paid by resolved conversation rather than by the minute. Why: Voice surpassed text as Sierra's primary channel by October 2025 — the strongest signal that phone is where enterprise agent spend is going. $200M ARR by May 2026 (from $26M end-2024), a $950M Series E at $15.8B (GV/Tiger, May 2026), and Rocket Mortgage, SiriusXM, Vanguard, and Gap on the line. Outcome pricing puts the failure-tolerance risk on the vendor. Watch: No self-serve, no published pricing, enterprise sales cycle — startups get far more per dollar from Vapi or Retell. Outcome-based pricing only pencils at volume. Its chat side competes in element Sa; you're buying a suite, not a phone tool. [https://sierra.ai](https://sierra.ai) 5. **Bland** (Bland AI) — Start $0.14/min (no card) · Build $0.12/min + $299/mo · Scale $0.11/min + $499/mo · enterprise custom, VPC/on-prem — flat all-in rate, no model pass-throughs. Best for: Regulated and high-volume teams who want one predictable per-minute price and a self-hosted, single-vendor stack. Why: The vertically integrated bet: Bland runs its own STT/LLM/TTS (Bland Speech v3, Aug 2026) in its own infrastructure, so one flat rate covers everything — "no token charges, no surprise bills." $50M Series C (Jun 16, 2026; $100M+ total from Scale, Emergence, HubSpot, Dell) and 3.5M+ calls a week for Samsara, Kin Insurance, and CNO Financial. Watch: Flat rate costs more at low volume than Vapi with BYO keys ($0.14 vs ~$0.06/min). Closed stack: you take Bland's models, good or bad, and can't swap in the frontier model of the month. Valuation and ARR undisclosed. [https://www.bland.ai](https://www.bland.ai) ### How to choose - If Engineers are building your phone line and you want to swap models as the frontier moves → Vapi — $0.05/min platform, bring your own keys, and the best test/monitoring tooling in the category. - If An ops-led team needs agents in production this week with a predictable all-in rate → Retell for the transparent per-minute menu; Bland if you'd rather one flat rate and a single vendor to blame. - If Voice quality or multilingual coverage is the differentiator, or you're testing the channel on a budget → ElevenLabs Agents — 70+ languages, the best synthesis, and a $6/mo entry no pure-play matches. - If You're enterprise-scale, brand risk dominates, and you want the vendor to carry failure risk → Sierra's outcome-based pricing; in European or contact-center-first orgs, Parloa or PolyAI. - If You need latency and cost control at massive scale, or refuse platform lock-in → Build on LiveKit Agents or Pipecat — the open-source layer under half the platforms above — accepting you now own the whole pipeline. ### The field (16 more) Parloa, PolyAI, LiveKit Agents, Pipecat, Deepgram Voice Agent API, OpenAI Realtime API, Synthflow, Regal, Replicant, Phonely, Thoughtly, HappyRobot, Vocode (fading), Cognigy (acquired), Tenyx (acquired), Air AI (dead) Full dossier data: https://elems.ai/e/vs.json --- Source: [elems.ai](https://elems.ai/e/vs.html) — the periodic table of the AI-led startup. Data: https://elems.ai/elements.json (CC BY 4.0, cite elems.ai).