AI Call Centre Costs, Pricing and ROI

Research date: 22 September 2026. Last updated: 22 September 2026.

Published AI call centre pricing runs from $0.038 per voice minute on infrastructure you build yourself to $240 per user per month for a full enterprise platform. A ten-agent team typically lands between $150 and $2,400 a month depending on which of four pricing models you buy. Several major vendors publish no price at all.

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 22 September 2026 and carries its source. Where a vendor publishes nothing, this page says so rather than estimating.

What actually drives the price

Six variables move the number more than the vendor you pick.

How the AI is metered. Per seat, per minute, per automated resolution or per credit pool. At the same call volume these produce wildly different bills, and the difference is larger than the difference between vendors.

Your call volume, in minutes. Not calls. A four-minute average handling time doubles the cost of a two-minute one on any usage-based plan.

Seat count. Per-seat pricing punishes large teams with low volume; usage pricing punishes small teams with high volume.

Integration depth. Reading a CRM is cheap. Writing into it during the call is where implementation cost appears.

Concurrency at peak. Several vendors charge for concurrent capacity separately from usage.

Compliance requirements. HIPAA, on-premise deployment and data residency commitments frequently move a deal from published pricing to a custom contract.

The four pricing models, compared

Per seat or per agent. Genesys Cloud CX runs $75, $115, $155 and $240 per user per month across four tiers, billed annually. Talkdesk publishes $85, $105, $165 and $225. Five9 publishes $119 and $159 for its lower two tiers with three higher tiers quote-only, priced per concurrent user with a 50-seat minimum. Predictable, and expensive if your agents are not busy. Sources: genesys.com/pricing, talkdesk.com/pricing, five9.com/pricing, read 22 September 2026.

Per minute. Amazon Connect charges $0.038 per voice minute plus telephony. Retell AI runs $0.07 to $0.31 per minute depending on model, voice and add-ons. Costs track usage exactly, which suits variable and seasonal volume. Sources: aws.amazon.com/connect/pricing, retellai.com/pricing, read 22 September 2026.

Per outcome. Zendesk bills AI agents on automated resolutions — in its words, you "pay only for customer requests that were successfully resolved by the AI agent, without any escalation to a human agent." The most buyer-aligned model published by any vendor here. Source: zendesk.com/pricing, read 22 September 2026.

Bundled minutes with overage. Brilo publishes Pro at $149 per month for 600 minutes with overage at $0.16, and Growth at $499 for 2,500 minutes with overage at $0.14. A floor plus a marginal rate, which makes a forecast possible. Source: brilo.ai/pricing, read 22 September 2026.

Typical monthly cost by team size

Assumptions: four-minute average handling time, moderate integration, published list prices with no negotiated discount. These are illustrations, not quotes.

The per-seat column is seat licences only. It excludes the AI, which on Genesys is metered in AI Experience tokens and on Five9 is a catalogue of separately priced add-ons with no published rates.

The costs nobody puts on the pricing page

This is where budgets break, and it is the section competitors will not write.

Implementation and integration build. The published price assumes the integration exists. If the agent must write into a system the vendor does not support natively, someone builds that, and on infrastructure products like Amazon Connect the entire call flow is a build.

Overage. Know your marginal rate before you sign. Brilo publishes $0.16 and $0.14 per minute on its two paid tiers; many vendors do not publish theirs at all.

Concurrency. Retell AI includes 20 concurrent calls and charges $8 per additional concurrency per month. At seasonal peak this is a real line item. Source: retellai.com/pricing, read 22 September 2026.

Add-ons that sound like core features. Zendesk's voice is an $83 per agent per month Contact Center add-on and Copilot is $50 per agent per month, both on top of a Suite licence that starts at $19.

Telephony. Amazon Connect's $0.038 is the platform rate. Standard telephony rates apply on top.

The minimum you cannot avoid. Five9's 50-seat floor is not a discount threshold. Below it you cannot buy.

What competitors charge, where they publish it

Four of the eleven vendors examined for the providers comparison publish nothing usable. Dialpad routes contact centre pricing to sales and prices its AI Agent on an undisclosed credit pool. PolyAI describes per-minute pricing without rates. Cresta has no pricing page at all — cresta.com/pricing returned HTTP 404 on 22 September 2026. Nextiva publishes $75 per agent per month for contact centre Essential, but the two tiers carrying the advanced AI are the two it does not price.

Treat an unpublished price as a longer evaluation, not a higher one. It usually means the deal is configured rather than bought.

What doing nothing costs

Every ROI case needs a baseline, and most skip it. Work yours out before you look at a quote, because it is the number the finance conversation actually turns on.

Pull three figures you already have. Abandoned calls per month — callers who hung up before reaching anyone. Calls arriving outside staffed hours, which for most operations go to voicemail or nowhere. And your conversion rate on answered calls, or if you do not track it, your average order or case value.

Multiply abandoned plus after-hours calls by your conversion rate by your average value. That is revenue you are not booking today, monthly, and it is usually larger than the entire cost of the software. For an operation losing 200 calls a month at a 20% conversion rate and £150 average value, the arithmetic is 200 × 0.2 × £150, or £6,000 a month.

The reason this matters more than the labour saving: a labour saving requires you to actually remove or redeploy a person, which is a decision with consequences. Recovered calls require nobody to be let go. Most successful deployments are justified on the second, not the first.

What is actually negotiable

List price is a starting position for everything except self-serve tiers.

Annual commitment. Nearly universal. Brilo publishes a 10% annual discount; most enterprise vendors discount more steeply for a multi-year term.

The overage rate, more readily than the base price. Vendors protect headline pricing and will often move on the marginal rate, which is what you actually pay at volume.

Implementation fees, frequently waived or reduced to close a quarter.

Seat minimums, occasionally, though Five9's 50-seat floor is structural rather than a discount threshold.

Contract term and exit. The most valuable concession on a first deployment is not price but a short initial term. You are buying something whose containment rate you cannot yet predict, so the right ask is a six-month term with a genuine exit, not a discount on three years.

What is rarely negotiable: published per-minute infrastructure rates, and anything metered by a third party such as telephony or model costs.

The ROI arithmetic, written out

Model cost per resolved call, not cost per minute. A platform resolving 40% of calls is more expensive than a dearer one resolving 75%, because every unresolved call still costs you an agent.

Take a team handling 2,000 calls a month at a four-minute average, with a fully loaded agent cost of £18 an hour.

Today: 2,000 × 4 minutes = 8,000 minutes, or 133 hours of talk time. Allowing for the fact that agents are not on calls continuously, that is roughly 1.5 full-time agents of pure call handling.

With AI at 70% containment on routine calls: 1,400 calls resolved without a human. 600 calls still reach your team, or 40 hours of talk time.

The saving is 93 hours of agent time a month. At £18 fully loaded, roughly £1,674.

The cost at 8,000 minutes is around $499 plus overage on a bundled plan, or $560 to $2,480 on a per-minute one.

The arithmetic works at almost any realistic containment rate above about 40%. Where it stops working is set out below.

When this is not worth buying

A genuine disqualification, because a page that says every buyer should buy is not a pricing page.

Your call volume is low. Under roughly 200 calls a month, the free and entry tiers cover you, but so does an answering service, and the configuration effort may not repay itself.

Your calls are not routine. If most of your volume is complex, emotional or requires professional judgement, containment will be low and you will pay for an agent that escalates almost everything.

You have no system for the AI to write into. Without an integration the agent takes messages. That has value, but it is not the value the pricing assumes.

Nobody owns it. These deployments need someone reading transcripts and tuning intents, a few hours a month indefinitely. Without that owner, containment decays and the spend becomes waste.

Your compliance demands on-premise. That moves you to a custom contract and a different cost base entirely.

How to get a comparable quote

Ask every vendor the same six things, in writing, before the demo: the metering model; the marginal rate once the allowance is exhausted; the concurrency limit on the quoted plan and the cost of more; what implementation is included versus billed; the contract term and minimum; and which of the capabilities in the proposal are add-ons.

Then convert every quote to cost per resolved call at your volume. It is the only figure that compares a per-seat licence with a per-minute rate honestly.

Related reading

For the vendor-by-vendor detail behind the prices here, see the AI call centre providers comparison and the AI agents for call centres roundup. If variable volume is your reason for looking, call centre automation covers the surrounding work, and smaller operations should start with the smaller teams guide.

Brilo publishes a free tier, $149 per month Pro and $499 per month Growth, with overage rates on both and a 10% annual discount. It is an AI voice agent, not a contact centre platform. Source: brilo.ai/pricing, read 22 September 2026.