Cost Routing

Learn more about how your Vapi account is billed for provider expenses.

Provider expenses can either end up provider-side, or at-cost in your Vapi account.

During calls, requests will be made to different providers in the voice pipeline:

  • transcription providers: providers conducting speech-to-text
  • model providers: LLM providers
  • voice providers: providers conducting text-to-speech
  • telephony providers: providers like Twilio/Vonage that facilitate phone calls

Per-minute telephony costs only occur during inbound/outbound phone calling. Web calls do not incur this cost.

Where Provider Costs End-up

There are 2 places these charges can end up:

  1. Provider-side: in the account you have with the provider.
  2. With Vapi: in your Vapi account.

Billing That “Just Works”

The central idea is that everything is designed to “just work”.

Whether you are billed provider-side, or on Vapi’s side, you will never be charged with any margin for provider fees incurred during calls.