Retell charges by the piece. We charge by the minute.

We read Retell’s docs, pricing pages, and changelog, then checked what we could against our own live account and real test calls. Here’s what we found, gaps included.

Try a free demo callSee pricing

Our price, available now (Standard to Pro)

2¢ to 9¢/min

Phone numbers

Bring your own carrier on every plan, or add phone numbers from us

Retell, published list price

$0.07–$0.31/min

Retell’s own pricing-page example: about $0.11/min

Phone agents from 2 cents a minute. Lite 2 cents, Standard 5 cents and Pro 9 cents per minute, all available now. Our optional add-ons are coming soon and cannot be bought yet. Retell figures are Retell’s published list prices from retellai.com/pricing, retrieved October 1, 2026: “$0.07-$0.31 / min for AI Voice Agents”, and a worked example on the same page that comes to $0.11 per minute (LLM $0.04, voice infrastructure $0.055, text-to-speech $0.015, no telephony or add-ons). Configurations vary, so your own total will depend on the choices you make.

Feature by feature.

Grouped by where the work actually happens. Where Retell is ahead of us, we’ve said so.

Building the agent

Flow node types

Ahead

17 node types (extraction, KB lookup, agent handoff, payment, MCP call, subflows) vs Retell’s six.

Version history & environments

Have

Staging and production, instant re-routing on promote.

Test call in browser

Have

In-browser mic call, same idea as Retell’s shareable voice link.

Voice & language

Languages, real-call-verified

Partial

49 of Retell’s 55, but ahead on 5 they don’t have at all (Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Georgian, Telugu). The remaining 6 are blocked upstream, on speech recognition, not our text-to-speech.

Voice providers

Have

Kokoro, ElevenLabs, Cartesia, MiniMax vs ElevenLabs and PlayHT.

Telephony

In-call SMS

Ahead

A flow node, no extra charge. Retell sells this as a $20/mo add-on.

Voicemail detection, batch calling

Have

Both platforms support this; we haven’t independently confirmed Retell’s exact limits.

Tools & data

Payment collection

Ahead

We couldn’t find this on Retell’s side at all.

MCP server authentication

Ahead

Real OAuth 2.1 login for external MCP clients. Retell’s is unconfirmed beyond existing.

Knowledge base, custom functions, calendar booking

Have

Comparable depth on both sides.

After the call

Customizable dashboards

Gap

Retell shipped user-configurable dashboards; ours aren’t configurable yet.

Pricing

Price per minute

Have

Phone agents from 2 cents a minute. Lite 2 cents, Standard 5 cents and Pro 9 cents per minute, all available now. Retell lists $0.07 to $0.31 per minute depending on configuration, and its own pricing-page example comes to about $0.11 per minute. The ranges overlap, so this is a comparison of structure rather than a win either way: our tiers bundle the language model and voice into one per-minute rate, and phone numbers are a priced extra on every plan.

Free tier

Gap

Retell gives new accounts $10 in credit and 20 free concurrent calls. We don’t have a free tier yet.

Team & access

White-labeling

Neither

Confirmed absent on both sides.

Our side of this table is grounded in our own codebase and, where noted, real calls. Retell’s side comes from their public docs, pricing pages, and changelog — not a hands-on account audit — so treat it as directional rather than certain, and tell us if something’s changed on their end.

How we test it.

We place live calls against both agents with the same caller persona and the same goal, then have an independent judge score fluency and whether the goal was actually met.

The first Spanish run we placed surfaced a real gap: our receptionist template didn’t have pricing content seeded, so it transferred the caller with nothing resolved. Retell’s agent didn’t know the price either, but it offered a concrete appointment slot instead of a dead end. We shipped a fix the same day — a seeded knowledge-base node and a prompt that pivots to booking instead of transferring — and re-verified in English: the agent now collects a callback number and closes with a resolved next step.

We haven’t re-run the Spanish comparison against Retell since the fix, so we’re not claiming a rematch win here — just showing what happens when a test call finds something wrong.

Hear it yourself.

Place a real call to one of our demo agents. No account required.

Try a free demo callSee the ThunderPhone comparison