Telnyx Pricing (2026): Voice, SIP, and AI Agent Costs

Telnyx pricing starts at $0.002 per minute for the Voice API, but almost no call on Telnyx costs just $0.002. That figure is one of two lines on every call.

When you add the SIP trunk underneath, an outbound US call starts at $0.007 per minute, an inbound local call $0.0052, and a voice AI agent somewhere around $0.06 to $0.07 once everything's billed.

Back in October 2020, a FreePBX admin found Telnyx charging $0.07 a minute on local outbound calls, in a rate deck that priced most of the US at half a cent.

We went through every Telnyx rate card that matters for voice, so you can price a real month of calls, including the voice-agent math that Telnyx's own estimator leaves out.

Telnyx Pricing at a Glance

Pricing verified against Telnyx's pricing pages on 26 October 2026. Verify with the vendor before you commit.

How Telnyx Voice Pricing Works: The Two-Line Bill

Telnyx voice pricing splits every call into two per-minute charges, and the Voice API pricing page says so up front: "the API and the SIP trunk it rides." Both land on the same invoice.

Telnyx can publish both lines because it runs its own carrier network, so the SIP rate is its own rate with no reseller in between. That's Telnyx's pitch, and the Twilio table further down mostly backs it up.

Line 1: The Voice API Fee

The Voice API costs $0.002 per minute, flat, for outbound calls, inbound calls to local numbers, and inbound calls to toll-free numbers.

TeXML (Telnyx's TwiML-compatible markup) bills at the same $0.002, and so do browser and app calls over WebRTC. Telnyx says a TwiML app "runs unchanged" when you point it at Telnyx. (Lovely if true, but run your test suite before you move production traffic anyway.)

Line 2: SIP Trunking

The SIP trunking rate card is where the call's real cost lives:

• Outbound local calls: from $0.005 per minute

• Outbound calls to toll-free numbers: free

• Inbound local calls: from $0.0032 per minute

• Inbound toll-free calls: from $0.015 per minute, depending on the calling number

When you stack the two lines, you get the per-minute rate you'll see on your invoice:

That $0.007 outbound figure is the one Telnyx uses in its own Twilio comparison, and it's the honest headline for an outbound US call.

If you bring your own PBX or SIP stack (FreePBX, Asterisk, or a framework that speaks SIP), you pay the SIP line alone. Telnyx's own example prices 250,000 SIP minutes at 60% outbound at $1,070 a month.

Inbound Channel Billing: When a Flat Fee Wins

Channels switch inbound pricing from per minute to per unit of capacity. Each channel carries one concurrent inbound call with unlimited minutes, pooled across every number you assign to channel billing.

• First 10 channels: $12 per month each

• Next 40 channels: $11 per month each

• Next 200 channels: $9 per month each

• 250+ channels: $8 per month each

At $12 a channel against $0.0032 a minute, a channel pays for itself once it carries more than 3,750 inbound minutes a month. That's roughly two hours of talk time per channel, every day.

Optional Voice Features and What They Cost

Every feature is its own line item, and nothing turns on unless you call it. This is great for your bill but slightly terrifying for your forecast.

• Call recording: $0.002 per minute, with $0 storage

• Conference calls: $0.002 per participant, per minute

• Call transfer: $0.10 per invocation

• Answering machine detection: $0.002 per call standard, $0.0065 per call premium

• Media streaming over WebSockets: $0.0035 per minute

• Noise suppression: $0.002 per leg per minute, or $0.005 with Krisp

• Speech-to-text: from $0.0015 per minute (Parakeet) to $0.027 (Azure), with Deepgram Nova 3 at $0.005

• Deepfake detection: $0.01 per invocation

Watch the transfer fee. At $0.10 a go, it's 50 times the per-minute Voice API rate, and a voice agent that hands lots of calls to humans will feel it (Scenario 2 below puts a number on it).

Phone Numbers and E911

Telnyx numbers are cheap and get cheaper at volume:

• Local and toll-free numbers: from $1.00 per month, with automatic discounts once you buy more than 50 numbers in a month, stepping down to $0.79, $0.50, $0.39, and finally $0.25 per month past 5,000 numbers a month

• SMS and MMS on a number: an extra $0.10 per month

• 800 toll-free numbers: $500 one-time for a 12-month term, then $40 per month

• E911: $1.50 per number, per month

HD Voice is free, too. Telnyx dropped its $1 monthly HD Voice charge on US long-code numbers in July 2025.

Telnyx Voice AI Agent Pricing

Telnyx's Voice AI Agents price is $0.05 per minute for the voice engine, and that sticker covers:

• Orchestration: turn-taking, interruption handling, tools, and knowledge base retrieval

• Speech-to-text: Deepgram and Telnyx STT, hosted on Telnyx

• Text-to-speech: Telnyx Ultra, Natural, NaturalHD, Qwen3TTS, Inworld, Rime, Resemble, and Murf

Everything else bills on top:

The rounding rule is where the bill grows. Telnyx bills the engine on connected time, rounded up per call, so a 15-second call bills as 60 seconds and a 90-second call as 120. You aren't charged for ringing or failed attempts.

Telnyx says a production agent "lands near $0.06 per minute." Its on-page estimator gets there with $0.05 + $0.0032 + $0.0064 and a footnote that excludes per-call rounding. Telnyx's own FAQ adds the $0.002 Voice API fee to the phone call, which the estimator also skips.

Fold those two back in and a realistic agent lands nearer $0.07 per connected minute. Short calls push it higher.

The bundle is where Telnyx separates from orchestration platforms. Vapi's $0.05 a minute is a hosting fee, with STT, TTS, and the LLM passed through at cost and telephony billed by your carrier (our Vapi pricing breakdown walks through that stack).

Retell's voice engine is $0.055 per minute, with TTS from $0.015 and the LLM billed on top, as our Retell per-minute pricing guide shows.

Telnyx put AI Assistant avatars into beta in October, with billing starting November 1, 2026. It's opt-in per conversation, so it won't touch a voice-only agent.

Telnyx Plans: Pay As You Go, Growth, and Enterprise

Telnyx plans are built around a monthly commitment. Every plan runs the same platform, models, and network, and a bigger commitment buys discounts, support, and headroom.

When Growth Pays Off

The 15% discount is narrower than it looks. It applies to the Voice, Messaging, and Numbers lines only. The voice engine and LLM tokens bill at the same rate on every plan, so the 15% doesn’t touch them.

If you're a telephony customer whose Voice, Messaging, and Numbers spend clears $2,000 anyway, Growth is a free 15% off. For a voice-agent customer, the discount is only about $48 a month on the roughly $3,600 bill in Scenario 2.

At that size, the 24/7 phone support is the better reason to commit.

Free Credits and Trial Accounts

New accounts start on a Pretrial tier with $25 in AI credits and a free US local number, with no card required.

Pretrial covers AI products only, though. Voice and Messaging need an upgraded account, and upgrading swaps the $25 AI credit for $5 you can spend on any product.

What Telnyx Costs per Month: 3 Worked Scenarios

These scenarios are illustrative. Each one uses the published pay-as-you-go rates above, before taxes, volume tiers, and plan discounts.

1. Telnyx's Own 100,000-Minute Example

Telnyx's Voice API page prices 100,000 minutes a month at 60% outbound:

That's about $0.0063 per minute. Numbers, E911, recording, and taxes are on top.

2. A Voice Agent Taking 20,000 Inbound Calls

Picture a healthcare scheduling agent on Telnyx's Voice AI Agents, with 20,000 inbound calls a month on 10 local numbers, averaging 2 minutes 30 seconds connected, running Kimi on Telnyx GPUs. Every call rounds up to 3 billed minutes.

Per connected minute, that's about $0.072. Billed to the second, the same month would come to about $3,070, so per-call rounding adds roughly $550 on its own.

Now add a human handoff on 20% of calls. At $0.10 per transfer, that's another $400 a month, more than double the SIP line.

3. Your Own Agent Stack on Telnyx Telephony

Plenty of teams build on Pipecat or LiveKit and use Telnyx only as the phone line, streaming call audio to their own agent over WebSockets. Here's 50,000 billed inbound minutes with recording on:

That's about $0.011 per minute for the phone layer. Your STT, LLM, TTS, and hosting bills arrive separately.

Costs on Top of the Telnyx Rate Card

Telnyx's SIP trunking, Voice API, and numbers pricing pages all come with the same footnote: carrier passthrough and taxes vary by destination. There are three costs behind that.

60-Second Billing Increments

Telnyx bills calls in 60/60 increments, where an 11-second call costs a full minute, and a 96-second call costs two. It no longer offers 6-second billing.

On long inbound support calls, you'll barely notice. On an outbound dialer that hits voicemail all day, every 8-second call bills as 60.

Short-Duration Call Surcharges

Telnyx treats outbound calls of 6 seconds or less as short-duration calls and allows them to make up 15% of your connected outbound calls over the calendar month.

Cross that line at any point and Telnyx emails you. If you're still over at month-end, the penalty applies to every short call you made that month, and international short calls carry a $0.01 fee per call once you're over 15%.

Tune answering machine detection and retry logic before you scale an outbound agent, because Telnyx says it doesn't support use cases that require short-duration calls.

Taxes and Regulatory Fees

Telnyx passes through the federal Universal Service Fund (USF) and Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) fees on the interconnected VoIP portion of its US telecom, VoIP, and Programmable Voice services (inbound and outbound).

State and local sales and telecom taxes apply on top, based on your service address (Telnyx tax article).

The FCC resets the USF contribution factor every quarter, and its proposed Q4 2026 factor is 42.0%, applied to interstate and international end-user telecom revenue.

Telnyx won't estimate taxes in advance, so budget a buffer and read the tax section of your first invoice line by line.

Telnyx vs Twilio Pricing

Telnyx is cheaper than Twilio on published US list rates, and the difference is biggest on outbound calls:

Run Telnyx's 100,000-minute example through Twilio's Programmable Voice list rates, and the same month costs $1,180 against Telnyx's $628. Twilio's figures come from its US voice pricing page and its US SIP trunking pricing page, both current as of August 2026.

List rates leave out volume and committed pricing on both sides, and Telnyx's own comparison table admits as much.

Is Telnyx Worth the Cost?

Telnyx's published US rates undercut Twilio's on every voice line in the table above. For a voice agent, you also need to know what each dollar buys once callers start behaving like callers.

Cekura's voice agent platform benchmark ran the same appointment and Medicare agents through 82 caller scenarios, three runs each, on nine platforms (updated October 22, 2026). Telnyx's agent platform finished like this:

• Task completion: 97.56%, tied for second of nine

• Infrastructure-clean calls: 100%, tied for first, with no connection, audio, or platform failures across 246 calls

• Mean response time: 1.82 seconds, third fastest

• Repeatable reliability (pass³): 68.29% of scenarios passed all three runs, fifth of nine

• Interruption handling: 4.63 out of 5, ninth of nine

These are relative scores under one fixed test setup, so treat them as a shortlist signal and validate on your own traffic.

Read together, they describe a platform that's cheap and dependable at the network layer, more likely to talk over a caller who pauses mid-sentence, and less consistent run to run. A scenario that passes once and fails on the rerun is a call you paid $0.05 a minute for and still have to fix.

Telnyx is worth it if you:

• Run high-volume US calling, where a few tenths of a cent per minute compounds fast

• Want telephony, STT, TTS, LLM tokens, and numbers on one invoice

• Need HIPAA readiness without a plan upgrade (Telnyx says it's included on every plan)

Skip Telnyx, or test hard first, if you:

• Make lots of very short outbound calls, where 60-second rounding and the short-call policy bite

• Serve callers who pause or hesitate a lot

• Need a ready-made phone system for human agents, since Telnyx sells APIs and you build the app

Catch Expensive Call Failures Before They Reach Your Telnyx Bill

Telnyx pricing rewards teams that know their traffic in terms of average call length, transfer rate, how often callers interrupt, and how many outbound calls end in six seconds or less. Most teams learn those numbers from their first invoice.

Every failed booking, botched handoff, and rerun still bills by the minute. And as the benchmark shows, a platform can pass a scenario once and miss it on the next run, which no single test call will catch.

Cekura runs those calls before your customers do.

It can send a SIP INVITE straight to your agent's SIP endpoint, tagging each call with run and scenario IDs, so you can stress-test any agent with a SIP endpoint or phone number, wherever it runs.

With Cekura, teams can:

• Simulate thousands of caller scenarios, including interruptions, background noise, and adversarial users, before a prompt or model change ships

• Test infrastructure behavior like latency, voice activity detection, and turn-taking under real call conditions

• Replay production calls with the original audio against a new agent version

• Gate releases in CI with Tests as Code, so a regression fails the build

• Monitor live calls for drop-offs, negative sentiment, and missed workflow steps

• Red-team agents for jailbreaks, prompt injection, and data extraction

Native integrations cover Retell, Vapi, ElevenLabs, LiveKit, Pipecat, and Bland, and Cekura is SOC 2-, HIPAA-, and GDPR-compliant for transcript redaction, role-based access, and audit trails. Pay as you go is free for the first user, then $0.25 per voice testing minute.

When every call flow is tested before launch, your Telnyx bill pays for conversations that finish the job.

Book a demo to see simulations, call replays, and live-call monitoring run against your own agent.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Telnyx Cheaper Than Twilio?

Telnyx is cheaper than Twilio on published US list rates. An outbound local call starts at $0.007 per minute on Telnyx against $0.014 on Twilio, and a local number costs $1.00 a month against $1.15. Volume and committed-use discounts on either side can change the math.

Does Telnyx Have a Free Plan?

Telnyx has no free Voice API plan, but pay-as-you-go has no monthly fee. New accounts get $25 in AI credits for AI products such as AI Assistants, plus a free US local number, with no card required. Upgrading to use Voice and Messaging replaces that with a $5 credit for any product.

Is Telnyx HIPAA Compliant?

Telnyx says HIPAA readiness is included on every plan, including pay-as-you-go.

Its HIPAA guidance is written for customers with a Business Associate Addendum and limits PHI to HIPAA-eligible services. AI features that touch PHI have to run on Telnyx-hosted models, so confirm which products your BAA covers before routing patient calls.

How Does Telnyx Bill Calls?

Telnyx bills calls per minute in 60-second increments. An 11-second call bills as 60 seconds, and voice AI engine minutes round up per call the same way. Ringing and failed attempts aren't charged on voice AI calls.

Does Telnyx Charge a Monthly Fee?

Telnyx charges no platform or support fee on pay-as-you-go. Monthly costs come from numbers (from $1.00 each), E911 ($1.50 per number), any inbound channels, and the $2,000 or $5,000 minimum spend if you commit to Growth or Enterprise.