Bland AI pricing in 2026: what a minute really costs

At a glance

Bland sells a platform for building AI phone agents, inbound and outbound, billed by the minute. It is built for developers and for large companies in regulated fields, and on Enterprise its own engineers build the first agent with you. TalaLevel is a sales CRM, and on its Scale plan Joey is a finished AI caller inside it, billed by the seat with the minutes included. Most of the differences below come from that one choice.

Bland AI pricing, and what a minute really costs

Bland’s pricing page lists three plans:

• Start, $0 a month. $0.14 a minute, $0.05 a minute for transferred time, 100 calls a day, 100 an hour and 10 at once. No card needed; you get $2 of credit and one phone number.
• Build, $299 a month. $0.12 a minute, $0.04 for transferred time, 2,000 calls a day, 1,000 an hour and 50 at once.
• Enterprise, custom. Priced to your volume. Texting, warm transfers, scheduling, guardrails, your own pools of caller IDs, a HIPAA BAA, SSO and Bland’s forward-deployed engineers are ticked on this plan only.

The minute covers the AI. The rest of the bill is in Bland’s billing docs: a minimum of $0.015 on every outbound dial made on Bland’s phone lines, failed ones included; transferred time billed on top of the call’s own minutes; voicemail billed as call time; $15 a month for each US or Canadian number after the free one; $0.02 a text where texting is on; and Norm, the AI that helps you build agents, billed by the token. Calling from the lead’s local area code needs a dashboard add-on whose price isn’t public.

The phone line itself is the open question. Bland’s pricing page says telephony is billed separately, “on your own carrier or Bland’s at pass-through cost”, and its comparison with Vapi says the same. Its homepage says one rate covers “the language model, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and telephony.” In April 2026 the pricing page said telephony was included; by July it said separate. Bland doesn’t print its pass-through rate. Its pricing page describes its own lines as Twilio at pass-through cost, and Twilio’s price list puts a US outbound minute at $0.014.

The rates have moved before. Until December 2025 every Bland plan paid a flat $0.09 a minute; since then the rate depends on the plan. Bland’s docs still list a Scale plan at $499 a month and $0.11 a minute, which its pricing page still showed in early September 2026 and no longer does.

Joey is on TalaLevel’s Scale plan, $247 a seat a month, which includes 5,000 AI credits a seat. A minute of Joey uses about 10 credits, so a seat covers about 500 minutes. More credits are $10 per 1,000, about 10 cents a minute, with the phone line, the voice, the model, the transcript and the recording inside. The same seat is the CRM, a power dialer on up to ten lines, 6,000 texts and ten numbers, email from your Gmail and Tala. A year costs ten months.

Worked through for a month of calling:

Not in Bland’s sums: the phone line; the per-dial minimum, which comes to $15 for every 1,000 outbound dials; transferred minutes; numbers after the first; and the local caller ID add-on.

On minutes alone, Bland’s Start plan costs less than Joey at 500 and 2,000 minutes, and the two are level around 5,000, before Bland’s phone line. Start stops at 100 calls a day and 10 at once, though, which is at most 3,000 calls in a 30-day month. Past that you are on Build, which costs more than Joey at every volume above. And Bland’s minutes come with nothing around them: the CRM your leads live in, texting, and a dialer for your reps are separate bills.

If you have reps as well, four reps on Scale cost 4 × $247 = $988 a month, and their 20,000 credits cover about 2,000 minutes of Joey.

What you build before the first call

Bland gives you the parts. Before an outbound list can be called, someone on your side puts these together, in Bland’s dashboard or through its API:

• The agent. A prompt, or a flow in Pathways, Bland’s visual designer for branching calls with tools and variables. Agents have development, staging and production versions, and Bland’s docs warn that attaching a number “is not the same as putting the current agent into service”: you publish and promote it.
• The numbers. One free number, more at $15 a month in the US or Canada, or your own Twilio account connected with its account ID and token. Calling from a local area code needs a paid add-on; your own pools of caller IDs are Enterprise only.
• Voicemail. “By default, Bland hangs up on voicemail,” its docs say. “Nothing is left behind.” You set the message, and any retries, yourself.
• The list. A CSV with a column named exactly phone_number, each number with its country code. One bad row rejects the whole file.
• Calling hours. Each call takes a start time, which defaults to UTC. For handing calls to a person during opening hours, Bland’s own guide says there is no business-hours setting and the check is yours to write.
• The CRM. Bland isn’t one. HubSpot and Salesforce connect by signing in, then you set up the tools, triggers and sync you want; anything else goes through webhooks and your own code.
• Texting. On Enterprise only, apart from the one-number Agent Phone Plan. For your own Twilio numbers, you register them with the carriers through Twilio yourself.

Bland’s own estimates vary. “Most teams deploy a first agent within a day on the self-serve plans,” says its pricing page; its homepage says most production agents “go live in two to six weeks”, and Enterprise customers get a 28-day plan with Bland’s engineers. The G2 reviews shown on Bland’s AWS Marketplace listing rate it 4.9 from 11 reviews, and the main complaint is the start. “Getting started is hard,” wrote one reviewer who runs outbound lead-generation calls on it. Another, who builds for clients: “It takes about 2-4 weeks to really understand Bland AI and be able to build complex use cases.” A third found setup “super simple” and done in 24 hours.

With Joey there is nothing to put together. You write his guide in plain words: your business, who you call, how the call goes, the greeting, the voice, how fast he speaks. Or you talk it through with Tala, the assistant in the app. Nothing is live until you press Go live, and he only calls a list a person sets running from the Calls page. There’s no code, no phone numbers bought elsewhere and no model or voice accounts to set up. You can talk to Joey in the browser at talalevel.com/ai-caller for up to three minutes before you sign up.

Calling a list

Both will work through a list of phone numbers. The difference is how much of the calling is already decided for you.

Joey calls from 9am to 8pm in each lead’s own time zone. He leaves one voicemail at most for each lead on each list, in words you approved. Every call is recorded, transcribed and filed on the lead, and a rep can listen in and take the call over while it’s going. If you switch it on, he sends one text, in words you set, when none of a run’s calls reach a lead.

Bland gives you the controls, and its defaults are yours to change. Calls go out from Bland’s pool of numbers unless you set your own. Voicemail hangs up unless you set a message. Recording is off in the API unless you turn it on, and on in the dashboard’s batch wizard. Numbers on your do-not-call list, and duplicates, are dropped when the batch dials. Start allows 10 calls at once and Build 50, and calls past the daily or hourly cap are turned away. Bland can also call each new lead within seconds of a form or a CRM change, which Joey doesn’t do: he works the lists you set running.

Whichever you pick, judge it by people reached, not minutes used. On our own floor, over the same ten weeks, a person answered 5.9% of Joey’s calls and 8.4% of our reps’ calls.

After the call

On Bland, calls land in its Conversations list with the transcript and, if recording was on, the audio. A webhook sends each call’s details to your systems when it ends, and HubSpot or Salesforce sync writes summaries back to the contact once you set it up. A call can be transferred to your number, with the transferred minutes billed on top of the call; warm transfers, where the agent briefs your rep first, are on Enterprise. Bland’s live listening is an API that streams a call’s audio.

In TalaLevel the call is already where your team works. Joey’s calls sit on the lead next to the reps’ calls, texts and emails, and a rep can listen to any of them and take one over. The follow-up runs from the same lead: texts from your own numbers, email from your Gmail, and Tala, who answers leads by text, books calls and follows up.

Who each is built for

Bland calls itself an enterprise voice AI platform for high-volume, regulated phone work in healthcare, insurance, financial services and logistics, and says more than 230 regulated companies run on it. Its self-serve plans are labelled “For developers” and “For teams”, and most of the people reviewing it build agents, often for clients. It answers inbound calls, speaks more than 40 languages, connects to your own carrier, and holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, with a HIPAA BAA on Enterprise.

TalaLevel is a sales CRM for any team that sells by phone and text, from one rep to a full floor, and sales teams outside our own floor run on it today. Joey is one part of the Scale seat, next to the power dialer, texting, email and Tala. You buy it on the website with a seven-day trial and a card on file, pay monthly and cancel anytime. Joey calls in the US, in English, outbound only, and isn’t a kit for building your own agent.

Which to pick

Pick TalaLevel if

• You’re a sales team and want an AI caller working your lists this week, without building an agent or connecting a phone carrier and a CRM.
• You want the minutes priced with the phone line, voice, model, transcript and recording inside: about 10 cents a minute past the seat’s 500.
• You want calling hours, voicemail and recording settled for you: 9am to 8pm in the lead’s time zone, one voicemail at most, every call recorded and filed on the lead.
• You want your reps and the AI caller in one app, with a rep able to listen in and take over.
• You’d outgrow Bland’s Start plan. Joey costs less than Build at every volume worked out above.

Pick Bland if

• You’re a developer building a voice agent into your own product, with its API, webhooks and your own carrier.
• You need inbound calls answered, calls outside the US, or languages other than English.
• You want each new lead called within seconds of a form, triggered by your own systems.
• Your security review needs SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 or a HIPAA BAA.
• You make a few hundred minutes of calls a month and already have a CRM: Bland’s Start plan has no monthly fee.

How we compared

We read Bland’s pricing page, billing docs, help pages and terms in November 2026, along with older copies of its pricing page to see what changed this year. Joey’s price is from TalaLevel’s own pricing page, checked the same month.