The per-minute rate
Calls are billed at $0.12 per minute of conversation, counted from the moment the agent answers to the moment the call ends. You pay for the actual length of the call rather than a rounded-up whole minute.
The rate covers everything the agent does during the call. Looking things up in your knowledge, running a workflow, calling one of your API tools — none of them add a separate charge.
A blocked caller costs nothing at all, because the call is refused before it is answered.
How Yaplet credits work
Call minutes are metered in Yaplet credits, the same unit that meters AI chat replies and other AI features, so everything AI-related shows up in one place instead of half a dozen.
If you hold a prepaid credit balance, call minutes are taken from it first. Whatever the balance does not cover is billed as metered usage on your subscription invoice, in your subscription's currency. Metered usage is billed as it accrues during the period rather than only at renewal, so you may see interim usage invoices between renewals — this never moves your renewal date.
Where to see your usage
| Where | What you see |
|---|---|
| Brand → Voice → the agent → Call history | Every call that agent handled, with its duration and cost, for a date range that defaults to the last 30 days. This is the per-agent view. |
| Communications → Inbox | The call itself, as a conversation with its transcript and recording. |
| Settings → Organization settings → Billing | Your credit usage across the whole organisation, alongside every other Yaplet usage line. |
There is no per-number minute summary anywhere. If you want to know what one number cost, look at the Call history of the agent it rings.
The caps that protect you
| Cap | Value | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Simultaneous calls | A generous ceiling per organisation | Once that many calls are already in progress, the next one is not answered — it is dropped before the greeting, and costs nothing. Stops a flood of calls emptying your balance. The ceiling can be raised on request. |
| Maximum call length | 15 minutes | The call is ended at the ceiling regardless of what is happening. A backstop against a call that never hangs up. |
| Silence on the line | About 25 seconds | After roughly ten seconds of silence the agent asks whether the caller is still there. If nothing comes back, it says goodbye and hangs up rather than billing an empty line. |
| Recordings kept | 100 per organisation | Past 100, the oldest recordings are removed to make room. Transcripts are unaffected by this cap. |
There is also a twelve-second safety timer on ending a call: once the agent decides the conversation is over, the line drops even if the farewell goes wrong. That closed a long-standing problem where an agent thanked the caller, got cut off, started thanking them again, and never hung up — while the minutes kept counting.
Planning a launch or a campaign that could have a lot of people phoning at the same time? Contact support a few days beforehand and we will tell you where your ceiling sits and raise it if you need more.
Cost examples
At the standard rate:
- A 90-second reception call — about $0.18.
- A 4-minute support call — about $0.48.
- An 8-minute sales call — about $0.96.
- 500 calls a month averaging 3 minutes — about $180 a month, plus number rental.
Number rental and setup fees are separate and appear as subscription lines, not as credits.
Stopping voice charges
Two different charges, two different actions, and confusing them is the expensive mistake:
- To stop per-minute charges, pause every voice agent at Brand → Voice — the ⋯ menu on each card. A paused agent answers nothing, so nothing is metered.
- To stop the monthly number rental, release each number at Settings → Organization settings → Phone numbers. Only the organisation owner can do this. The unused part of the current month is credited to your account balance; the setup fee is not refunded.
Pausing an agent does not stop the rental. Neither does deleting the agent, and neither does deleting the whole brand — in both cases the numbers stay on the organisation, unassigned, still billing until somebody releases them.
A release can fail visibly if our telephony provider refuses to hand the number back; you get an error saying nothing was removed. Retrying is safe.
One reporting gap to know about
Calls answered by a brand that has no Vex chat AI are billed per minute and transcribed exactly as normal, but they do not appear in the AI answer-quality reports. Those figures are kept per chat AI, so a phone-only brand simply has nothing to attribute them to. It is a reporting gap, not a billing one — you are charged either way.
What to read next
For number rental and setup fees, see Phone number setup fees and monthly rental. For exactly what each kind of deletion does and does not stop, see What happens to your phone numbers when you delete things.