Quick answer: ElevenLabs Agents costs less than Bland AI at both workloads we priced, unless you run one of its dearest models. 4,000 outbound US calls (10,000 minutes) cost $995.22 a month on ElevenLabs Pro with GPT-5 Mini and your own Twilio numbers, against $1,664.00 on Bland’s Build plan, as at 12 November 2026.
“Bland AI vs ElevenLabs: which one should I put on my phone lines?” This page compares Bland AI (bland.ai), which runs its own language, speech and transcription models, with ElevenLabs Agents (branded ElevenAgents), which pairs ElevenLabs speech with a language model you choose. Every figure was read on Bland’s, ElevenLabs’ and Twilio’s own pages on 12 November 2026, in US dollars, excluding tax such as Australian GST. The choice turns on what a minute includes, who supplies the phone line and how many calls a plan lets you place.
Where Zian fits if you want agents, not a build
Zian AI is our platform pick when what you want is calls answered and appointments booked, not a voice stack to assemble on Bland or ElevenLabs. If you would rather have the whole job run for you, LeadsNow.ai is the done-for-you pick: a managed, pay-per-result appointment-setting and lead-generation service that runs on Zian, with leads answered in under 60 seconds, 24/7.
Bland and ElevenLabs sell the parts of a phone agent by the minute; on their self-serve plans your team still writes the prompts, wires the CRM and runs the dialling, and both offer forward-deployed engineers on Enterprise. Zian is an AI sales and reception agents platform. Its AI Receptionist answers inbound calls 24/7 (qualifying, booking, transferring and taking messages), its agents run outbound follow-up by voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger and handle voicemail on calls, and SmartReach AI™ paces each follow-up. Zian works in 30+ languages with voice cloning, connects to HubSpot, Salesforce, HighLevel and Zapier, and its live counter shows 64,521+ qualified sales appointments set.
The honest gap: Zian is in a partnership-application beta and publishes no price, so it is not in the arithmetic below; each of its three listed plans, including Intel + Widgets (Free Forever), starts with a partnership application.
| Route | What you get | Who builds the agent | Published price, as at 12 November 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Zian AI (platform pick) | Ready-made AI receptionist and outbound sales agents across calls, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger | Zian’s digital-team agents, configured by you | No public price during the partnership-application beta |
| 2. LeadsNow.ai (done-for-you pick) | Managed AI appointment setting and lead generation that runs on Zian | LeadsNow.ai runs it | Pay-per-result; we do not print its price |
| 3. Bland AI | Voice agent platform with its own model, speech and voices bundled into one rate; numbers for sale in the US and Canada | Your team (forward-deployed engineers on Enterprise) | Start $0.14 a minute, no platform fee; Build $0.12 a minute plus $299 a month; Enterprise custom |
| 4. ElevenLabs Agents | Voice and chat agent platform with ElevenLabs speech bundled in; you choose the model and connect your own carrier | Your team | Plans from $0 to $990 a month; $0.080 per additional call minute, plus the model |
Method and disclosure: zian.ai publishes this page and appears in it. By editorial policy Zian is listed first as the platform pick and LeadsNow.ai as the done-for-you pick; neither is scored or priced. Bland and ElevenLabs facts come only from each vendor’s own pages, read on 12 November 2026, under the same evidence rule; where a vendor’s pages disagree, we print both. Bills are our arithmetic on published rates.
How Bland and ElevenLabs Agents each sell a minute
Bland sells the AI in a call as one number; ElevenLabs sells the speech as one number and the model on top. Bland’s pricing page lists the LLM, speech-to-text and text-to-speech under “Included in your per-minute rate” and leads with “No token charges. No model-provider pass-throughs. No surprise bills.” ElevenLabs’ agents pricing FAQ says additional call minutes cost $0.08, “LLM usage is billed separately on top, based on the model you choose”, and “ElevenLabs does not charge extra for telephony”, with your own provider billing you for its side of the call.
| Price element | Bland AI (self-serve) | ElevenLabs Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Plans and plan fee (monthly billing) | Start $0; Build $299 a month; Enterprise “Custom”. Billing docs also list Scale at $499, which the pricing page does not, and a one-number Agent Phone Plan at $19.99 (one call at a time, 50 calls a day) | Free $0, Starter $6, Creator $22, Pro $99, Scale $299, Business $990; Enterprise custom. Yearly billing: Pro $82.50 a month (“2 months free”) |
| Minutes included | None; Start gives “2 credits + an inbound number ($15/mo value)” | 15, 75, 275, 1,238, 3,738 and 12,375 call minutes, Free to Business |
| Per connected minute | $0.14 Start, $0.12 Build ($0.11 Scale, docs only) | $0.080 beyond the included minutes |
| Language model | Included: Bland’s own model | Extra, “at cost”: 114 rows on the agents calculator; apart from two $0 rows (Custom LLM and grok-beta), from $0.000476 a minute (GPT-5 Nano) to $0.2315 (GPT-4); GPT-5 Mini $0.00238, GPT-5.5 $0.0446. The calculator calls these “Estimated costs” |
| Speech-to-text and voice | Included; voice limit 1 on Start, 5 on Build | Included in the call minute |
| Telephony | Pricing FAQ: “billed separately, on your own carrier or Bland’s at pass-through cost”; docs index: per-minute pricing “covers LLM, TTS, STT, and telephony in a single line item” | No ElevenLabs fee; your carrier bills you (Twilio US local: $0.0140 a minute outbound, $0.0085 inbound, $1.15 a month per number) |
| Phone numbers | $15 a month, US or Canada | ElevenAgents connects numbers from your own provider |
| Calls that do not connect | $0.015 per failed call and per outbound attempt on Bland’s telephony | No per-attempt row in ElevenLabs’ agents pricing table; Twilio bills a call only once it is answered |
| Transfers to a human | $0.05 a minute (Start) or $0.04 (Build) on Bland numbers; free on your own Twilio | Not priced on this page |
| Billing increment | “Prorated to the exact second. Only active call time is counted.” | Call duration, measured as connection duration, with “a 95% discount for periods of silence longer than 10 seconds”; your carrier rounds by its own rules (Twilio rounds each call up to the next whole minute) |
| How you pay | Credit balance; “Hitting limits means calls get rejected rather than incurring unexpected charges” | Plan plus prepaid top-ups; “If your balance hits $0 and Auto Top Up is off (or fails), your service will pause immediately.” |
Two rows decide most bills. The model line is zero on Bland, whose own model is bundled, while on ElevenLabs it varies nearly 500-fold with the model you pick. The carrier line is the other: Bland states its telephony both ways, and we could not find a separate Bland telephony rate on its pricing page or billing documentation, as at 12 November 2026, so the Bland-numbers bill below carries none; ask Bland which statement applies to your account. For every Bland plan and fee, see how much Bland AI costs, plan by plan.
What an outbound list and an inbound line cost on Bland vs ElevenLabs
This worked bill is the part neither vendor’s pricing page does for a stated workload. Every line is a published rate multiplied by a quantity you control, so you can swap in your own figures; a short script computed each total, and every line was rechecked by hand.
Workload A, an outbound list: 4,000 connected calls a month to US numbers, each 2 minutes 30 seconds (10,000 connected minutes); one dial in three connects, so 8,000 dials ring out with no voicemail; three numbers; 22 dialling days, which is 545 dials and 182 connected calls a day. Workload B, an inbound reception line: 1,500 inbound calls a month, each exactly 3 minutes (4,500 minutes), on one number, about 50 calls a day.
Plan choices. Workload A needs Bland Build, because 182 connected calls a day exceed Start’s 100-call daily cap; Workload B fits Start. Bland’s billing docs also list an Agent Phone Plan at $19.99 a month with unlimited US and Canada minutes, but it allows one call at a time across the account, 20 calls an hour and 50 a day, and Bland says it is “built for one agent doing one thing at a time”. Workload B averages 50 calls a day, so busier days would exceed its daily cap and any overlapping caller would hear a busy message; we price Start instead. On ElevenLabs we priced Pro for its 20 concurrent calls: each plan from Creator to Scale costs within 4 cents of $800 at 10,000 minutes, and of $360 at 4,500 minutes, before the model and carrier. Free and Starter land within $1.20 of that on the pricing table’s $0.080 rate, but the plan cards list the commercial licence only from Starter up and “Additional Minutes” only from Creator up.
| Line item | Workload A: Bland Build, Bland numbers | Workload A: Bland Build, your Twilio | Workload A: ElevenLabs Pro, your Twilio | Workload B: Bland Start, Bland number | Workload B: ElevenLabs Pro, your Twilio |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $299.00 | $299.00 | $99.00 (1,238 minutes included) | $0.00 | $99.00 (1,238 minutes included) |
| Connected minutes | $1,200.00 (10,000 × $0.12) | $1,200.00 | $700.96 (8,762 × $0.08) | $630.00 (4,500 × $0.14) | $260.96 (3,262 × $0.08) |
| Model (GPT-5 Mini on ElevenLabs) | Included | Included | $23.81 (10,000 × $0.00238, estimate) | Included | $10.71 (4,500 × $0.00238, estimate) |
| Unanswered dials | $120.00 (8,000 × $0.015) | $0.00 | $0.00 | n/a (inbound) | n/a (inbound) |
| Carrier minutes | No published Bland rate | $168.00 (12,000 × $0.0140) | $168.00 (12,000 × $0.0140) | No published Bland rate | $38.25 (4,500 × $0.0085) |
| Phone numbers | $45.00 (3 × $15) | $3.45 (3 × $1.15) | $3.45 (3 × $1.15) | $15.00 (1 × $15) | $1.15 |
| Monthly total | $1,664.00 | $1,670.45 | $995.22 | $645.00 | $410.07 |
| Cost per connected minute | $0.166 | $0.167 | $0.100 | $0.143 | $0.091 |
| Same calls with GPT-5.5 on ElevenLabs | $1,664.00 | $1,670.45 | $1,417.49 | $645.00 | $600.10 |
How the carrier minutes were counted: Twilio’s billing article says “any partial minutes (under 60 seconds) are rounded up to the next full minute”, so each 2-minute-30-second outbound call bills 3 Twilio minutes (4,000 × 3 = 12,000). Bland bills its own minutes to the second, so its connected line stays at 10,000. Unanswered dials carry no Twilio charge because, in Twilio’s words, a call is marked “completed” only when it receives a 200 OK answer from the carrier. On your own Twilio, Bland’s $0.015 minimum does not apply, since its billing page lists it only for “Bland’s telephony”. ElevenLabs bills call minutes on connection duration and its pricing table has no per-attempt row, so we price its ring-outs at $0.
Four results stand out. On the outbound list, ElevenLabs is $668.78 below Bland Build: Bland’s $299 fee plus four cents a minute over ElevenLabs’ $0.08 comes to $699.00, more than the whole gap. Bringing your own Twilio barely moves Bland ($1,670.45), because $168 of Twilio minutes replaces $120 of unanswered-dial charges and numbers fall by $41.55. On the inbound line, ElevenLabs is $234.93 below Bland Start, or $219.93 if Bland’s free first number covers the line. And GPT-5.5 narrows both gaps without closing them ($1,417.49 and $600.10).
Three lines sit outside both ledgers. ElevenLabs on yearly billing lists Pro at $82.50 a month, $16.50 less. Twilio lists Media Streams at $0.0044 a minute; ElevenLabs’ native-integration page does not say whether that leg applies, and if your invoice shows it, add $52.80 to Workload A and $19.80 to Workload B. Bland’s possible telephony pass-through on its own numbers is the largest unknown. For the same ElevenLabs ledger at 1,000 three-minute calls, see our Retell AI vs ElevenLabs Agents cost comparison.
Choosing between building on a platform and buying the outcome? Zian’s agents answer inbound calls 24/7, book appointments, handle voicemail on calls and follow up by voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger. Apply For Partnership
The Model Ceiling: the dearest model that still keeps ElevenLabs below Bland
The Model Ceiling is the per-minute model price at which an ElevenLabs bill equals the Bland bill for the same workload. Work it out in one line: take Bland’s monthly total, subtract the ElevenLabs bill before the model (plan, extra minutes, carrier and numbers), and divide by your connected minutes. Any model priced below the ceiling keeps ElevenLabs cheaper; any model above it makes Bland’s bundled minute the cheaper buy.
On our assumptions the ceiling is 6.93 cents a minute for the outbound list ($1,664.00 less $971.41, over 10,000 minutes) and 5.46 cents for the inbound line ($645.00 less $399.36, over 4,500 minutes), or 5.13 cents if Bland’s free first number covers that line. Against Bland on your own Twilio, the outbound ceiling is 6.99 cents.
| Model on ElevenLabs (calculator estimate per minute) | Outbound list, ceiling 6.93 cents | Inbound line, ceiling 5.13 to 5.46 cents |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 Nano ($0.000476) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($976.17) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($401.50) |
| GPT-5 Mini ($0.00238) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($995.22) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($410.07) |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash ($0.00289) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,000.28) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($412.35) |
| Eleven Realtime v1 Mini ($0.00323) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,003.71) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($413.89) |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.00948) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,066.23) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($442.03) |
| Eleven Realtime v1 Max ($0.0155) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,126.58) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($469.19) |
| GPT-5.5 ($0.0446) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,417.49) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($600.10) |
| Claude Opus 4.8 ($0.0474) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($1,445.53) | ElevenLabs cheaper ($612.71) |
| GPT-6 Astra ($0.0862) | Bland cheaper (ElevenLabs $1,833.45) | Bland cheaper (ElevenLabs $787.28) |
| GPT-4 ($0.2315) | Bland cheaper (ElevenLabs $3,286.47) | Bland cheaper (ElevenLabs $1,441.14) |
Of the 114 model rows on ElevenLabs’ agents calculator on 12 November 2026, only GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-6 Astra (six rows, counting dated versions) are above both ceilings. The quotable version: at these two workloads, ElevenLabs Agents is the cheaper bill with any model on its calculator priced under about 5 cents a minute, which on 12 November 2026 was every listed model except GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-6 Astra.
Three things move the ceiling. A lower connect rate raises it, because Bland charges $0.015 for every unanswered dial on its telephony. Lower volume on Build raises it, because the $299 fee is spread over fewer minutes; at very low volume compare against Bland Start instead. And ElevenLabs’ model figures are estimates: its pricing page says LLM token usage “is calculated in fiat currency, and the corresponding cost is deducted from your ElevenLabs credits”, and its changelog added a “fast” service tier that “trades a per-token price premium for higher token throughput and lower latency”. Read your real per-call cost after a test week, then redo the subtraction.
Phone numbers, SIP and bringing your own Twilio to Bland or ElevenLabs
Bland sells numbers; ElevenAgents connects the ones you already have. Bland’s dispatch guide says its Buy number button covers “United States and Canada only, $15/month”, and “Anywhere else, bring your own.” ElevenLabs’ agents pricing FAQ says “You connect your own provider, such as Twilio or a SIP trunk”. ElevenLabs’ separate ready-made receptionist product, Reception.ai, does assign local US and Canada numbers and about 50 more countries by regulatory request, but this page compares the two build platforms.
| Telephony question | Bland AI | ElevenLabs Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Buy a number from the platform | Yes: US or Canada, $15 a month; a new organisation gets one free number | No: import a Twilio number or connect a SIP trunk |
| Your own Twilio | Connect your Twilio account and import numbers; geo-permissions are inherited from Twilio | Native integration: purchased Twilio numbers (inbound and outbound) or Verified Caller IDs (outbound only) |
| SIP trunking | TLS on port 5061 and SRTP only (“Bland does not accept plain UDP or port 5060”); SIP edges in the US, Canada, Asia-Pacific and Europe; guides for Bandwidth, Twilio, Telnyx, 3CX, Five9 and NICE CXone; number porting | TCP or TLS (UDP “experimental; use this for testing only”); guides for Telnyx, Plivo, Exotel, Bandwidth, Sinch, Vobiz, Voximplant and a Vonage connector, plus Amazon Connect, Genesys, Five9 and Microsoft Teams; static-IP SIP servers in the US, EU, India and Singapore for enterprise clients |
| Which plan gets SIP | Billing docs: SIP “for enterprise customers”; the SIP guide names no plan | The SIP trunking guide names no plan for standard trunking; static-IP SIP servers are “available for Enterprise accounts” |
| Platform charge on your own carrier | Its standard per-minute rate; “all carrier fees are billed to your account” | No ElevenLabs telephony fee |
| Calls outside the US and Canada | International calls need “at least $5 of credits” purchased, or auto-recharge | Whatever your carrier allows |
For an Australian business the first row matters most. Neither agent platform sells an Australian number self-serve: Bland’s number-purchase API offers US or Canada and says “For others, please contact support”, and ElevenAgents imports numbers rather than selling them (ElevenLabs’ separate Reception.ai product lists Australia among its regulatory-request countries). In practice an Australian caller ID on either build platform means bringing your own carrier. On Bland you then pay its full per-minute rate plus your carrier; on ElevenLabs you pay the $0.08 minute and model plus your carrier. Bland publishes an Asia-Pacific SIP edge (asia2.sip.bland.ai); ElevenLabs lists Singapore among its static-IP SIP regions, which are for Enterprise accounts.
How many calls at once each plan allows
Bland ties concurrency and daily caps to the plan and rejects calls above them. ElevenLabs ties concurrency to the plan and lets you burst above it at double the rate, or queue inbound callers.
| Plan | Concurrent calls | Call caps | Above the limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bland Start | 10 | 100 a day, 100 an hour | “Hitting limits means calls get rejected” |
| Bland Build | 50 | 2,000 a day, 1,000 an hour | Rejected |
| Bland Scale (billing docs only, $499) | 100 | 5,000 a day, 1,000 an hour | Rejected |
| Bland Enterprise | Pricing page: “Concurrency sized to your volume” | Unlimited | Contracted |
| ElevenLabs Free / Starter / Creator | 4 / 6 / 10 | No daily cap in the pricing table | Burst: up to 3 times your limit or 300, whichever is lower, at $0.16 a minute; then rejected unless call queueing is on |
| ElevenLabs Pro / Scale / Business | 20 / 30 / 40 | No daily cap in the pricing table | As above; burst calls “receive lower priority for speech-to-text and text-to-speech processing” |
| ElevenLabs Enterprise | “Elevated concurrency limits” | Custom | The 300-call burst ceiling applies to non-enterprise customers |
A bulk campaign does not get your whole plan on ElevenLabs. By default a campaign uses “the lower of 50% of your workspace concurrency or 70% of the agent’s concurrency”, and batch calls use the same split, so Pro’s 20 calls give a campaign 10 at once. On Bland, Build allows 50 calls at once, 1,000 an hour and 2,000 a day. Our outbound workload averages about one call in progress (454 connected minutes over an 8-hour dialling day), so neither limit binds at this volume.
Outbound tools: Bland batches vs ElevenLabs Campaigns
ElevenLabs has moved bulk outbound to Campaigns. Its batch-calling page warns that batch calling “will be deprecated” in favour of Campaigns, “which adds retries, callbacks, redirects, and calling windows.” A campaign retries failed, unanswered and voicemail calls up to a ceiling you set (default 6 attempts, maximum 30), dials only inside weekly windows in one timezone, honours requested callback times, tries up to five numbers per recipient, and runs on phone or WhatsApp; “Email and SMS channels are coming soon.” Campaigns are not available in Zero Retention Mode, and do-not-call state “belongs to the campaign”. On Twilio numbers ElevenLabs supports Twilio answering machine detection, which Twilio prices at $0.0075 a call.
Bland runs outbound as batches: upload a CSV with a phone_number column, pick the agent, write the run’s instructions and start calling, with an optional status webhook. Numbers on your do-not-call list and duplicates are “dropped at dial time”. By default “Bland hangs up on voicemail”; its voicemail object can leave a message, or a message plus an SMS copy, and a retry object redials after a delay. Bland’s pricing grid ticks SMS and web chat, warm and live transfers, the scheduling node and custom dialling for Enterprise only; its SMS and warm-transfer guides add the Agent Phone Plan, which serves one agent on one number, one call at a time. Both vendors put calling-law compliance on you: ElevenLabs says “You are responsible for outbound calling compliance, including consents”.
Languages, voices and the latency each vendor states
ElevenLabs states the larger language count; Bland states its latency two ways. Every figure here is vendor-stated, not measured by us.
| Item | Bland AI, as stated by Bland | ElevenLabs Agents, as stated by ElevenLabs |
|---|---|---|
| Languages | “40+ languages out of the box”; the Send Call reference lists 52 language options, including en-AU and en-NZ, a “fluent” multilingual mode that switches on the fly, an experimental Babel engine, and auto-detect for English and Spanish only | “90+ languages”; agents use every language of their voice model, and new agents default to Eleven v4 Turbo (90+); a language-detection tool switches the agent’s output language |
| Voices | Voice limit 1 (Start), 5 (Build), unlimited (Enterprise); clones from one sample of about ten seconds, covering “17+ languages” | “17k+ voices across 90+ languages” on the agents page; “over 16,000 voices” in the same page’s FAQ; Business includes 10 professional voice clones |
| Latency claim | “sub-200ms latency” (bland.ai llms.txt and its comparison page); “sub-400ms response latency” (docs.bland.ai llms.txt) | “ultra-low latency” on the agents page; Eleven v4 Turbo median “~100ms”, which its model page says excludes “application & network latency” |
These figures cannot be set side by side: ElevenLabs’ 100ms is one model’s synthesis time, and we could not find a definition of what Bland’s two figures measure on the Bland pages we read, as at 12 November 2026. Measure end-to-end on your own calls, on the carrier you will use.
HIPAA, SOC 2 and BAAs as each vendor states them
Both sign a BAA only on Enterprise. Bland’s pricing FAQ says it holds “SOC 2 Type I and Type II (independently audited), HIPAA compliant with a signed BAA, GDPR compliant with a DPA, and PCI DSS self-attested”, that it is “FedRAMP 20x Class A certified and ISO 27001 certified”, and that “Compliance documentation is available under NDA on Enterprise.” Its pricing grid ticks the BAA, SSO and data residency in the Enterprise column only, and its trust page lists ISO 27001:2022, PCI DSS v4.0.1 and “EU data residency available, configurable per customer”.
ElevenLabs’ agents page says “We are SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1 certified, with HIPAA and GDPR compliance”, badges ISO 42001, and lists data residency across the US, EU and India among Enterprise controls. Its HIPAA page says “Execution of a BAA, as may be required by HIPAA, is only available for Enterprise tier subscriptions”, and HIPAA use also requires Zero Retention Mode, which restricts the model list and cannot run batch calls or campaigns. So HIPAA outbound on ElevenLabs means placing calls one at a time.
Bland AI vs ElevenLabs Agents: which one should you choose?
| Option | Choose it when | It is the wrong pick when |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Zian AI (platform pick) | You want agents that answer inbound calls 24/7 and run outbound follow-up across voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger, with booking built in | You need a published per-minute price today, or you want to assemble your own stack |
| 2. LeadsNow.ai (done-for-you pick) | You want appointments set for you, pay-per-result, with leads answered in under 60 seconds, 24/7 | You want to own and operate the agent yourself |
| 3. Bland AI | You want one rate covering model, speech and voice, numbers bought from the platform, caps that reject calls rather than add charges, a 99.9% uptime SLA printed on Start and Build, or a model priced above your Model Ceiling | You need a BAA, or SMS and warm transfers on more than one call at a time, without an Enterprise contract, or your list exceeds the 5,000-call daily cap of its Scale plan (2,000 on Build) |
| 4. ElevenLabs Agents | You will run a model under the Model Ceiling, already have Twilio or a SIP trunk, want campaigns with retries and calling windows, want ElevenLabs voices, or want burst and queueing instead of hard rejection | You want the platform to supply numbers, one predictable rate with no model line, or HIPAA batch outbound |
If you are weighing Bland against a third build platform instead, our Retell AI vs Bland AI comparison works the same arithmetic for Retell’s itemised minute, and our Zian AI vs ElevenLabs Agents comparison covers the build-or-buy question for ElevenLabs alone.
The sentences on Bland’s and ElevenLabs’ own pages that cut against this page
Against “ElevenLabs is cheaper”: Bland’s strongest argument is predictability. Its pricing page promises “No surprise bills”, its billing docs say capped calls are rejected rather than charged, and its comparison page argues that “no outside AI lab sits in its call path”, so a security team reviews one AI company, not two. ElevenLabs labels its model figures “Estimated costs”, and an empty prepaid balance pauses service unless Auto Top Up is on. Bland prints a 99.9% uptime SLA on Start and Build; ElevenLabs lists “Custom terms & assurance around DPA/SLAs” on Enterprise.
Against “Bland is simpler”: Bland’s own pages disagree about whether telephony on its numbers is billed separately, and its Scale plan appears in its billing documentation but not on its pricing page. Its public changelog has no entry after 3 August 2026, though its documentation describes plans the changelog does not mention, such as the Agent Phone Plan; ElevenLabs’ changelog in the last 90 days stopped billing teardown time after a call (26 October 2026) and added answering-machine actions and call queueing. Re-read both pricing pages on the day you budget.
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Bland AI vs ElevenLabs questions people ask
Is Bland AI cheaper than ElevenLabs Agents?
Not at the two workloads we priced. 4,000 outbound US calls of two and a half minutes cost $995.22 a month on ElevenLabs Pro with GPT-5 Mini and your own Twilio numbers, against $1,664.00 on Bland’s Build plan. A 4,500-minute inbound line costs $410.07 on ElevenLabs against $645.00 on Bland Start, as at 12 November 2026. Bland becomes cheaper only if the model you run on ElevenLabs costs more than 5.13 to 6.93 cents a minute.
What does Bland AI’s per-minute price include?
Bland’s pricing page lists the LLM, speech-to-text and text-to-speech under “Included in your per-minute rate”: $0.14 a minute on Start and $0.12 on Build, which adds a $299 monthly fee. On telephony Bland says two things: its pricing FAQ says it is “billed separately”, while its documentation index says per-minute pricing covers telephony “in a single line item”.
Does ElevenLabs charge for the language model on phone calls?
Yes. ElevenLabs’ agents pricing page says “LLM usage is billed separately on top, based on the model you choose”, on top of $0.08 per additional call minute. Its calculator estimates the model line from $0.000476 a minute for GPT-5 Nano to $0.2315 for GPT-4, with GPT-5 Mini at $0.00238, as at 12 November 2026.
Can I buy a phone number from Bland or ElevenLabs?
From Bland, yes: US or Canadian numbers at $15 a month, and a new organisation gets one free. ElevenAgents does not sell numbers; you import a Twilio number or connect a SIP trunk, and your carrier bills the call minutes. ElevenLabs’ separate Reception.ai product does assign US and Canadian numbers.
How many calls at once can Bland and ElevenLabs make?
Bland allows 10 concurrent calls on Start and 50 on Build, with daily caps of 100 and 2,000 calls, and rejects calls above them. ElevenLabs allows 4 to 40 by plan (20 on Pro), lets you burst to three times your limit (up to 300 calls) at $0.16 a minute, and gives an outbound campaign the lower of half your workspace limit or 70% of the agent’s.
Which one signs a HIPAA BAA?
Both, on Enterprise only. Bland’s pricing grid lists its BAA in the Enterprise column. ElevenLabs’ HIPAA page says BAA execution “is only available for Enterprise tier subscriptions” and requires Zero Retention Mode, which cannot be used with batch calls or campaigns.
Does Bland or ElevenLabs bill by the second?
Bland says call time is “Prorated to the exact second”. ElevenLabs charges on call duration measured as connection duration, with a 95% discount for silences longer than 10 seconds. If your ElevenLabs calls run on Twilio, Twilio rounds each call up to the next whole minute.
Where every figure on this page comes from
| Figure | Who published it | Link | Date read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start $0.14 and Build $0.12 a minute, $299 Build fee, $0.05/$0.04 transfer minutes, caps 100/2,000 a day and 100/1,000 an hour, 10/50 concurrent calls, voice limits 1/5, 99.9% uptime SLA, Enterprise-only BAA, SMS and warm transfers, “2 credits + an inbound number ($15/mo value)”, telephony “billed separately”, compliance FAQ | Bland AI | bland.ai/pricing | 12 November 2026 |
| Scale $499 at $0.11, $0.015 outbound minimum and failed-call charge, per-second proration, BYOT transfers free, Scale caps 5,000/1,000 and 100 concurrent, SIP “for enterprise customers”, “all carrier fees are billed to your account”, SMS $0.02, Agent Phone plan $19.99 | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/platform/billing | 12 November 2026 |
| Numbers US and Canada only at $15 a month; one free number per new organisation | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/agents/dispatch | 12 November 2026 |
| Number purchase US or Canada; “For others, please contact support” | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/api-v1/post/inbound-purchase | 12 November 2026 |
| Agent Phone Plan $19.99 a month: unlimited US and Canada minutes, 1 concurrent call, 20 calls an hour, 50 a day, “built for one agent doing one thing at a time” | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/platform/agent-phone-plan | 12 November 2026 |
| SMS and warm transfer available on Enterprise and the Agent Phone Plan | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/tutorials/messaging/sms; docs.bland.ai/tutorials/warm-transfer | 12 November 2026 |
| SIP over TLS 5061 and SRTP only; four SIP edge regions including asia2 | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/agents/sip-network | 12 November 2026 |
| Bring your own Twilio; geo-permissions inherited | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/tutorials/custom-twilio | 12 November 2026 |
| Batch CSV upload, status webhook, do-not-call numbers dropped at dial time | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/tutorials/batch-calls | 12 November 2026 |
| Hangs up on voicemail by default; voicemail object | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/platform/agent-call-recipes | 12 November 2026 |
| 52 language options incl. en-AU; Babel and fluent modes; $5 credit purchase for international calls; retry object | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/api-v1/post/calls | 12 November 2026 |
| Voice clones from one ~10-second sample, 17+ languages | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/tts/voices | 12 November 2026 |
| “sub-200ms latency”, “40+ languages” | Bland AI | bland.ai/llms.txt | 12 November 2026 |
| “sub-400ms response latency”; telephony “in a single line item” | Bland AI | docs.bland.ai/llms.txt | 12 November 2026 |
| ISO 27001:2022, PCI DSS v4.0.1, EU data residency | Bland AI | bland.ai/trust-security | 12 November 2026 |
| Last changelog entry 3 August 2026 | Bland AI | bland.ai/changelog | 12 November 2026 |
| “No outside AI lab” in Bland’s call path (Bland’s argument) | Bland AI | bland.ai/compare/bland-vs-elevenlabs | 12 November 2026 |
| ElevenLabs plans $0 to $990, included minutes 15 to 12,375, concurrency 4 to 40, $0.080 additional minute, $0.160 burst, $0.003 text message, yearly Pro $82.50, 114 model rows ($0.000476 to $0.2315; GPT-5 Mini $0.00238; GPT-5.5 $0.0446), “Estimated costs”, Enterprise BAA and SLAs, commercial licence from Starter | ElevenLabs | elevenlabs.io/pricing/agents | 12 November 2026 |
| 90+ languages, “17k+ voices” and “over 16,000 voices”, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 42001, US/EU/India residency | ElevenLabs | elevenlabs.io/agents | 12 November 2026 |
| Connection-duration billing, 95% silence discount | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs help centre | 12 November 2026 |
| Balance at $0 pauses service | ElevenLabs | elevenlabs.io/docs/overview/administration/pay-as-you-go | 12 November 2026 |
| Campaigns: default 6 and maximum 30 attempts, five numbers per recipient, 50%/70% concurrency, not with Zero Retention Mode, email and SMS coming soon | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs Campaigns docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Batch calling to be deprecated; Zero Retention Mode cannot run batch calls | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs batch calling docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Burst up to 3 times or 300, double rate, deprioritised | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs burst pricing docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Twilio purchased numbers in and out, Verified Caller IDs outbound only | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs Twilio native integration | 12 November 2026 |
| SIP over TCP or TLS, UDP for testing; static-IP regions US, EU, India, Singapore | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs SIP trunking docs | 12 November 2026 |
| BAA Enterprise only; Zero Retention Mode required | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs HIPAA docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Eleven v4 Turbo median ~100ms, excluding application and network latency | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs models page | 12 November 2026 |
| Teardown no longer billed (26 October 2026); fast service tier | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs changelog | 12 November 2026 |
| Reception.ai numbers: US and Canada, about 50 more countries by regulatory request | ElevenLabs | Reception.ai phone numbers docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Reception.ai regulatory-request countries include Australia | ElevenLabs | Reception.ai international numbers docs | 12 November 2026 |
| Twilio US local $0.0140 outbound, $0.0085 inbound, $1.15 a month; Media Streams $0.0044; answering machine detection $0.0075 a call | Twilio | twilio.com/en-us/voice/pricing/us | 12 November 2026 |
| Partial minutes rounded up to the next full minute | Twilio | Twilio help article 223132307 | 12 November 2026 |
| A call is “completed” and charged only on a 200 OK answer | Twilio | Twilio help article 223132487 | 12 November 2026 |
| Workload bills, Model Ceiling (6.93, 5.46 and 5.13 cents), cost per connected minute | zian.ai calculation from the rates above | This page | 12 November 2026 |
| 64,521+ qualified sales appointments set | Zian AI | zian.ai home page counter | 12 November 2026 |