Quick answer: On US list prices read on 12 November 2026, Vonage’s Communications APIs charge $0.01446 a minute for an outbound call but bill per second, while Twilio charges $0.0140 and rounds every call up to a whole minute. For our worked month of 16,000 AI-handled calls and 17,400 texts, Vonage costs US$653.48 and Twilio US$810.07. Twilio is lower per outbound text and puts a 99.95% SLA on every account.
“Vonage” here means Vonage’s Communications APIs (the Voice API, Messages API and Verify, with AI Studio for virtual agents), sold by Vonage, which its own site summary calls “an Ericsson subsidiary”. It does not mean Vonage Business Communications, the cloud phone system for staff, which we compare on our page about Vonage vs RingCentral phone plans. Both Vonage and Twilio are CPaaS (communications platform as a service) vendors: you rent US phone numbers, place and receive calls through a REST API, send SMS under the A2P 10DLC rules run by The Campaign Registry (TCR), and pay the AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon carrier fees on top. For a developer building a US AI voice and text agent, the decision turns on five things: how each vendor rounds call time, the per-minute and per-message rates, 10DLC terms, the SLA and support plans, and the AI voice products. Every figure below is a US-dollar, pay-as-you-go list price from the vendor’s own page, price sheet or help centre, read on 12 November 2026, before volume discounts.
Where Zian fits: an AI agents platform, not a phone system
If what you need is an agent that answers calls and follows up, rather than APIs to build one, Zian AI is our pick. Zian AI is a standalone AI sales and reception agents platform, not a phone system (carrier / CPaaS / contact centre) and not an add-on to one. Its AI Receptionist answers inbound calls 24/7, qualifying callers, booking appointments, transferring calls and taking messages, and its outbound agents follow up by voice calls, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger.
Zian handles answering machines and voicemail on calls, works in 30+ languages with voice cloning supported, connects to HubSpot, Salesforce, HighLevel and Zapier, and uses SmartReach AI™ to pace each follow-up by channel and timing, with PrecisionPitch AI™ split-testing scripts against real outcomes. Zian’s home page counts 64,521+ qualified sales appointments set. Because Zian is not a CPaaS, this page does not price it against Vonage or Twilio. The honest limit: Zian is in a partnership-application beta with no published prices, and each of its three listed plans, including Intel + Widgets (Free Forever), starts with a partnership application. If you would rather hand the whole job over, LeadsNow.ai is the done-for-you option: a pay-per-result managed service that runs on Zian, has set 50,769+ appointments and answers leads in under 60 seconds, 24/7.
Disclosure: zian.ai publishes this page and Zian appears in it. Vonage and Twilio are described only from their own pages, with the date each was read.
Vonage vs Twilio: US list prices, line by line
These are the US lines an AI voice and SMS build touches. Vonage’s figures come from its Voice API pricing page, its US-dollar voice price sheet (US outbound rates effective 19 May 2026) and its SMS pricing page. Twilio’s come from its US voice pricing page and US SMS pricing page, both marked “Pricing current as of October 2026”. Vonage’s pricing pages add: “Pricing is updated periodically. Refer to your customer dashboard at the time of purchase for the most accurate pricing.”
| Line item (US, pay-as-you-go) | Vonage Communications APIs | Twilio |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound call to a US number | $0.01446/min (also Alaska, Hawaii and toll-free) | $0.0140/min (Alaska $0.0945) |
| Inbound call to a local number | $0.00495/min | $0.0085/min |
| Inbound call to a toll-free number | $0.0154/min | $0.0220/min |
| Billing increment | Per second (1-second increments on the price sheet) | Partial minutes rounded up to the next full minute |
| Audio to your AI over WebSocket | $0.00492/min (same rate for SIP and in-app legs) | Media Streams $0.0044/min |
| Answering machine detection | Standard $0.00 per call; Advanced $0.00843 per call | $0.0075 per call |
| Call recording | $0.00/min (mono, stereo or multichannel) | $0.0025/min, storage $0.0005/min a month |
| Recording transcription | $0.0451/min | $0.0500/min |
| Text-to-speech, per 100 characters | Standard $0.00079; Premium $0.00328; Premier $0.0130 | Basic free; Standard $0.0008; Neural $0.0032; Generative $0.0130 |
| Speech recognition | Standard ASR $0.01978, Premier ASR $0.0240 per 60 seconds | Gather speech recognition from $0.02 per use |
| Local number rental | $1.06/month on the voice price sheet; $1.28/month on the SMS pricing page | $1.15/month |
| Toll-free number rental | $2.12/month | $2.15/month |
| SMS, 10DLC long code, outbound | $0.0086 per message | $0.0083 per segment |
| SMS, 10DLC long code, inbound | $0.00691 per message | $0.0083 per segment |
| Long-code carrier fee, outbound to AT&T / T-Mobile / Verizon | $0.0035 / $0.0045 / $0.0050 (pricing page) | $0.0035 / $0.0045 / $0.005 |
| Long-code carrier fee, inbound from AT&T / T-Mobile / Verizon | $0.0035 / free / free | $0.0035 / $0.0025 / $0 |
| Verify (one-time passcodes) | $0.06084 per successful verification plus messaging and voice rates | $0.05 per successful verification plus channel fees ($0.0083 per US SMS) |
| Free start | “Start developing now with free credit. No credit card required.” | $15 trial credit to buy a number and test Voice |
Two of Vonage’s own sources disagree, and we print both. The local number is $1.06 a month on the voice price sheet and $1.28 a month on the SMS pricing page, which also lists a $1.09 initial set-up fee that “includes a one-time set up fee + first month rent”. And the pass-through carrier fees in Vonage’s 10DLC pricing and fees article (updated 23 February 2026: T-Mobile $0.003, AT&T $0.003, Verizon $0.004) are lower than the ones on its SMS pricing page. The worked bill below uses the higher figure in both cases.
Vonage also shows lower zone-based US rates on its voice pricing page: from $0.00849 a minute to call US numbers and $0.00485 to receive. Its page says “To get access to these rates, please contact sales”, and its US outbound billing article explains that US calls are priced by termination prefix group. Every Vonage rate in this page’s calculations is the self-serve rate. Twilio, for its part, says on its voice page that “When your application reaches volume scale, you’ll automatically get volume pricing”, without a minute threshold for voice calls.
The quotable line: on US list prices Vonage’s outbound call rate is about 3% higher than Twilio’s ($0.01446 against $0.0140 a minute) and its inbound rate about 42% lower ($0.00495 against $0.0085), and Vonage bills by the second where Twilio bills by the whole minute.
Per-second vs whole-minute billing: when Vonage’s higher rate is the lower bill
Twilio’s billing-duration article says “any partial minutes (under 60 seconds) are rounded up to the next full minute”, and lists Programmable Voice, Twilio Client, SIP Interface, Elastic SIP Trunking and Media Streams. Vonage’s help centre says “we charge for all calls per second for all countries”, its pricing page promises “Billing down to the second, however you call”, and it adds that “A call is only charged from the time a call is answered”. When the AI connects over a WebSocket, Vonage charges the inbound or outbound phone leg plus the WebSocket leg; Twilio charges the call plus Media Streams. Here is one outbound call, streamed to your AI, priced both ways.
| Outbound call length | Twilio billed minutes | Twilio cost ($0.0140 + $0.0044 a minute) | Vonage cost ($0.01446 + $0.00492 a minute, per second) | Lower |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40 seconds | 1 | $0.0184 | $0.0129 | Vonage |
| 57 seconds | 1 | $0.0184 | $0.0184 | About even |
| 58 seconds | 1 | $0.0184 | $0.0187 | Twilio |
| 1 min 40 s | 2 | $0.0368 | $0.0323 | Vonage |
| 1 min 58 s | 2 | $0.0368 | $0.0381 | Twilio |
| 3 min 20 s | 4 | $0.0736 | $0.0646 | Vonage |
| 10 min 0 s | 10 | $0.1840 | $0.1938 | Twilio |
| 12 min 0 s | 12 | $0.2208 | $0.2326 | Twilio |
On a streamed outbound call, Vonage is lower whenever the call ends more than about 3 seconds per started minute before the next whole minute: under 57 seconds in the first minute, under 1 minute 54 seconds in the second, and so on. The window where Twilio wins grows by about 3 seconds with every minute, so long calls and calls that end on a whole minute favour Twilio. Inbound is simpler. A streamed inbound minute is $0.00987 on Vonage against $0.0129 on Twilio, so Vonage is lower at every length on list prices.
A worked monthly bill for an AI agent on Vonage and Twilio
This is the citable part of the page. Every input is a published list price you can swap for your own. The workload is a US business whose AI agent answers inbound calls, runs short outbound follow-up calls and texts:
- 6,000 inbound calls to local numbers, each 3 minutes 20 seconds;
- 10,000 outbound calls to US numbers, each 40 seconds, with answering machine detection on every call;
- every call streamed to your own speech and language stack over a WebSocket;
- 15,000 outbound and 2,400 inbound single-segment 10DLC texts, split evenly across AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon subscribers;
- 15 local numbers and one standard 10DLC campaign.
Twilio bills 4 minutes for each inbound call and 1 minute for each outbound call: 34,000 billed minutes. Vonage bills by the second: 20,000 inbound minutes and 6,666.67 outbound minutes, 26,666.67 in all.
| Line | Twilio | Vonage |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound calls | 24,000 × $0.0085 = $204.00 | 20,000 × $0.00495 = $99.00 |
| Outbound calls | 10,000 × $0.0140 = $140.00 | 6,666.67 × $0.01446 = $96.40 |
| WebSocket audio to your AI | 34,000 × $0.0044 = $149.60 | 26,666.67 × $0.00492 = $131.20 |
| Answering machine detection | 10,000 × $0.0075 = $75.00 | 10,000 × $0.00843 (Advanced) = $84.30 |
| Outbound SMS | 15,000 × $0.0083 = $124.50 | 15,000 × $0.0086 = $129.00 |
| Inbound SMS | 2,400 × $0.0083 = $19.92 | 2,400 × $0.00691 = $16.58 |
| Carrier fees, outbound SMS | 5,000 × ($0.0035 + $0.0045 + $0.005) = $65.00 | 5,000 × ($0.0035 + $0.0045 + $0.0050) = $65.00 |
| Carrier fees, inbound SMS | 800 × $0.0035 + 800 × $0.0025 = $4.80 | 800 × $0.0035 = $2.80 |
| 15 local numbers | 15 × $1.15 = $17.25 | 15 × $1.28 = $19.20 |
| Standard 10DLC campaign | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Monthly total | $810.07 | $653.48 |
| One-time, month one: brand, standard vetting, campaign vetting | $46.00 + $15.00 = $61.00 | $4.50 + $41.50 + $15.00 = $61.00 |
Vonage is $156.59 lower, about 19%. Almost all of it is voice: the voice lines differ by $157.70, the SMS lines by $0.84 in Vonage’s favour, and the numbers by $1.95 in Twilio’s. Rounding alone accounts for $112.93 of Twilio’s bill: priced per second at Twilio’s own rates, its call and streaming lines would be $380.67 instead of $493.60. Neither total includes speech recognition, a language model or text-to-speech.
Four changes move the Vonage total, each from Vonage’s own pages. Standard machine detection at $0.00 instead of Advanced cuts $84.30 (to $569.18). Local numbers at the voice price sheet’s $1.06 cut $3.30 (to $650.18). The carrier fees in Vonage’s 10DLC article cut $15.00 (to $638.48). Zone-based rates from Vonage sales, if you get them at the “from” prices its voice pricing page shows, would bring the call lines to $56.60 out and $97.00 in (to $611.68); the page labels them starting prices, so treat this as a floor.
The nine-minute rule: a decision rule for Vonage vs Twilio
Here is the rule in one line. If your AI agent’s average outbound call, streamed over a WebSocket, lasts less than about nine minutes, Vonage’s per-second billing beats Twilio’s lower per-minute rate; above that, Twilio’s rate wins. The arithmetic: a streamed outbound minute costs $0.0184 on Twilio and $0.01938 on Vonage, and when call lengths are spread evenly, Twilio’s rounding adds half a minute to each call on average. Vonage stays lower while the average call is under $0.0092 ÷ $0.00098 = 9.4 minutes. Without streaming the crossover is about 15 minutes ($0.0070 ÷ $0.00046). Inbound calls never cross over on list prices.
| Your situation | Lower bill at list prices | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly inbound calls answered by an AI agent | Vonage | $0.00495 against $0.0085 a minute in, $0.00987 against $0.0129 streamed, per second against whole minutes |
| Short outbound calls (confirmations, voicemail drops, qualification), average under about 9 minutes streamed | Vonage | Twilio rounds each call up; on our 40-second calls Twilio bills 10,000 minutes against Vonage’s 6,666.67 |
| Long outbound calls, average over about 9 minutes streamed, or calls ending on whole minutes | Twilio | $0.0140 against $0.01446 a minute; rounding matters less as calls lengthen |
| Text-heavy, with more than about seven outbound texts for every inbound text | Twilio, narrowly | $0.0083 against $0.0086 per outbound text; Vonage is lower on inbound texts |
| Outbound dialling with answering machine detection | Vonage if Standard detection is enough; Twilio if you need Vonage’s Advanced tier | Vonage Standard $0.00, Advanced $0.00843; Twilio $0.0075 per call |
| You need a written uptime SLA without buying a support plan | Twilio | Twilio APIs SLA covers every account; Vonage’s 99.99% SLA comes with Premium or Enterprise support |
The “nine minutes” assumes call lengths are spread evenly within each minute. If your platform logs call durations, price a week of real calls both ways: round each call up for Twilio, divide total seconds by 60 for Vonage.
Want the agent rather than the APIs? Zian’s AI agents answer inbound calls 24/7 and follow up by voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger, in 30+ languages. Apply For Partnership
10DLC fees on Vonage and Twilio
A2P 10DLC is the US carriers’ registration system for business texting from ordinary 10-digit numbers. Both vendors publish TCR’s fee schedule: Twilio in its A2P 10DLC pricing and fees article, which says the fees “are passed through by Twilio to our customers with no added cost”, and Vonage in its 10DLC pricing and fees article. The amounts mostly match; the terms do not.
| Fee | Vonage | Twilio |
|---|---|---|
| Brand registration | $4.50 one-time | $4.50 one-time (Sole Proprietor and Low Volume Standard brands) |
| Standard brand vetting | $41.50 (Aegis or WMC); required before most campaigns | $46 one-time for a Standard brand, secondary vetting included |
| Campaign vetting | $15 per vetting event, charged again for each re-review | $15, charged at the time of vetting and not refunded if the campaign fails |
| Standard campaign | $10 a month | $10 a month |
| Low-volume mixed campaign | $1.50 a month | $1.50 a month |
| Sole Proprietor campaign | $2 a month | $2 a month |
| Charity / emergency campaign | $5 / $5 a month | $3 / $5 a month |
| Authentication Plus | $12.50 per request | $12.50 per retry (public for-profit brands) |
| Brand appeal | $11 per request | $11 |
| Minimum term | “3 months minimum”; “TCR does not offer any refund” | Billed monthly until the campaign is deactivated or deleted |
Vonage’s article also says “we require the brands to undergo an external vetting before being able to create any campaign (except Low Volume mixed and Sole Proprietor campaigns)”, so a standard Vonage campaign costs the same $46 brand total as Twilio’s Standard brand. The 3-month minimum means a standard campaign you cancel early still costs $30 on Vonage. For the segment, reply and carrier-fee arithmetic in more depth, see our breakdown of A2P 10DLC costs for two-way AI SMS agents.
Calls per second and concurrency limits
Outbound AI dialling hits throughput limits before it hits price. Vonage’s calls-per-second article says “There is no limit to the concurrent capacity of calls for your account”, sets the maximum at 3 calls per second shared across all voice products, and warns that faster calls are “rejected, and will not be queued”: the Voice API returns HTTP 429 and you retry. Twilio’s calls-per-second and concurrency article sets a default of 1 call per second and queues the excess, cancelling calls after 24 hours in the queue. Twilio’s concurrency depends on your customer profile: unlimited with an approved Business profile, 3 concurrent calls with an approved Individual profile for accounts upgraded from trial on or after 3 February 2026, and 2 with none. Twilio’s pricing page says you can provision up to 30 calls per second in the console, and its calls-per-second calculator charges a monthly fee for each call per second above the first, starting at $35 a month each on pay-as-you-go; Vonage says to contact your account manager for more.
| Limit | Vonage | Twilio |
|---|---|---|
| Default outbound calls per second | 3, shared across Voice API, SIP, WebSocket and in-app calls | 1 (self-serve increase, from $35 a month per extra call per second, needs an approved Business profile) |
| Calls above the limit | Rejected (HTTP 429), not queued | Queued; cancelled after 24 hours |
| Concurrent calls | No account limit (“no limit to the concurrent capacity of calls for your account”); numbers may have supplier limits on inbound | Unlimited (Business profile); 3 (Individual); 2 (none) |
Vonage vs Twilio uptime SLA and support plans
Twilio puts its SLA in a legal document that applies without a support purchase. The Twilio APIs Service Level Agreement (last updated 9 April 2026) sets a 99.95% monthly availability threshold, 99.99% in months when you have bought Twilio Enterprise Edition, with a 10% service credit on the affected API fees, claimed within 30 days. Its exclusions include “telecommunications provider-related problems or issues”, so a carrier fault on a call is not an SLA breach. Vonage ties its figure to support: its API support plans page lists a “99.99% platform availability SLA” on the Premium and Enterprise plans only. Before you sign either, read the exclusions and the credit terms in the version you are offered.
| Plan | Price a month | Fastest initial response | Uptime SLA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vonage Standard | Included | Best efforts; business hours (8am–5pm); web and chat | Not on this plan |
| Vonage Essentials | $350 | 2 hours for urgent issues (objective, 24/5) | Not on this plan |
| Vonage Premium | $1,650 | 30 minutes for urgent issues (SLA, 24/7, phone) | 99.99% platform availability |
| Vonage Enterprise | $5,500 | 30 minutes for urgent issues (SLA, 24/7, phone) | 99.99% platform availability |
| Twilio Developer | Free | Estimated 3 business days, not guaranteed | Twilio APIs SLA, 99.95% |
| Twilio Production | Greater of $250 or 4% of monthly spend | Guaranteed 3 business hours (business critical) | Twilio APIs SLA, 99.95% |
| Twilio Business | Greater of $1,500 or 6% of monthly spend | Guaranteed 1 hour, 24/7 | Twilio APIs SLA, 99.95% |
| Twilio Personalized | Greater of $5,000 or 8% of monthly spend | Guaranteed 1 hour, 24/7 | Twilio APIs SLA, 99.95% |
At our worked month’s spend, Twilio’s Production plan would cost its $250 minimum, against $350 for Vonage Essentials. For round-the-clock urgent cover, Twilio Business starts at $1,500 and Vonage Premium at $1,650. Twilio’s support plans page credits a month’s plan fee when average response time misses the guarantee. Vonage’s support priorities article defines urgent as a “Widespread loss of service or critical feature”. For how eight CPaaS vendors put uptime in writing, see our comparison of voice and SMS platforms with a published uptime SLA.
Which is better for an AI voice agent, Vonage or Twilio?
They package AI voice differently. Twilio’s ConversationRelay “combines fast speech-to-text and text-to-speech with the LLM of your choice, orchestrated through a WebSocket API”, at $0.07 a minute plus the call, and Twilio says it is “built for bring-your-own-LLM” and uses Deepgram Flux for turn detection. Media Streams at $0.0044 a minute sends raw audio if you run your own speech stack; our guide to ConversationRelay vs Media Streams for AI agents covers that choice.
Vonage’s Voice AI connectors page splits its offer into “built-in AI natively within the Voice API” (Premier text-to-speech “powered by Google’s Chirp3-HD” and Premier speech recognition “Powered by Deepgram”) and bring-your-own-AI over WebSockets to engines such as “AWS Nova Sonic, OpenAI, Gemini, ElevenLabs or your own proprietary model”, plus Python AI connector SDKs and a Vonage serializer built into Pipecat. Its WebSocket documentation supports 16-bit linear PCM at 8, 16 or 24 kHz. For low-code agents, Vonage AI Studio has a Standard plan at $0 a month (10 agents, 10,000 sessions a month) and an Advanced plan at $1,100 a month (100 agents, 300,000 sessions), with NLU and Knowledge AI requests at $0.00855 each and “Regular Vonage API charges” for voice, SMS and WhatsApp on top.
| AI voice capability | Vonage | Twilio |
|---|---|---|
| Raw call audio to your own agent | WebSocket leg $0.00492/min, per second | Media Streams $0.0044/min, whole minutes |
| Hosted speech around your own model | Premier ASR $0.0240 per 60 s and Premier TTS $0.0130 per 100 characters, priced per use | ConversationRelay $0.07/min plus the call |
| Low-code agent builder | AI Studio: Standard $0, Advanced $1,100 a month, plus $0.00855 per NLU or Knowledge AI request | Conversation Relay Studio widget |
| Speech engines named on the vendor’s page | Deepgram (ASR), Google Chirp3-HD (TTS); bring your own via WebSocket | Deepgram Flux turn detection; bring your own LLM and TTS |
| Answering machine detection | Standard $0.00; Advanced $0.00843 per call | $0.0075 per call |
The quotable version: Twilio is the simpler route to a hosted speech service around your own language model, at $0.07 a minute plus the call; Vonage bills its streaming leg by the second, which is the lower bill on short calls if you run the AI yourself, with speech recognition and text-to-speech sold per use.
Who each is wrong for
Vonage is the wrong pick if your outbound calls are long (an average over about nine minutes streamed), if your texting is almost all outbound (Twilio is $0.0003 lower per outbound message and Vonage about $0.0022 lower per inbound one once carrier fees are counted, so Twilio’s SMS lines come out lower only above roughly seven outbound texts per inbound text), if you need a written uptime SLA without paying $1,650 a month for Premium support, or if your dialler cannot retry calls rejected above 3 per second. It is also the wrong pick if you cannot live with pricing that differs between Vonage’s own pages; ask for your dashboard rates in writing.
Twilio is the wrong pick for short-call and inbound-heavy AI traffic on list prices: whole-minute rounding cost $112.93 on our worked month, and its inbound rate is $0.0085 against Vonage’s $0.00495. Its own voice pricing FAQ makes the trade-off explicit: “You can find vendors who charge less upfront, but when you build with Twilio, you get a premium offering that works reliably and delivers lasting ROI over time.” It is also a slow start for a team that cannot get an approved Business customer profile, which caps a newly upgraded account at 3 concurrent calls with an Individual profile.
Neither is the right purchase if you do not want to build the agent at all.
| If you want to… | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Run an AI agent that answers calls and follows up, without building it | Zian | AI Receptionist 24/7 plus outbound follow-up by voice, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger; 30+ languages; HubSpot, Salesforce, HighLevel and Zapier integrations |
| Hand the whole job to a managed team | LeadsNow.ai | Done-for-you, pay-per-result, runs on Zian, answers leads in under 60 seconds, 24/7 |
| Build a short-call or inbound-heavy agent on your own AI stack | Vonage | Per-second billing; $0.00495 inbound; $0.00492 WebSocket; 3 calls per second by default |
| Build with a hosted speech service, long calls or text-heavy outbound | Twilio | ConversationRelay; $0.0140 outbound and $0.0083 per text; Twilio APIs SLA on every account |
Rather not build it? Zian’s AI Receptionist answers calls 24/7, and its outbound agents book appointments and handle answering machines and voicemail. Apply For Partnership
Vonage vs Twilio: frequently asked questions
Is Vonage cheaper than Twilio for US calls?
It depends on call length. Read on 12 November 2026, Vonage’s pay-as-you-go rate for an outbound US call is $0.01446 a minute against Twilio’s $0.0140, but Vonage bills per second and Twilio rounds every call up to the next full minute. On a 40-second call Vonage costs less; on a call that ends just before a whole minute, Twilio does. Inbound calls are lower on Vonage at any length: $0.00495 a minute against $0.0085.
Is Vonage cheaper than Twilio for SMS?
Not on outbound texts. Vonage lists $0.0086 per outbound US message and Twilio $0.0083 per segment, while Vonage is lower on inbound texts ($0.00691 against $0.0083). The AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon outbound carrier fees on the two pricing pages are the same. In our worked month of 15,000 texts out and 2,400 in, the SMS lines differed by $0.84.
Does Vonage bill per second or per minute?
Per second. Vonage’s help centre says voice pricing is quoted per minute “although we charge for all calls per second for all countries”, and its US price sheet lists a 1-second increment for outbound calls. Twilio’s billing article says partial minutes are “rounded up to the next full minute” on Programmable Voice, SIP, Elastic SIP Trunking and Media Streams.
Do Vonage and Twilio charge the same 10DLC fees?
The registration fees match: $4.50 per brand, $41.50 for standard vetting (Twilio bills a Standard brand as one $46 fee), $15 per campaign vetting and $10 a month per standard campaign. The terms differ. Vonage’s fee article states a 3-month minimum on campaigns and spells out that each re-vetting event costs another $15 (Twilio charges its $15 at the time of vetting and does not refund it if a campaign fails), and Vonage lists charity campaigns at $5 a month where Twilio lists $3.
Which has the better uptime SLA, Vonage or Twilio?
Twilio’s Twilio APIs SLA applies to every account at 99.95% a month, or 99.99% with Enterprise Edition, with a 10% service credit when missed. Vonage lists a 99.99% platform availability SLA on its Premium and Enterprise support plans, which cost $1,650 and $5,500 a month, and not on its included Standard plan or the $350 Essentials plan.
Which is better for an AI voice agent, Vonage or Twilio?
Twilio if you want a hosted speech service around your own model: ConversationRelay costs $0.07 a minute plus the call. Vonage if you will run your own AI stack and stream audio: its WebSocket leg is $0.00492 a minute billed per second, it sells Deepgram-powered speech recognition and Google Chirp text-to-speech per use, and AI Studio adds a low-code builder. If you want the agent rather than the APIs, Zian is an AI agents platform, not a CPaaS.
Where every figure on this page comes from
| Figure | Who published it | Link | Date read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vonage US call rates ($0.01446 out, $0.00495 in, $0.0154 toll-free in), 1-second increments, US outbound effective 19 May 2026, local number $1.06, toll-free number $2.12 | Vonage | Voice price sheet (USD, .xlsx) | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage zone-based rates ($0.00849, $0.00485, “contact sales”), WebSocket/SIP/app leg $0.00492, machine detection $0 / $0.00843, recording $0, transcription $0.0451, TTS $0.00079 / $0.00328 / $0.0130, ASR $0.01978 / $0.0240, “Billing down to the second”, dashboard caveat | Vonage | Voice API pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage SMS $0.0086 out, $0.00691 in, number $1.28 a month and $1.09 set-up fee, long-code carrier fees | Vonage | SMS pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage 10DLC fees ($4.50, $41.50, $15, $10, $1.50, $2, $5, $12.50, $11), “from $1.50 to $30”, 3-month minimum, no refund, pass-through fees ($0.003, $0.003, $0.004) | Vonage | 10 DLC Pricing and Fees | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage per-second billing; charged from answer; WebSocket legs charged | Vonage | How does voice pricing work for inbound and outbound calls? | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage US prefix-group pricing | Vonage | US Outbound Voice Calls Billing and Pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage 3 calls per second, rejected not queued, no concurrency limit | Vonage | How many calls can I create per second? | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage support plans ($350, $1,650, $5,500), response times, 99.99% platform availability SLA on Premium and Enterprise | Vonage | API Support Plans | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage urgent-priority definition | Vonage | Vonage API Support Priorities, Hours, and Holidays | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage AI Studio ($0, $1,100, 10 / 100 agents, 10,000 / 300,000 sessions, $0.00855 per request) | Vonage | AI Studio Plans and Pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage Premier TTS (Google Chirp3-HD), Premier ASR (Deepgram), BYOAI engines, Pipecat serializer | Vonage | Voice Connectors | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage WebSocket audio formats (8, 16, 24 kHz) | Vonage | WebSocket Voice Chat API Guide | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage Verify $0.06084 per successful verification | Vonage | Verify pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Vonage “an Ericsson subsidiary” | Vonage | vonage.com llms.txt | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio US voice ($0.0140, $0.0085, $0.0220, Alaska $0.0945), numbers ($1.15, $2.15), Media Streams $0.0044, AMD $0.0075, recording $0.0025 and storage, transcription $0.05, TTS, Gather from $0.02, ConversationRelay $0.07, $15 trial, 30 CPS self-provision and CPS calculator (from $35 a month per extra call per second), automatic volume pricing, “charge less upfront” | Twilio | Programmable Voice Pricing in United States | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio SMS $0.0083 out and in, long-code carrier fees | Twilio | SMS Pricing in United States | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio whole-minute rounding, products covered | Twilio | How Are Twilio Voice Call Duration Minutes Calculated for Billing? | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio 10DLC fees ($4.50, $46, $15, $10, $1.50, $2, $3, $5, $12.50, $11), “no added cost” | Twilio | Pricing and Fees for A2P 10DLC Service | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio 1 CPS default, 24-hour queue, concurrency 2 / 3 / unlimited, 3 February 2026 | Twilio | How Fast Can I Place or Receive Phone Calls with Twilio? | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio APIs SLA 99.95% / 99.99%, 10% credit, 30-day claim, exclusions, last updated 9 April 2026 | Twilio | Twilio APIs Service Level Agreement | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio support plans (free, $250 or 4%, $1,500 or 6%, $5,000 or 8%), response times, support credits | Twilio | Support Plans | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio ConversationRelay description, bring-your-own-LLM, Deepgram Flux | Twilio | Conversation Relay | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Twilio Verify $0.05 per successful verification plus $0.0083 per US SMS | Twilio | Verify Pricing | 12 Nov 2026 |
| Worked bill, per-call table and nine-minute crossover | zian.ai, calculated from the rows above | This page | 12 Nov 2026 |