AI Voice Agent Cost Calculator
An AI voice agent on Loop Voice costs about $0.95 to $1.49 per answered conversation on monthly billing, and calls nobody answers cost nothing. Enter how many shoppers you'd call and how many support calls you get, and the calculator picks the plan, the monthly bill and the cost per conversation, next to the same calls made by a person or on a per-minute developer platform.
Across 7 stores in Loop Voice's September 2026 benchmark, 15.9% of shoppers called picked up at least once. A shopper can pick up more than one call in a sequence, so round up when you budget.
Used only for the per-minute and in-house comparisons.
- Answered conversations a month
- 309
- Credits needed
- 464
- Plan
- Growth
- Monthly cost
- $399
- Cost per answered conversation
- $1.29
| Option | Monthly cost | Per answered conversation | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loop Voice, Growth | $399 | $1.29 | Nothing to build; overage only if you exceed the plan |
| Developer platform, usage only | $148 to $221 | $0.48 to $0.71 | The store layer you build and run: Shopify events, consent, texts, attribution |
| In-house rep, wages and benefits | $1,732 | $5.60 | Phone system, hiring, supervision, and the hours needed to call within minutes all day |
How the numbers are worked out
- Loop Voice. An answered conversation uses about 1.5 credits, and calls nobody answers use none. Plans: Starter $119 for 120 credits, Growth $399 for 500, Scale from $975 for 1,500 (more credits in steps up to 10,000), Enterprise $3,790 for 6,000; yearly billing saves 20%. Answered calls that don't end in an order still use credits.
- Per-minute platforms. The range is the example stack in our build vs buy breakdown: Vapi's hosting fee plus speech-to-text, a language model, an ElevenLabs voice and Twilio calling, $0.096 to $0.143 a minute as listed on October 16, 2026. One extra billable minute per answered conversation covers voicemails and short unanswered connects.
- In-house rep. $21.53 is the US median hourly wage for customer service representatives (BLS, May 2025); wages are 68.7% of compensation in office and administrative jobs (BLS, June 2026), so an hour costs about $31.36. Each answered call gets 4 extra minutes for notes and lookups, and each unanswered dial 1 minute.
Three things the calculator leaves out
- Results. It prices calls, not the orders they bring in. Measure those with a holdout group (how to run a holdout test on cart recovery calls).
- Coverage. Calling every abandoned checkout within minutes means paying people for every calling hour, which our call center cost guide puts at about $12,515 a month for 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day.
- Building. A per-minute platform leaves the Shopify events, consent rules, opt-outs, texts and attribution to your engineers (build vs buy).
Common questions
How many answered conversations does each Loop Voice plan cover?
About 80 on Starter, 330 on Growth, 1,000 on Scale at 1,500 credits and 4,000 on Enterprise, at about 1.5 credits per answered conversation. Calls nobody answers use no credits.
Is a per-minute voice platform cheaper than Loop Voice?
Per conversation, usually yes: about $0.48 to $0.72 for a 4-minute call at the example rates, against $0.95 to $1.49 on Loop Voice's monthly plans. The difference has to pay for the engineers who build and run the store layer, which our build vs buy breakdown puts at roughly 13,600 to 80,000 answered conversations a month before building wins.
What pick-up rate should I assume?
Start with 15 to 17%: in Loop Voice's September 2026 benchmark, 15.9% of shoppers called picked up at least once, and 16.5% of shoppers called after abandoning checkout. Your caller ID, timing and audience move it, so replace it with your own number after a month.
See every plan on the pricing page.
Ready to launch your voice agent?
Setup takes under 10 minutes. No code, no headcount.