Bolna pricing explained: plans, per-minute cost and what a call really costs

Bolna publishes three ways to pay. All figures below are in US dollars unless marked, as listed on bolna.ai, checked 12 Oct 2026.

• ▸Free credits. Bolna says every new account gets $5 in free credits.
• ▸Pilot terms. Bolna's Pilot plan page says Pilot payments are non-refundable (with legal exceptions) and that call recordings are mandatory during the Pilot.

Bolna's documentation says every call's total cost is the sum of five components. Speech-to-text is billed by call duration, rounded to seconds. The LLM is billed by tokens generated, and text-to-speech by characters synthesised. Telephony is billed by call duration, rounded to minutes. The platform fee is described as a flat per-minute fee charged on top of provider costs.

The 6¢ bundled rate only applies when your agent uses Bolna's preferred models. The list includes Deepgram, Azure, Sarvam and ElevenLabs options for speech recognition, GPT mini and nano models for the LLM, and ElevenLabs, Sarvam, Cartesia and Azure voices. If you pick a model outside that list, Bolna bills that component at variable, usage-based rates instead.

Bring-your-own-key (BYOK) changes the maths. On the Basic plan, if your own key serves any one of speech-to-text, LLM or text-to-speech, that call moves to base token pricing. On other plans, if all three run on your own keys, you pay only the platform fee plus telephony, and you pay the model providers directly.

Using the pay-as-you-go rate on bolna.ai, a 2-minute call on bundled models costs 2 × $0.06 = $0.12 (2 × ₹5.52 = ₹11.04) for speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech. At the higher-volume rate of 4.51¢, the same call is 2 × $0.0451 = about $0.09.

That figure is incomplete. Bolna states that telephony and the platform fee are added per minute, but the pricing page and the docs pages we checked on 12 Oct 2026 do not publish a number for either. We have not guessed them. Ask Bolna for both before you model a budget, and remember that telephony is rounded up to whole minutes, so a 61-second call is billed as 2 telephony minutes.

One wording point is ambiguous. Bolna's preferred-models page describes $0.06/min as a flat rate that includes the listed models, while the main pricing FAQ says telephony and the platform fee are added. We read the $0.06 as the model bundle only, which matches the FAQ.

GRX10 Voice AI is priced at $0.119/min for the platform (₹7.99/min in India), with telephony at carrier cost as a separate line (₹0.85/min on managed SIP in India). There is no surcharge for languages. On published per-minute figures, Bolna's model bundle is cheaper than GRX10's platform rate, and teams that are comfortable assembling and tuning their own stack may pay less with Bolna.

Bolna suits developers who want a low published rate, are willing to choose and tune models, and can handle telephony setup and integrations in-house. The Pilot plans give a predictable entry cost if you already know your volume.

GRX10 Voice AI suits teams that want one platform rate with the model stack included and first-word response under 700 ms on real phone calls. Your sales or service team also gets warm handoff to a human with full context, and every call lands in the CRM with a disposition. If you would rather not run calling yourself, our VoiceOps team can run it for you. For a wider view, read our Bolna alternatives guide or the direct GRX10 Voice AI vs Bolna comparison, then talk to us or book a demo.