Bland AI vs ElevenLabs Agents: Price, Call Caps and Fit

Bland AI suits teams wanting one rate with models included: $0.14 a minute on Start, or $0.12 plus $299 monthly on Build, under daily caps. ElevenLabs Agents suits teams wanting its voices, at $0.08 a minute plus the language model. To choose your own models and carrier, Dograh, the open-source AI voice agent platform, runs self-hosted or on Dograh Cloud.

Key Takeaways

• Bland bundles its own models into $0.14 or $0.12 a minute.
• ElevenLabs Agents charges $0.08 a minute past plan minutes, plus the language model.
• Bland rejects calls past its caps. ElevenLabs bursts to three times at double rate.

Bland and ElevenLabs both sell hosted phone agents, but Bland starts from the call and ElevenLabs from the voice. We table both, price one month on each, then compare call limits and compliance and say who each fits. If you want open source, the last section covers Dograh.

Bland AI and ElevenLabs Agents in one table

Bland sells a finished phone agent at one rate, while ElevenLabs sells its speech stack by the minute and lets you pick the language model. The rows below put plans, limits, phone lines and hosting side by side.

Who builds what inside the call

The biggest difference is who chooses the language model. Bland promises "No token charges" and "No model-provider pass-throughs", because the language model, the transcription and the voices are Bland's own and sit inside the minute rate. You get one number to budget and no model bills to reconcile.

The trade is choice. On Start you can use one voice and on Build five, with unlimited voices and a custom voice actor only on Enterprise. If a newer language model would suit your calls better, Bland decides when its stack moves to it, since the model comes with the minute.

ElevenLabs Agents works the other way round on the language side. ElevenLabs runs its own speech-to-text and voices, plus a turn-taking model it built, and those sit inside the $0.08 minute. The language model is yours to choose from its supported list, or you plug in a custom one, and that usage is billed on top at a rate that depends on the model.

So Bland is one decision and one bill. ElevenLabs gives you its voice library, which is the reason most teams look at it, plus control over the reasoning layer, at the cost of a second line on the invoice.

What 10,000 minutes a month costs

A worked example puts the two price models on the same footing. Take 10,000 call minutes in one month, with the phone line left out because both vendors let you bring your own carrier.

The rows are not like for like. Bland's $1,499 already pays for the language model, while the ElevenLabs rows still need it. A small model adds little to ElevenLabs' line, and a large reasoning model can add a lot, so price the model you plan to use before you compare.

Bland Start looks lowest of the Bland rows, but its cap of 100 calls a day allows about 3,000 calls in a month. Our full breakdown of Bland AI pricing shows where Build starts to win and what transfers, texts and phone time add.

On ElevenLabs, Pro covers the minutes for less than Business, but it allows only 20 calls at once. If your 10,000 minutes arrive in morning spikes, the plan with more lines can be worth the higher fee.

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Call limits and what happens at the edge

The two vendors handle a busy hour in opposite ways. Bland caps self-serve plans on calls at once, calls a day and calls an hour. Start allows 10 at once, 100 a day and 100 an hour. Build allows 50 at once, 2,000 a day and 1,000 an hour, and Enterprise removes the daily cap. Bland's billing docs say plainly that "hitting limits means calls get rejected rather than incurring unexpected charges."

ElevenLabs has no daily cap, only calls at once, from 4 on Free to 40 on Business. Above that, ElevenLabs' burst pricing lets an agent take up to three times its limit at $0.16 a minute, double the usual rate.

Past the burst ceiling, new calls are rejected unless you turn on call queueing. Queued callers wait for a free line for up to 1,800 seconds, 180 by default, and the waiting time is not billed.

In practice, Bland protects your budget and ElevenLabs protects the call. An outbound team planning 3,000 calls a day outgrows Build and needs an Enterprise contract. On ElevenLabs the same team pays double for every minute above its line count, so steady traffic over the limit is a sign to move up a plan.

Phone lines, HIPAA and where each runs

Both let you bring your own carrier, which keeps your numbers portable. Bland works with your own Twilio account or a SIP trunk, or it can supply Twilio lines at pass-through cost. When the agent hands a caller to a person on Bland's lines, the transfer minutes cost $0.05 on Start and $0.04 on Build, and on your own telephony Bland charges no transfer fee. ElevenLabs connects natively to Twilio and to SIP trunks, with setup guides for Telnyx, Plivo and Vonage among others, and the carrier bills you directly.

For a healthcare line, both put the business associate agreement (BAA) under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) on Enterprise. Bland lists "HIPAA compliant with a signed BAA" in its Enterprise column, beside SOC 2 Type I and Type II, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP 20x Class A. ElevenLabs offers BAAs to HIPAA customers on Enterprise, and patient data also needs its Zero Retention Mode switched on.

Hosting follows the same pattern. Bland offers on-prem or virtual private cloud deployment on Enterprise, and ElevenLabs arranges private deployment in your own cloud account through its sales team. In both cases the code stays closed, so you run their software on your hardware without being able to read or change it.

Which one fits your team

Bland fits a phone operations team that wants one vendor and one rate. If you have no interest in choosing models, run steady volume under 2,000 calls a day, and like a hard stop over a surprise bill, Build is simple to budget. It fits less well when you need a specific language model or voice, or HIPAA before you are ready for an Enterprise contract.

ElevenLabs Agents fits a brand where the voice is part of the product, or a team that already knows which language model it wants. Traffic that spikes is easier to absorb with burst and queueing than with a daily cap. It fits less well when steady volume sits above your plan's line count, since burst minutes cost double. Budget the language model as a second line from day one, because it moves with every prompt change.

Whichever you lean towards, run your pilot over a real phone number. Most phone calls still arrive at the agent as 8 kHz audio, while a browser demo runs at 16 kHz, so a voice that sounds perfect in the dashboard can mishear callers once it is on a phone line.

Where Dograh fits as the open-source option

If neither closed platform suits you, Dograh is the open-source third option. The platform runs the call flow, tools and phone line, and you choose every model under it, including ElevenLabs voices on your own ElevenLabs key, set as the agent's voice provider, any other LLM, speech-to-text and voice provider, or open models on your own servers. Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee, but servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost money. Dograh Cloud charges a 1¢-a-minute platform fee, which is the $100 line in the example above, and pre-recorded clips can play your agent's most common lines with a voice fallback for the rest.

Call limits are yours to set. Self-hosted Dograh runs 10 calls at once by default, raised with one environment setting, and your servers and carrier set the real ceiling, while Dograh Cloud's pay as you go includes 10, with more on request. Our post on scaling to thousands of simultaneous calls covers each limit in the chain. For patient calls, a self-hosted install needs no BAA with Dograh, because the calls never reach us, though your model providers may need their own and the phone carrier may need one depending on what it stores.

Quality checks come built in. The QA step scores each step of test and live calls, and you set what share of calls it samples. When a score looks wrong, the call trace shows the speech-to-text, AI and voice time for every turn, so you know which part of a slow reply to fix first.

For the wider field, see our guides to Bland AI alternatives and ElevenLabs alternatives.