Best AI Cold Calling Software for Agencies in 2026: Per-Minute Prices and the Law

The best AI cold calling software for an agency is a voice platform priced per minute, Autocalls from $0.09 on its agency tiers, Retell from $0.07, Bland from $0.12, Vapi from $0.05 plus model pass-through, with one condition every roundup on this query skips: since February 2024 an AI-generated voice is an "artificial or prerecorded voice" under the TCPA, so the software may lawfully call only numbers that gave written consent to the business it calls for, or business landlines, and never a cold list of cell phones. I run Paramount Exposure, so I am a vendor in the adjacent category and I rank nobody. Paramount sells no calling software; it builds outbound in a client's own accounts and runs it, and it has done that for no client yet. Both facts are on the page.

Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-10-14 and linked in its row. MyNewStaff's guide on this query, the one page of theirs that ranks, prints a four-column price table with no date; the figures here carry one.

What "AI cold calling software" means, and what it does not

Three different products share the phrase.

Voice-agent platforms. Retell, Bland, Vapi, Synthflow, Autocalls and GoHighLevel's Voice AI. You get a model, a voice, telephony and a builder; you design the conversation and the rules. Priced per minute, sometimes with a platform fee. This is what an agency buys when it wants to own the agent.

Managed AI callers. MyNewStaff's Brooke is the example on this query: a vendor builds and runs the voice agent for you, bills a monthly tier plus minutes.

Human dialers with AI assistance. Convoso, Apollo's dialer and the contact-centre products. A person places the call; the software dials, records, transcribes and coaches. Legally a different animal, because a live human voice is not an artificial one.

The distinction decides the law before it decides the price, so the legal section comes before the table.

The law first: what an AI caller may dial

Not legal advice. Have a TCPA attorney review every script and every list before a dial.

The February 2024 ruling. The FCC's declaratory ruling of 8 February 2024 confirmed that the TCPA's restrictions on "artificial or prerecorded voice" calls "encompass current AI technologies that generate human voices", including voices cloned from a real person (FCC 24-17). The consequence under 47 U.S.C. 227 and 47 CFR 64.1200: a marketing call with an AI voice to a cell phone needs the called party's prior express written consent, a signed agreement naming the number and the seller. The statute carries no business-to-business exception to that rule. A business owner's cell is still a cell.

So an AI voice dialing the cell numbers, or the residential lines, on a purchased list is unlawful without prior express written consent. Business landlines sit outside that consent rule, but inside the Telemarketing Sales Rule, state law and the identification and opt-out duties below, and a cell phone registered to a business is still a cell phone. The lawful shapes of an AI-voice product are calls to people who gave written consent to that business (speed-to-lead and follow-up on the client's own forms), calls to business landlines after a wireless scrub has removed every cell number, and AI assisting a human who places the call.

The B2B exemption is narrower than vendors say. The FTC's rule exempts calls to a business to sell to that business from the Do Not Call provisions (16 CFR 310.6), but under the TSR amendments the FTC adopted in March 2024, B2B calls are subject to the misrepresentation rules, and since October 2024 records must be kept for five years (FTC press release). Florida, Maryland, Oklahoma and Texas condition or omit the exemption in their own statutes.

Each client needs its own registry account. Every seller must subscribe to the National Do Not Call Registry itself; an agency "cannot purchase the list once and then provide the data to all of its Clients" (FTC DNC Q&A). Lists are scrubbed inside 31 days of any call.

Identify, disclose, allow opt-out. Every artificial-voice message must state the business's identity at the start, give a callback number and, for telemarketing, offer an automated opt-out within two seconds of the identification (47 CFR 64.1200(b)). Opt-outs by any reasonable means must be honoured within ten business days (FCC 24-24). Maine requires clear notice when an AI voice could be mistaken for a person (10 M.R.S. 1500-DD); the FCC has proposed a federal at-call disclosure (FCC 24-84). One first sentence covers all of it: the business's name, that the caller is an AI, that the call is recorded, a callback number.

Hours, caps and states. Federal hours are 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local; Florida (Fla. Stat. 501.616(6)), Oklahoma (15 O.S. 775C.3) and Maryland (Md. Comm. Law 14-4502) narrow that to 8 p.m. and cap attempts at three per 24 hours; Connecticut requires written consent for every sales call to a consumer (chapter 743m); New Jersey bars unsolicited sales calls to cell phones (N.J.S.A. 56:8-130). Several states keep their own Do Not Call lists in addition to the federal registry; confirm each with the state regulator before serving that state.

Abroad. In the UK an automated marketing call to a business needs that business's prior consent (PECR regulation 19); the EU's ePrivacy Directive says the same (Directive 2002/58/EC, article 13). An AI cold call into the UK is unlawful whoever answers.

Ringless voicemail is a call (FCC 22-85). Dropping AI voicemails on a cold list is the same violation.

A platform cannot make any of this true for you. It can make it enforceable: the consent check before the dial, the hours engine, the disclosure line fixed in the script, the opt-out written to every channel. Buy the platform that lets you build those gates, and do not sell a client anything that skips them.

The five criteria

Price per minute, all in. Retell publishes components; Bland publishes one talk rate; Vapi publishes a hosting fee and passes models through at cost; Autocalls bundles minutes into a plan and charges overage. Model a real month, including telephony and the text-to-speech voice you will actually use.

Agency structure. Sub-accounts, white label, rebilling, concurrency shared across clients. Autocalls and GoHighLevel are built around this; Retell, Bland and Vapi are built for one builder at a time.

Compliance primitives. Can you require a consent flag before a dial, enforce calling hours by the called party's time zone, lock the disclosure line, and propagate an opt-out? If the answer is "you can build that", budget the build.

Recording and transcripts. Where they live, who owns them, how long they are kept. All-party recording states need an announcement at the top of every call (RCFP recording guide).

Exit. Numbers, agent prompts, recordings and CRM records should leave with the client.

The options, with published prices

Prices checked 2026-10-14. Each figure is from the vendor's own page that day; the source column links to it. "Quoted" means no number is printed. The fuller write-ups are in Retell AI alternatives, Bland AI alternatives, Synthflow alternatives, Autocalls alternatives and MyNewStaff alternatives, and every head-to-head is on the comparisons hub. Rates change; confirm before you sign.

#	Option	What it is	Published price (checked 2026-10-14)	Best for	Source
1	Autocalls	No-code voice agents with an agency and white-label track	Starter $34/mo (120 min, $0.20 overage); Pro $129 (700 min, $0.16); Agency $249 (1,700 min, $0.09); Agency White Label $419 (3,500 min, $0.09, own branding, Stripe rebilling); numbers from $3.99/mo	Agencies that want sub-accounts and rebilling without building	autocalls.ai/pricing
2	Retell AI	Voice-agent platform priced by component	$0.07 to $0.31/min all-in; voice engine $0.055, telephony $0.015, standard TTS $0.015, LLM from $0.008; Enterprise quoted	Builders who want to choose every model and pay per second	retellai.com/pricing
3	Bland AI	Voice-agent platform with one flat talk rate	Start $0/mo at $0.14/min; Build $299/mo at $0.12/min; Enterprise quoted; telephony separate	Teams that want no model pass-through on the bill	bland.ai/pricing
4	Vapi	Developer voice platform	$0.05/min hosting plus provider pass-through; Core $29/mo; Pro from $999/mo; Premier quoted; HIPAA add-on $2,000/mo	Engineering teams that want the lowest platform fee and will manage providers	vapi.ai/pricing
5	Synthflow	Enterprise voice platform	Enterprise from $30,000/year; no per-minute rate published	Contact-centre volume with an SLA	synthflow.ai/pricing
6	GoHighLevel Voice AI	Voice agent inside the agency CRM	Platform $97, $297 or $497/mo; AI Employee $50 or $97/mo per sub-account; voice engine $0.045/min plus TTS ($0.015 to $0.170), LLM tokens and phone charges	Agencies already running clients on GoHighLevel	gohighlevel.com/pricing, AI pricing
7	Convoso	Human dialer and contact centre with a voice AI agent	Not published; custom quote after a consultation, primarily annual plans	Outbound teams of human callers that want dialer, compliance tooling and AI assist	convoso.com/pricing
8	Apollo dialer	Human dialer inside a data and sequencing seat	Advanced Dialer add-on $119 per team per month billed annually; seats $49 to $119 per month annually; US dialing 1 credit per 30 seconds	Small teams whose humans place the calls	apollo.io/pricing
9	MyNewStaff Brooke	Managed AI voice caller	Starter $997/mo (500 voice min), Growth $2,497, Scale $4,997, Enterprise $9,997; $0.25/min; a $1,997 setup fee implied by "setup FREE"	Buyers who want a vendor to run the agent	their Brooke page
10	Paramount Exposure, the company I run	Outbound built in your accounts and run for you	Outbound Install $2,500 once; Engine $2,500 or $5,000/mo; voice above the tier $0.25/min	Firms that want outbound run consent-first and want to own every asset. Limit: no cold AI calls to consumers; no outbound results history yet	paramountexposure.com/services/ai-sdr

What we checked, and when

Ten options, one of them mine, every price from the vendor's own page on 2026-10-14. Two things the competing guides print are not on the vendors' pages today: a Bland "$499/mo Scale" tier and a Synthflow per-minute range. Autocalls shows a lower figure beside a yearly toggle labelled "2 months free" ($27, $103, $199, $355), which does not quite reconcile with the monthly prices. Nothing here comes from a review site. Paramount appears once, at its published prices.

Who each option fits

Autocalls is the agency product by design: unlimited assistants on the Agency tier, 500 concurrent calls, and a $419 white-label tier with your branding and Stripe rebilling, at $0.09 a minute on both. Concurrency is shared across the whole account including client sub-accounts, so a busy client can starve a quiet one. Fit: an agency reselling voice agents that wants a price list, not a codebase.

Retell is the builder's platform: per-second billing, your choice of model and voice, batch calling at $0.005 a dial. Fit: an agency with an engineer that will own the agent and the compliance logic. Bland is the same idea with a simpler bill: $0.12 or $0.14 a minute including the model. Vapi is the cheapest platform fee on the page at $0.05 a minute and the most assembly. Synthflow has moved upmarket; price it only at contact-centre volume.

GoHighLevel's Voice AI fits one case: the client already lives in GoHighLevel. Convoso and Apollo belong on the page for the lawful human-led shape: a person dials, the software does the rest.

MyNewStaff's Brooke is the managed caller on this query. Its page says the AI identifies itself ("configurable") and prints a per-minute rate; it does not say what consent the called numbers carry. The head-to-head is on MyNewStaff vs Paramount.

If you run an agency

Three things an agency contract has to settle before a voice agent dials for a client. The client is the seller and must hold its own registry subscription and any state registrations; the agency is the telemarketer. Liability for a violation cannot be assigned to the client or to the platform; the FTC states the same principle for email, that you "can't contract away your legal responsibility" (CAN-SPAM guide). And the client warrants, in writing, that every number supplied for automated calling carries written consent naming the client, and produces the record on request. An agency that resells Autocalls at $0.20 a minute without those three clauses has resold the exposure to itself.

Where Paramount fits, honestly

Paramount Exposure is an AI development and software agency. Its outbound line is described on the AI SDR service page, the AI appointment setting page and the AI lead generation page, and it is built around the rules above rather than around them.

The Outbound Install is $2,500, delivered in 14 days: an ICP and the first 1,500 verified contacts, the compliance pack (registry and wireless scrub run and recorded, internal suppression, the AI-disclosure opening line, recording-consent handling by state, opt-out propagation across email, SMS and voice, calling hours by recipient time zone), three secondary domains and nine to ten inboxes in your name, one phone number with branded caller ID, a voice agent built for business landlines and consented numbers, sequences in your voice, and a reply handler that answers interested replies in under 60 seconds and sends them to your booking link. The Outbound Engine runs it: $2,500 a month includes 1,500 contacts, about 6,000 emails, up to 1,000 AI voice dials and 500 billed minutes; $5,000 a month includes 5,000 contacts, about 20,000 emails, up to 4,000 dials and 2,000 minutes. Three-month minimum, then month to month; minutes above the tier at $0.25; a 45-day exit. You own everything.

What we will not do: make AI calls to consumers' cell phones without their written consent, or sell that. We guarantee the inputs, contacts verified, deliverability gates met, dials and minutes as stated, replies answered in under 60 seconds, scrubs logged, with any missed month credited. AI voice calls go only to business landlines, after a wireless and Do Not Call scrub removes every cell number, and to people who gave prior express written consent; the agent says it is an AI in its first sentence. We do not guarantee meetings; we have run this for no client yet, and the first campaign will be Paramount's own, with its weekly numbers published, misses included, at /outbound/proof.

If the problem is inbound, buy less: the $497 AI Lead Responder answers website inquiries in under 60 seconds and sends people to your booking link; it never books and never calls. The free Intake Index scores which problem you have. The outbound tiers are published on the AI SDR service page; the responder is on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best AI cold calling software for agencies?

For an agency that wants sub-accounts, white label and rebilling without building, Autocalls at $249 or $419 a month with $0.09 a minute (2026-10-14). For an agency with a builder, Retell from $0.07 a minute or Bland at $0.12 to $0.14. Whichever you choose, the software may only call numbers with written consent for the client or business landlines; an AI voice on a cold cell-phone list is unlawful under the FCC's 2024 ruling.

How much does AI cold calling software cost per minute?

Published rates on 2026-10-14: Vapi $0.05 hosting plus pass-through, Retell $0.07 to $0.31 all-in, Autocalls $0.09 on agency tiers, Bland $0.12 to $0.14, GoHighLevel $0.045 on the voice engine plus text-to-speech, tokens and phone charges. Synthflow publishes no per-minute rate; MyNewStaff's Brooke publishes $0.25.

Is AI cold calling legal?

An AI voice is an artificial voice under the TCPA (FCC 24-17). Marketing calls with it to cell phones need prior express written consent, with no B2B exception in the statute; calls to business landlines and to consented numbers, with identification, disclosure, an opt-out and a registry scrub, are the lawful shapes. State laws add hours, caps and consent rules, and the UK bars automated marketing calls to businesses without consent.

Does Paramount sell AI cold calling?

Not to consumers. Paramount sells an outbound engine: email to business addresses under CAN-SPAM; AI voice calls to business landlines, after a wireless and Do Not Call scrub removes every cell number, and to people who gave prior express written consent, with the AI disclosed in the first sentence and every opt-out honoured; SMS only with consent; built in your accounts and run for you from $2,500 a month after a $2,500 install. It never robocalls a consumer's cell phone, and it has no outbound results history yet.