Telnyx Pricing 2026: Voice, SMS, Numbers and Voice AI Rates, and What a Small Business Really Pays

How much does Telnyx cost? The short answer

As of October 23, 2026, Telnyx is pay as you go with no monthly fee. A US local number is $1 a month, plus $0.10 a month to turn on texting. A call costs a $0.002-a-minute Voice API fee plus SIP trunking from $0.0032 a minute to receive and $0.005 a minute to call out, so from about half a cent a minute in and $0.007 out. A text is $0.004 per message part plus the carrier's fee. Telnyx's own voice AI engine is $0.05 a minute, with the AI model billed per token on top.

Every Telnyx number on this page comes from Telnyx's own pricing pages and its 10DLC fees article, read October 23, 2026. Telnyx says rates may vary by destination and volume tier, so check the live page before you sign a budget.

Telnyx voice prices in the US

Telnyx bills a call as two lines: its Voice API fee and the SIP trunking the call rides on. Both are published, and every add-on is its own line.

Calling a toll-free number from your Telnyx line has no SIP trunking charge, only the $0.002 API fee. Telnyx also publishes its rates in machine-readable form at GET /v2/public/pricing, which is handy if you want your own dashboard to check them.

Telnyx SMS and phone number prices

Volume discounts kick in at 100 million texts a month and past 50 numbers a month, so a small business pays the list rates above. Carrier fees are passed through at cost, and Telnyx publishes the full carrier table on the same page.

Telnyx Voice AI Agents pricing

Telnyx also sells its own voice agent platform. The rate is $0.05 a minute for what it calls the voice engine: the agent runtime (turn-taking, interruptions, tools, knowledge base), speech-to-text and text-to-speech. Two things are added on top:

• The AI model, billed per token. Telnyx estimates about $0.006 a minute for the Kimi model on its own GPUs (its calculator shows $0.0064). Anthropic and OpenAI models are billed at those providers' list rates on the same invoice.
• The phone call. Carrier cost from $0.0032 a minute inbound, plus the $0.002 Voice API fee, and $1 a month for a local number.

Telnyx puts a realistic agent at about $0.06 a minute. One catch is in its own footnote: the voice engine is billed per call in 60-second increments, so a 15-second call is billed as a full minute and a 90-second call as two. Telnyx says you are not charged for ringing or failed attempts. Pay as you go includes 500 concurrent calls, and Telnyx says US and Canadian numbers port in free for teams moving from Vapi or Retell.

A worked bill: a 6-truck HVAC and plumbing company

Telnyx's pages list rates, not bills, so here is one. Take an HVAC and plumbing company with six techs on the road. An AI receptionist answers 400 calls a month on one local number, averaging 3 minutes each, so 1,200 inbound minutes. A quarter of the callers get put through to the owner's cell for about 2 minutes, every call is recorded, and every caller gets one appointment text. This is the same workload as our Twilio pricing example, so the two bills compare line for line.

Option C needs one more line. Because the voice engine rounds every call up to the next full minute, 400 calls can add up to 400 billed minutes, or up to $20 more. Most months land between, so budget about $82 to $102.

Options A and B leave the AI model, and in A the speech recognition and voice too, to be billed by other vendors. Option C is the only one where the whole call sits on one Telnyx invoice. Our AI voice agent cost guide adds up every layer of a voice agent per minute, setup included.

Texting also needs a one-time registration before the first message goes out, covered next. It is not in the monthly total above.

What the Telnyx price page leaves out

• 10DLC registration. Business texting from a local number has to be registered with the carriers. Telnyx's fees article lists a $4.50 brand registration fee and $15 per campaign review, and a campaign that gets sent back for review is charged again. The campaign itself then costs $1.50 a month for Low Volume Mixed or $10 a month for a standard campaign, billed three months at a time at first and monthly after that. Telnyx says it passes these through at cost.
• Carrier fees on every text. The $0.004 is Telnyx's part. Each carrier adds its own fee per message part, from nothing on some carriers to $0.0045 on T-Mobile and Verizon outbound.
• Message parts, not messages. Texts are billed per part, so a long appointment text with a link can bill as two or three.
• Inbound and outbound are priced differently. Receiving a local call starts at $0.0052 a minute, making one at $0.007. Toll-free inbound starts at $0.017 a minute and varies by who is calling.
• The transfer fee. Using Telnyx's transfer command costs $0.10 each time. At 100 transfers a month that is $10, more than the inbound minutes. Our worked bill dials the owner as a second call leg instead; ask your builder which way they wire it.
• Porting and prepaid balance. Telnyx's pricing pages do not list a porting fee or a minimum top-up. The only porting price we found is the voice AI page's free US and Canadian port-in for teams coming from Vapi or Retell.
• Minimum spend only on bigger plans. Pay as you go has no minimum. Growth is a $2,000 monthly minimum for 15% off voice, messaging and numbers, and Enterprise is $5,000. Neither makes sense for a single-location service business.

Telnyx vs Twilio at the same volumes

Twilio figures below are from Twilio's US Voice and SMS pricing pages, read October 7, 2026, as published in our Twilio breakdown. Telnyx figures were read October 23, 2026.

At this size, Telnyx saves about $8 to $10 a month on the phone line and about $32 if you use the managed speech layer. 10DLC registration fees are left out on both sides. Twilio's do not appear on the pages our Twilio breakdown read, so we did not compare them.

Is Telnyx worth it?

On rates, Telnyx is cheaper than Twilio on almost every line a small business uses: about 40% less per inbound minute, half the outbound rate, and less than half the per-text fee. But at 400 calls a month the gap is around $8 to $32 a month. That is real money over a year, and it is not a reason to rebuild something that already works.

Where Telnyx stands out is the voice AI bundle. At $0.05 a minute with speech included, plus about $0.006 for the model, it lands at the low end of the platforms in our voice AI pricing comparison, with the phone line on the same bill. The trade is per-minute rounding and fewer options than a platform that lets you mix any model and voice.

If you are starting from scratch, Telnyx is a sensible default for the phone line. If you already run on Twilio, switch for the AI bundle or for volume, not for $8. And the cheapest useful thing you can run on either one is a missed-call text-back: at $0.004 a text plus carrier fees, 200 missed calls a month costs a couple of dollars on Telnyx.

Who can build a phone or AI voice workflow on Telnyx for my business?

You can build it yourself if you have a developer, hire a freelancer, or hire a studio that builds the whole system and hands it over. Ask anyone you hire which option above they plan to use and how they handle transfers, because those two choices move this bill from about $18 to over $100 a month.

SuperDupr is one of those studios. We build AI voice agents for service businesses, and our published price for a voice agent build is $5,000 to $10,000, with $200 to $2,000 a month ongoing depending on volume. Most AI builds go live in 2 to 4 weeks, the number and the system belong to your business, and the usage bills (Telnyx or Twilio, the voice platform, the model) stay in your name at the vendors' own rates. We do not resell Telnyx. The first step is a free 30-minute strategy session, booked from that page.

Sources

• Telnyx Voice API pricing, telnyx.com/pricing/voice-api, read October 23, 2026: $0.002 platform fee, recording, transfer, media streaming, Conversation Relay, answering machine detection, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and noise suppression rates, plans.
• Telnyx SIP Trunking pricing, telnyx.com/pricing/elastic-sip, read October 23, 2026: inbound local from $0.0032, toll-free from $0.015, outbound local from $0.005, toll-free destinations free.
• Telnyx SMS API pricing, telnyx.com/pricing/messaging, read October 23, 2026: 10DLC, toll-free and short code per-part rates and carrier fee tables.
• Telnyx Global Numbers pricing, telnyx.com/pricing/numbers, read October 23, 2026: $1 numbers, $0.10 SMS enablement, short codes, 800 numbers, volume tiers.
• Telnyx Voice AI pricing, telnyx.com/pricing/voice-ai-agents, read October 23, 2026: $0.05 voice engine, LLM per token (Kimi estimate $0.0064 a minute), 60-second rounding, 500 concurrent calls, free port-in from Vapi or Retell, Growth and Enterprise minimums.
• Telnyx support, "10DLC Fees and Charges", support.telnyx.com, read October 23, 2026: $4.50 brand registration, $15 campaign review, $1.50 to $10 monthly campaign fees.
• Twilio Voice and SMS pricing, United States, twilio.com, read October 7, 2026, as published in our Twilio pricing breakdown.
• Worked bill: SuperDupr's arithmetic on the published rates above, for an assumed 400 calls of 3 minutes each.