Comparison
Telleo vs building your own voice agent
Developer platforms like Vapi and Retell AI, and open-source frameworks like Pipecat and LiveKit Agents, let an engineering team build a voice agent exactly the way it wants. Telleo is a finished product for teams that would rather not. We checked the platform facts below on each vendor's public site on 25 September 2026. They may have changed since.
The short answer
Build your own if voice AI is part of your product, you have engineers to own it, and you need full control over models, data and integrations. Use Telleo if you want Hindi and Hinglish calls, telephony, a CRM that acts on outcomes and per-call health checks without building and maintaining them yourself, priced in rupees per minute.
Side by side
| Telleo | Building your own agent on Vapi, Retell AI, Pipecat or LiveKit | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A finished product: agent builder, telephony, CRM, follow-up automation and call analysis. | Building blocks. Vapi and Retell host the voice pipeline; Pipecat and LiveKit Agents are open-source frameworks you run yourself. |
| Pricing model | A per-minute rate in rupees that includes telephony: ₹3.49/min on the annual plan, ₹3.99/min on monthly plans. Excludes 18% GST. | In US dollars and in parts. Vapi: $0.05/min hosting, with models passed through at cost, plus telephony. Retell: $0.07 to $0.31/min for voice agents, depending on the LLM and voice chosen. |
| Entry cost | Starter ₹3,499/month minimum billing (a trial plan, up to 3 months), Pro ₹6,999/month, or ₹19,999/year on the annual plan. The full CRM and workflow automations come with the annual plan, or with Pro + CRM at ₹8,999/month. | Vapi: $0 to start with $5 free credits; support packages from $29/month. Retell: $10 free credits and 20 free concurrent calls. Pipecat and LiveKit Agents: free and open source. |
| Engineering effort | No code. Opening line, script, questions, outcomes and handoff numbers are set in a form. | Engineers write prompts, tools and webhooks. With a framework you also run hosting, scaling and monitoring. |
| Telephony | Included on Telleo's lines (Plivo). No SIMs, dialers or telecom contracts. | You choose the carrier and numbers. Vapi lists its own telephony/SIP as free and Twilio, Vonage and Telnyx transport fees; Retell lists Twilio and Telnyx rates by country, including India. |
| Hindi and Hinglish | In production, with the tuning done: barge-in on phone lines, no repeated sentences, no parroting, gendered Hindi grammar, phone numbers read digit by digit. | Depends on the speech-to-text, LLM and voice you pick. Interruptions, fillers like "haan" and Hindi grammar are yours to tune and test. |
| CRM and follow-up | Built in: lead sources, round-robin assignment, retries, bookings, WhatsApp and email. | Build it or connect one. Retell lists integrations such as HubSpot, Make and n8n; otherwise webhooks and APIs. |
| Call analysis | Outcome, summary, lead rating and extracted answers on every AI call, free. Human calls analysed per minute of recording. | Retell lists post-call analysis, and AI quality assurance at $0.10/min after the first 100 free minutes. With a framework, you build it. |
| Quality monitoring | A green, amber or red health verdict on every AI call with a plain headline. | Vapi lists critical monitoring and call simulation; Retell lists simulation testing. With a framework, you build dashboards and alerts. |
| Control | You configure the agent and choose its voice and speech engine; Telleo runs the pipeline. No public API or SDK; webhooks for integration. | Full control of models, prompts, tools, data flow and hosting. Pipecat and LiveKit Agents can run on your own servers. |
| Compliance | No certifications claimed. We register DLT with you. | Retell: "SOC 2 certified, HIPAA-ready". Vapi: HIPAA option at $2,000/month. Self-hosted frameworks: whatever your own setup achieves. |
| Best for | Sales, admissions and service teams that want results from calling, not a voice AI project. | Product and engineering teams building voice into their own product. |
Choose Telleo if…
- You don't have engineers to build and maintain a real-time voice pipeline.
- Your calls are in Hindi, English or Hinglish and you don't want to tune interruptions, fillers and grammar yourself.
- You want telephony, CRM, follow-ups and call analysis on one bill, in rupees.
- You want a per-call health verdict rather than raw logs to dig through.
Choose building your own agent on Vapi, Retell AI, Pipecat or LiveKit if…
- Voice AI is part of your own product and you need control of every component.
- You need a public API, custom tools during the call or deep integration with your own systems.
- You want to choose specific models, voices or carriers, or host everything yourself.
- You need compliance options such as HIPAA agreements that a platform publishes.
- You need languages Telleo does not yet run in production.
What building your own involves
A phone agent needs speech-to-text, a language model, text-to-speech, telephony, turn-taking, hosting, and somewhere for results to go. Vapi and Retell AI host the real-time pipeline and let you choose the providers. Pipecat (BSD-2 licence, maintained by Daily) and LiveKit Agents (Apache 2.0) are open-source frameworks; you run the servers yourself, or use a hosted option such as Pipecat Cloud for Pipecat or LiveKit Cloud for LiveKit Agents.
In every case your team still writes the prompts, connects your data, picks a carrier and decides what happens after each call.
What it costs
Vapi charges $0.05 a minute for hosting, with speech and model costs passed through at cost and telephony on top. Its pricing calculator's default example puts 1,000 minutes at $82 to $129 a month. Retell publishes $0.07 to $0.31 a minute for voice agents, $10 in free credits, $2 a month per phone number, and 20 free concurrent calls, then $8 per extra concurrent call per month.
Pipecat and LiveKit Agents are free to use, but you pay for the AI services, telephony and servers, plus the engineering time to run them. Telleo's rate of ₹3.49 a minute on the annual plan includes telephony and analysis of AI calls, and excludes GST.
The part that takes longest
A first working agent is quick on any of these tools. Pipecat's quickstart promises a first bot in five minutes, and Retell says you can go live in minutes. Making it hold up on real Indian phone lines is the long part: callers interrupt, say "haan" mid-sentence, go silent, or hand the phone to someone else.
Telleo's agents already handle barge-in on phone lines, never repeat a sentence, avoid parroting answers back, match Hindi verbs to the voice's gender and close politely if they cannot hear the caller twice. Every AI call also gets a health verdict, so problems like long silences or a failed transfer show up in plain words.
Questions
Is building on Vapi or Retell cheaper than Telleo?+
It depends on your stack and volume. Vapi and Retell price in US dollars and in parts: platform fee, speech, model, voice, telephony, numbers and concurrency. Add those up for your expected minutes, plus engineering time, before comparing with Telleo's rupee rate, which includes telephony.
Are Pipecat and LiveKit Agents really free?+
The frameworks are open source: Pipecat under the BSD-2 licence and LiveKit Agents under Apache 2.0. You still pay for the AI services, telephony and servers you use, and for the engineers who run them.
Does Telleo have an API?+
No public API or SDK. Telleo connects to other systems through webhooks and HTTP request steps in its workflows. If your use needs a full developer API, a developer platform is the better fit.
Which speech engines does Telleo use?+
Telleo offers 80+ voices across 7 speech engines: Google Chirp3-HD, Sarvam Bulbul, Smallest Lightning (standard and Pro), Rumik, Microsoft Edge and Deepgram Aura-2 for English. Voice preview plays the exact engine and voice that will go out on the call.
Can I start with Telleo and build my own later?+
Yes. Every AI call has a full transcript, recording can be switched on for every call, and the call log supports search, filters and export.
When were these facts checked?+
On 25 September 2026, on the Vapi and Retell AI pricing pages, the Pipecat documentation, and the Pipecat and LiveKit Agents GitHub repositories. Please confirm on each vendor's site before deciding.
Sources
Third-party facts on this page come from these public pages. Vendors change prices and features; check before you buy.
- Vapi pricing — checked 25 September 2026
- Retell AI pricing — checked 25 September 2026
- Pipecat documentation: introduction — checked 25 September 2026
- Pipecat on GitHub (BSD-2-Clause) — checked 25 September 2026
- LiveKit Agents on GitHub (Apache-2.0) — checked 25 September 2026
Hear it on a real phone call.
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