Understanding Usage & Costs
Your bill has two parts: a fixed plan fee and variable usage. Usage is the part that moves, and it is worth understanding before it surprises you.
What Gets Metered
- Voice minutes — $0.38 per minute of call handling
- Outbound SMS — $0.08 per message sent
- Inbound SMS — included, not charged
- Phone number — included, not charged
Tracking It
Dashboard → Usage shows consumption for the current period, broken down by type. Check it in your first fortnight rather than waiting for an invoice — early usage is when the surprises happen.
💡 Tip: Multiply your typical daily call minutes by 30, then by $0.38. That single calculation predicts most of your variable cost and takes about a minute.
What Drives Voice Costs Up
- Long greetings. Ten seconds of preamble on every call adds up across hundreds of calls.
- Over-explaining agents. A prompt that produces monologues costs real money per call.
- Spam and wrong numbers. These are billable minutes producing nothing.
- Calls that should have transferred. An agent looping on a question it cannot resolve burns minutes.
⚠ Note: Trimming your greeting and tightening a verbose prompt is usually the fastest available cost reduction, and it improves caller experience at the same time.
SMS Costs
At $0.08 per outbound message, SMS is cheap individually and noticeable in volume. A workflow that texts every caller costs meaningfully more than one that texts only qualified leads — another reason to put conditions on SMS workflows.
Reviewing Regularly
Check Usage weekly for the first month, then monthly. What you are watching for is a step change: a sudden jump usually means a workflow is firing more often than intended, or call volume has genuinely grown.
✓ Success: Usage that tracks your call volume proportionally is healthy. Usage that grows faster than call volume means something is misconfigured.