Cognigy

Solo

not suitable

The cheapest publicly visible contract costs 43,080 USD a year and brings 60,000 conversations with it. Anyone handling a few hundred calls a year pays for volume they will never use and commits to a term with 60 days' notice.

Mid-market

suitable with caveats

From roughly 30,000 conversations a year the maths becomes arguable, because the entry package then costs about 1.44 USD per conversation and one staffed phone seat costs more. Below that, a mid-sized firm mostly pays for platform. There is a second thing to settle: who builds and maintains the agent. The platform needs a person who designs dialogues, connects business systems and chases down wrong answers.

Enterprise

suitable

This is the best fit. The framework agreement for up to 10 million conversations a year costs 1,000,000 USD plus 200,000 USD ramp-up, which works out at 0.10 USD per conversation and therefore one seventh of the entry price. Added to that are the attestations that decide admission in regulated procurement: BSI C5 Type 2, AIC4, ISO/IEC 42001:2023 and TISAX. German contract law and a registered seat in Düsseldorf remove the argument about jurisdiction.

Off-the-shelf

The contact centre platform's own voice response system

Genesys Cloud CX, Avaya and NiCE CXone each bring a voice response system of their own, and it sits where numbers, dial plans and workforce management already sit. Large companies stay for one reason: telephony is the riskiest construction site in the building, and a second vendor in the call path means a second on-call rota and a second three-in-the-morning fault hunt. That calm is paid for with automation tied to a decision tree: every question outside the intended path lands with a person.

AI-native

Model-based voice agent, billed per minute

Parloa from Munich, PolyAI from London and Vapi or Retell from the USA attack the same spot but sell by the conversation minute rather than the annual package, with entry at a few hundred euros a month instead of five figures a year. What you give up is the evidence base: ask for BSI C5 or AIC4 and the younger vendors will usually offer ISO 27001 and SOC 2, which is not what a banking supervisor wants to see. You also give up depth of integration, because a ready-made bridge to SAP, Salesforce or a core insurance application is less often on the shelf at the younger houses. The comparison pays off along three questions: which attestations does your own procurement demand, which business systems have to play along, and how many minutes really occur.

Build it yourself

Your own voice agent on a model API, telephony bought in

Technically the kit is on the shelf. LiteLLM keeps models interchangeable and caps cost per key, Langfuse logs every call with input, output and cost and thereby produces exactly the trail an audit wants to see, n8n chains the business systems without writing code and runs in your own data centre, Claude Code builds the rest, Supabase holds state and conversation history. Costed at 80 person-days at 1,100 euros, the build lands around 88,000 euros, twice the entry package, plus roughly 500 euros a month to run. Failure rarely comes from the build. It comes from telephony, because response time has to stay under roughly 800 milliseconds for a conversation to hold, and because SIP connectivity, number porting and media streams are a discipline of their own. It comes, second, from round-the-clock readiness, since a silent phone number is an outage the whole market can see. It comes, third, from the attestations: BSI C5 and ISO/IEC 42001 for a self-built system cost a six-figure sum and a year, and without them the solution does not clear procurement in regulated houses. Building your own pays off where the conversation itself is the product, or where a domain quirk no ready platform covers.

Entry price

There is no pricing page of its own; the sitemap with 763 addresses carries none. What is publicly visible are the list prices the vendor itself puts on AWS Marketplace, all as twelve-month contracts: 43,080 USD for platform, setup, 60,000 conversations a year and standard support; 53,916 USD for the same package with five voice gateways for phone operation; 1,000,000 USD as a framework agreement for up to 10 million conversations a year, plus 200,000 USD ramp-up. That works out at 0.72 USD per conversation at entry and 0.10 USD under the framework agreement. The vendor's own terms, by contrast, name euros as the currency with 30 days to pay, while the marketplace bills in dollars.⁵As of 2026-08-07List prices as twelve-month contracts: 43,080 USD for 60,000 conversations a year, 53,916 USD with five voice gateways, 1,000,000 USD framework agreement for up to 10 million conversations, 200,000 USD ramp-upOpen source

As of 2026-08-07

What gets expensive

In three places. First the volume tier: between the entry package and the framework agreement lies a factor of seven per conversation, and anyone growing inside the entry package pays the high rate for a long time before the jump pays off. Second the model cost that runs alongside and sits outside the contract: every call to your own language model is billed by the model provider, every minute of speech recognition and synthesis by the speech service. Third the renewal: the term renews automatically for the same duration unless notice is given at least 60 calendar days before it ends. One missed date costs another year. Anyone self-hosting should also reckon with the licence audit: the vendor may have usage audited, charges excess use at list prices, and from five percent deviation the customer pays for the audit.