Most AI calling platforms hide their economics behind a sales call. We think that's backwards — if the product's pitch is transparency about your pipeline, the pricing should be transparent too. So here is exactly how a Saient call is billed, down to the formula.
The formula
Every minute of a call has four cost components: a platform fee, speech-to-text (the agent's ears), text-to-speech (the agent's voice) and the language model (the agent's brain). Your per-minute rate is simply: platform fee (₹0.50) + STT + TTS + LLM. That's it. No seat licences, no monthly minimums, no per-call connection charges.
Where the range comes from
Each component has provider options at different price points, and you pick the combination per agent. Speech-to-text ranges from about ₹0.06 to ₹0.49 per minute depending on the provider. Voices range from roughly ₹0.21 for a standard voice to ₹1.26 for a premium natural-sounding one. The language model is the biggest swing: a fast open-weights model costs around ₹0.84 per minute, while frontier models can run several rupees more.
Put together, the cheapest sensible combination lands at ₹1.61 per minute, and a fully premium stack — best voice, best transcription, frontier model — costs around ₹7 per minute. A popular middle configuration works out to about ₹3 per minute. The configure screen shows you the live rate for whatever combination you've selected, before you dial anything.
Wallet billing, to the second of honesty
You top up an INR wallet via Razorpay and calls draw it down. After every call, the transaction record spells out the actual charge — which providers were used, how long the call ran, and the rate applied, like 'Groq+Deepgram+ElevenLabs — 3m 12s @ ₹3.09/min'. Phone numbers are a separate, flat line item: a +91 number costs ₹500 per month. There is nothing else to find on the bill, because there is nothing else on the bill.
Comparing it to the human alternative
A telecaller costs a salary, a seat, a manager's time and a hiring cycle — and dials for a fraction of the working day, in one or two languages. An agent at ₹3 per minute that makes a hundred two-minute qualification calls costs ₹600 and finishes before lunch, in whichever of six languages each contact prefers. The comparison isn't about replacing the human; it's about whether the first-touch grunt work should cost what it currently costs.
Why per-minute is the honest unit
Per-seat pricing charges you for capacity whether you use it or not. Per-lead pricing rewards the vendor for volume, not quality. Per-minute pricing means you pay precisely for conversation that happened — a call that doesn't connect costs you nothing in talk time, and a short 'not interested' costs a fraction of a long qualified conversation. Your bill tracks your activity, and you can read the whole pricing model in one formula. That's the standard we'd want as buyers, so it's the one we ship as sellers.