Credits and pricing
Talkif is prepaid and usage-based. You keep a USD balance; every call, phone number and post-call analysis takes what it costs from that balance, itemised. There are no plans to pick and no per-seat fees — the price of a call is the sum of the resources it used, at the rates for the providers you chose in the flow.
This page explains the model. Topping up, cards and auto-recharge are in Credits and payment; reading a bill is in Cost breakdown.
What a call costs
A finished call is priced as a set of line items, one per resource, each with its own unit:
Two consequences worth knowing before you design a flow:
- Telephony rounds up; nothing else does. A 61-second call pays 2 telephony minutes but 61 seconds of STT and infrastructure. Short calls are proportionally more expensive on the telephony line — WhatsApp calls have no telephony line at all.
- LLM cost is quadratic-ish in call length. Each turn resends the whole context, so a long System Prompt is paid on every turn of every call. Keeping prompts short is a cost lever as well as a quality one — see Write prompts.
Rates are published live. The current telephony and number prices are below; model rates are on Models and voices.
Telephony
Phone numbers
Monthly cost varies by country and number type. Price shown is for US local numbers.
Recording storage
Billed based on actual storage duration. Minimum 1 day charged.
The four kinds of balance
Your balance is made of buckets, and which bucket pays for what is the part that surprises people.
Granted monthly by a subscription plan; expires at the end of the period. Spent first.
Credits from a promotion, usually with an expiry date. Spent second.
Welcome credit, referral rewards and similar. Spent third.
Money you paid. Spent last, so it’s never wasted while expiring credit exists.
Two rules sit on top of the order:
- Calls and analysis can be paid from any bucket. Expiring buckets go first so you lose as little as possible.
- Phone number purchases and monthly rental can only be paid from purchased or subscription balance. Bonus and promotional credit never buy or rent a number. This is why a new account with only its welcome credit can build and test but must top up before buying a line.
GET /billing/balance reports available (everything usable), purchasedBalance, bonusBalance and the earliestExpiration across buckets.
Admission, overdraft and suspension
Talkif checks your balance once per call, before it starts — and never again during it.
- To start any call (inbound, outbound, browser test) the account must be active and have at least $1.00 available. Below that: outbound requests fail with
insufficient_balance, inbound calls are answered busy, campaigns and schedules hold. - Once a call is running it is never cut off for money. It’s metered to the end and settled as one charge, even if that takes the balance negative.
- If the balance ends at or below zero, the account is suspended: no new calls until a top-up brings it positive. The dashboard, billing and your data stay fully accessible — suspension only blocks spending. A top-up reactivates the account automatically.
- With auto-recharge on, the top-up happens instead of the suspension: the shortfall triggers a charge to your default card for your configured amount.
A worked example
You sign up, get the $5.00 welcome credit (bonus), and add $50.00 by card (purchased).
You buy a US local number at $1.15/month
Number purchases can’t use bonus, so the rental comes off purchased even though bonus is available.
You make a 4 min 20 s test call
Telephony is billed per started minute; STT, TTS and infrastructure per second; the LLM per token. Say the call comes to $0.42:
Calls spend expiring-first, so the whole amount comes off bonus:
Twelve more calls use up the bonus
Bonus hits $0.00; the next call spends from purchased. Nothing else changes — you don’t notice the bucket switch except in the transaction history, where each entry names its bucket.
A long campaign runs the balance to –$0.80
The last call was admitted with $1.10 available, ran long, and settled at $1.90. A running call is always billed to the end, so the balance goes negative and the account is suspended: existing calls finish normally, the queue holds.
Next month, rental renews
$1.15 is taken from purchased balance for the number. If the balance can’t cover rental, the number’s billing status moves to past due and eventually suspended — see Buy a number.
Where the numbers come from
Every line item on a bill records the rate that applied at the time, so historical bills don’t change when prices do. Rates are per account — if you’re on negotiated pricing, your rates apply automatically everywhere the public ones are shown here.