Bland review

Bland is an enterprise voice AI platform for inbound and outbound phone calls in healthcare, insurance, financial services and logistics ³. Unlike most rivals, it runs its own speech-to-text, language and voice models, and says no third-party AI provider touches the call ¹³. Customers cannot plug in OpenAI or Anthropic models instead ²⁰. You build agents as Conversational Pathways or in the agent builder, and an assistant called Norm can draft, test and debug them from a prompt ³.

Bland raised a $50 million Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital in June 2026, taking total funding past $100 million ²⁰. It sells a free Start tier and a $299-a-month Build tier, while warm transfers, guardrails, messaging and the HIPAA BAA sit on Enterprise contracts ¹.

You place calls through the API or in batches from a CSV file, and inbound numbers answer with a pathway or persona ^4,6. During a call the agent can use tools that call your own backend or built-in integrations such as Cal.com and Salesforce ^5,17, and transfer to a number or a list of departments ⁴. A warm transfer has the AI call the human first, brief them, then merge the calls ⁸. On Enterprise, the same pathways and memory run over SMS, RCS, iMessage and a web chat widget ^1,7.

Each agent has development, staging and production environments. You publish to staging, promote to production and roll back to an earlier version, and an activity log records who changed what ⁹. Evaluations run simulated callers against judges and can block a promotion ¹⁰. In production, guard rails check every turn for rules such as AI disclosure and opt-out handling, and can end or transfer the call ¹¹. Call logs keep the transcript, recording, extracted variables and guardrail triggers for every call ¹².

Start has no platform fee and costs $0.14 a minute; Build costs $299 a month plus $0.12 a minute; Enterprise is priced by contract ¹. The minute rate covers the language model, transcription and voice, with no token charges ¹. Transfer time costs $0.05 or $0.04 a minute on Bland's numbers and nothing if you bring your own Twilio ^1,2. Telephony is billed separately at pass-through cost, extra numbers cost $15 a month, each outbound attempt on Bland's lines carries a $0.015 minimum, and SMS costs $0.02 a message ^1,2,18,19. On Start, 1,000 minutes a month comes to about $140 before carrier charges ¹. Start allows 100 calls a day and 10 at once; Build allows 2,000 a day and 50 at once ¹.

Bland holds SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS v4.0 attestations from independent auditors and self-attests HIPAA and GDPR ¹³. A BAA, SSO and data residency come with Enterprise ¹. You can run Bland in its cloud, your VPC, your own data center or fully air-gapped, and pin every leg of a call to one region ¹³. Real-time PII redaction covers recordings and transcripts, and zero-retention processing is available for sensitive workflows ¹³. The sub-processor list names cloud and tooling vendors such as AWS, Twilio and Supabase, but no AI model provider ¹⁴. Bland lists no ISO 27001 certification and publishes no policy on training its models with customer calls ¹³.

Independent reviews are thin. G2 shows 5.0 from 11 reviews ²², and Trustpilot shows 2.9 from 2 reviews ²³. Bland says it serves 250+ enterprises and publishes stories from MyPlanAdvocate, Kin Insurance, Idaho Housing, American Way Health and Rosie ¹⁶. TNW names Samsara, Kin Insurance and CNO Financial Group as customers ²⁰. In 2024, Wired manipulated Bland's public demo bot into lying about being an AI ²¹.