Vapi review

Vapi is a developer platform for building voice AI agents that make and receive phone calls ^3,29. Each assistant combines a transcriber, a language model and a voice that you pick from dozens of providers or replace with your own ^3,29. Vapi charges a per-minute hosting fee and passes provider costs through with no markup ¹.

In May 2026 TechCrunch reported a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million, and that Amazon Ring evaluated more than 40 voice AI vendors before choosing Vapi for its inbound calls ²³. TechCrunch also names Kavak, Instawork, New York Life and Intuit among its enterprise customers ²³.

New assistants start on the Balanced preset, which bundles a transcriber, model and voice; you can swap any part ⁴. Tools give the assistant actions: Function and API Request tools call your systems, MCP tools reach remote tool servers, and built-in tools transfer calls, send texts and end calls ^5,29. Squads pass a caller between specialised assistants ²⁹. Transfers can be blind, warm with a message or a generated summary, or run by an assistant that speaks with the person first ⁶.

Edits are saved as a draft; you publish a version and can restore an earlier one, and traffic splitting can send part of live calls to a new version ^11,29. Simulations run an AI tester through full voice or chat conversations and score the result against your success criteria ¹⁰. Teams can keep assistants, tools and simulations as code in git and promote changes through pull requests ⁴. Outbound campaigns call up to 10,000 contacts from a CSV within a calling window ⁷. After each call, logs show the transcript, recording, cost and latency, and structured outputs pull out the results you define ^13,14.

Vapi's hosting fee is $0.05 a minute, pre-paid, and the transcriber, model and voice are billed at the providers' rates with no markup ¹. With the calculator's default providers, Deepgram, OpenAI and ElevenLabs, 1,000 minutes come to $82 to $129 a month ¹. Model cost depends on prompt length and tools, so long prompts push it up ²⁸. Calls over Vapi's own numbers and SIP carry no transport fee, but free numbers only take inbound calls; outbound calls go through an imported Twilio, Telnyx or DIDWW number at the carrier's rates ^1,4,27. Packages add support and capacity: Core costs $29 a month, Pro costs 10% of hosting fees with a $999 minimum, and Premier is by quote ¹. HIPAA is a $2,000-a-month add-on, and extra concurrent lines cost $10 each a month ¹.

Vapi says it is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA and GDPR compliant ³. Its trust centre also lists PCI DSS v4.0.1 and SOC 3, but no ISO 27001 ²⁰. HIPAA mode needs the paid add-on and a signed BAA, applies to the whole organization and limits you to providers Vapi has a BAA with ¹⁶. An EU region keeps an organization and its resources in the European Union ¹⁷. Zero Data Retention stops Vapi storing recordings, transcripts and summaries, and comes with any paid package ^18,1. The privacy policy says call recordings, transcripts and logs may be retained to help train and improve AI models ¹⁹. Subprocessors include Microsoft Azure, OpenAI, Cloudflare, Supabase and Groq ²⁰.

Independent ratings are thin. G2 shows 4.2 stars from 3 reviews ²⁴, and Trustpilot rates Vapi 2.4 from 15 reviews on an unclaimed profile, with complaints about downtime, slow support and a delayed refund ²⁵. G2 has not yet published a hands-on evaluation of Vapi ³⁰. The strongest proof is its customers: TechCrunch reports that Amazon Ring chose Vapi over more than 40 rivals for its inbound calls ²³, and Vapi publishes stories from Instawork, UnityAI and Spring Venture Group ^22,21.