A Bland AI alternative for Hindi and Hinglish phone agents

How do Bland AI and Voice Infra differ?

Both price the call as one per-minute rate. Bland’s pricing page puts the model, speech-to-text and voice into its rate (“No token charges. No model-provider pass-throughs.”) at $0.14 a minute on Start and $0.12 on Build, which adds a $299 monthly platform fee. Each plan sets its own limits: Start allows 10 concurrent calls and 100 calls a day, Build 50 concurrent and 2,000 a day, and Enterprise is sized to your volume.

Voice Infra runs the same Mira stack on every tier. Mira STT and Mira TTS are our own models, and the agent is tuned for Hindi and Indian English calls, including the switching between the two. The rate on T5 and T3 includes Mirai phone calling and call insights, so a minute on T5 is ₹5 all in, before GST. Minutes are billed in 10-second blocks, rounded up, and unanswered or busy calls cost nothing.

Where do Bland’s pages disagree?

Two questions get different answers depending on which Bland page you read, so we show both. On telephony, the pricing page says “Telephony is billed separately, on your own carrier or Bland’s at pass-through cost”, and the home page says one per-minute rate “covers the language model, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and telephony”. On timing, the pricing page says most teams deploy a first agent “within a day on the self-serve plans”, with a 28-day framework for enterprise deployments, and the home page says most production agents “go live in two to six weeks”. The pricing page ties “within a day” to self-serve plans, so the two may describe different customers. If either matters to your budget or launch date, ask Bland to confirm it for your plan in writing.

What does a month cost?

At 1,000 minutes, Bland’s Start plan is 1,000 × $0.14 = $140, plus telephony where it is billed separately. Build is 1,000 × $0.12 = $120 plus the $299 platform fee, so it pays for itself only at higher volume: the $0.02 saving per minute covers the fee after 14,950 minutes ($299 ÷ $0.02).

On Voice Infra, 1,000 minutes on T5 is 1,000 × ₹5 = ₹5,000 with phone calling included. At volume, T1 is ₹1 a minute: its ₹1,00,000 monthly minimum buys 1,00,000 minutes, with Mirai phone calling optional at ₹0.30 a minute. T3’s ₹50,000 minimum buys 16,666 minutes at ₹3. Prices exclude GST, and we leave the currency conversion to you. The pricing guide has a worked monthly forecast.

What does moving a Bland agent look like?

A Bland pathway becomes a node-based agent, or a single prompt if the conversation is simple. Agent Studio can draft a node-based agent from a description or from recordings of real calls. On the API, an agent is POST /v2/agents with system_prompt, first_message and {{variables}}, and calls go out with POST /v2/calls. Results arrive through signed webhooks, and campaigns dial an uploaded contact list within the hours you allow. The quickstart gets you to one real call in five minutes.

Check two things before you commit. We cannot transfer a call to a person yet, and a new workspace starts at 5 concurrent calls until we raise it.

What should you test before switching?

Write your test set from your own Hindi and Hinglish calls, recorded with consent, and keep the details that trip voice agents up: names, rupee amounts, dates, addresses and the English words your customers mix in. Run the same script on both and ring your own phone on the carrier your customers use.

Measure the delay a caller feels, from the end of their sentence to the first audio of the reply, on a real phone line and across enough calls to see the slow ones. The latency guide shows how to split that time into its parts. Then compare billed minutes after each platform’s rounding, with telephony added on both sides.