Ecommerce Order Support AI India: ₹2/min

₹2 per minute, from the first minute, with no monthly platform fee attached to it.

That single rate covers the agent answering and placing calls in 22+ Indian languages plus English. Around it sit two other running costs you should budget for and nobody should hide from you:

• Phone number recharge — ₹2,000 per 30 days, auto-debited from your credit balance. It covers the number plus one concurrent line. An extra line is ₹1,500/month, an extra number ₹750/month.
• Chat at ₹2 per conversation (a 24-hour window), for WhatsApp and Instagram order questions. WhatsApp's own conversation charges are billed by Meta directly to your own WhatsApp account — Dvaarik adds zero markup on them.

There is no subscription, no tier and no minimum monthly volume. Credits are prepaid, they never expire, later top-ups start at ₹500, and at a zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than running up a bill.

The full voice menu, where a breakdown is warranted: Bharat Standard ₹2/min (22 scheduled Indian languages + English), Studio HD ₹3/min, Global 99-language ₹4–5/min, Ultra realtime ₹10/min, call recording +₹0.10/min. The base advertised rate is always ₹2/min, and Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada and the rest of the scheduled Indian languages sit inside the ₹2 tier, not above it.

One-time build: custom setup is ₹40,000, and it is free for our 10 founding clients. That is a stated trade, not fine print — the free build is in return for (a) the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000/month, and (b) an honest testimonial and a short case study after go-live.

Generic "AI receptionist" copy assumes one job: answer the phone. An ecommerce operation has at least five distinct jobs, and they have very different economics.

1. COD confirmation before dispatch. The agent calls every COD order shortly after it is placed, confirms the item, the address and that the customer still wants it, and marks the order confirmed, cancelled or unreachable in whatever your team already works from. This is the highest-value call a D2C brand makes, because it happens *before* you have paid forward shipping.

2. Order status — the WISMO call. "Where is my order." The agent reads the current status against the order record, states the expected delivery window, and pushes the tracking link to WhatsApp so the customer stops calling. These are short calls, but they are the bulk of inbound volume during a sale week.

3. NDR and failed-delivery callbacks. When a courier marks a shipment undelivered — customer unreachable, address incomplete, asked to reschedule — the agent calls the same day, gets a corrected address or a new delivery date, and hands it back. A same-day callback on an NDR is worth more than a same-day callback on almost anything else you do.

4. Returns and exchange pickup coordination. Confirming the pickup window, checking the item is packed and available, and reducing the number of failed reverse pickups that cost you a second attempt.

5. Checkout drop-off callbacks — to your own customers only. If a logged-in customer abandoned a checkout, the agent can call back within about 60 seconds. This is the speed-to-lead pattern applied to carts. Dvaarik agents call only your own customers and your own order records — never bought or scraped lists. Calling hours are respected and the agent identifies your brand at the start of the call.

What is *not* on this list matters as much. Cold prospecting, review-farming calls and "just checking in" campaigns burn minutes and goodwill without moving an order, and we will tell you so before we build them.

Assume a D2C brand doing 1,200 orders a month, 600 of them COD. These are assumptions you should replace with your own numbers — the rates are fixed, the volumes are yours.

That is ₹3.00 of voice per order shipped, or ₹5.50 per order all-in including chat and the number.

During the founding first three months the ₹5,000/month Care Plan comes out of the same credit balance, so the month-one and month-two and month-three figure is ₹6,600 + ₹5,000 = ₹11,600 of credits consumed. To cover that you would load ₹12,000, which is billed ₹14,160 including 18% GST. From month four the Care Plan is optional; drop it and the brand is back to ₹6,600 of credits a month, billed ₹7,788 with GST.

The minimum first credit load is ₹10,000 (billed ₹11,800). A smaller brand at 300 orders a month — a quarter of these volumes — uses about ₹1,150 of voice and chat plus the ₹2,000 number, so roughly ₹3,150 of credits in a steady month. That first ₹10,000 load covers its month one including the ₹5,000 Care Plan, with about ₹1,850 still sitting on the balance.

No part of this is a plan you are locked into. If you ship nothing in February, the only cost that continues is the ₹2,000 number recharge.

Every figure below was read on the vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026 and is stored with the sentence it came from. Nothing here comes from a search snippet, an AI summary or a rival's comparison page — each of those produced at least one demonstrably false number during collection.

Two cautions we apply to ourselves as well as to them. Vendors' claims about *other* vendors are not evidence: Trikon publishes third-party rates that contradict those vendors' own pages, and Edesy's comparison tool claims ₹1.50/min for Edesy while Edesy's own pricing page says ₹6/min pay-as-you-go. Where the two disagree we use the vendor's pricing page, not its marketing tool. And we do not claim to be the lowest-priced option in India. The claim we will defend is about terms: ₹2/min from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. Seven of the vendors above — ConnectAI, Aixclerate, MyOperator, HuskyVoice.AI, VaniAgent, Agni and Scalify Labs — publish no route to a first call that does not begin with a monthly plan.

This table is our arithmetic applied to their published figures as of 21 Jul 2026 — not quotes from them, and not a claim about what a salesperson would offer you. Telephony is excluded except where the vendor publishes it. GST is excluded throughout: Agni and VaniAgent publish that their prices exclude 18% GST, as do ours, while Botsense and ConnectAI publish no GST treatment at all.

The last two rows are the point of the table. A rate you cannot buy at your volume is not a price, and a plan whose overage rate is unpublished cannot be compared at all. If a vendor will not tell you what minute 1,801 costs, that is information.

We do not publish an RTO-cost figure for your brand, because we have not measured your brand. Several pages ranking for this query do publish one as their own unsourced estimate, with no citation attached to it. Use your own number instead. Here is the arithmetic with a variable in it.

COD confirmation in the worked example costs ₹1,800 a month for 600 COD orders — ₹3 per COD order confirmed.

If your fully loaded cost per return-to-origin is R rupees (forward shipping + reverse shipping + packaging + handling + the acquisition cost you already spent), then confirmation pays for itself the moment it prevents 1,800 ÷ R returns in the month:

Everything above that line is margin you keep. Cancelling an order on the confirmation call is also a win, not a loss — you never paid to ship it.

Apply the same discipline to the inbound side. 300 WISMO calls cost ₹1,200, or ₹4 per call answered. Put that against what one hour of your support team costs you, using your payroll and not a benchmark we invented. If your team already answers those calls comfortably at your current volume, say so, and we will build the COD and NDR flows first and leave inbound alone until a sale week breaks it.

Three things, all stated up front rather than discovered on an invoice.

GST. All Dvaarik prices are quoted exclusive of GST. 18% is applied when you load credits: a ₹10,000 load is billed ₹11,800 (₹10,000 usable + ₹1,800 GST); the ₹12,000 load in the worked example is billed ₹14,160. There is no separate platform fee, and we will not invent one.

The phone number. ₹2,000 per 30 days, auto-debited from credits, covering the number and one concurrent line. On a sale day when 40 people call at once, one concurrent line takes them one at a time — extra concurrency is ₹1,500/month per line and is worth buying before a campaign, not during it. If your balance runs short the number pauses and a top-up resumes it.

WhatsApp's own charges. Meta bills WhatsApp conversation charges directly to your own WhatsApp Business account. Dvaarik adds zero markup on them. What we charge is ₹2 per conversation for the agent handling it, within a 24-hour window.

One more thing that is not hidden but is often misread: billing is whole-minute, the telecom standard. A 40-second COD confirmation bills as one minute. We say it plainly and the worked example is built on 1.5 billed minutes per COD order for exactly that reason. Anyone modelling this at 40 seconds × ₹2 ÷ 60 is going to be unpleasantly surprised, whoever they buy from.

An order-support agent that improvises on money is a liability. The boundaries we build in by default:

• No refund, discount or compensation decisions. The agent states your published policy and hands the conversation to a human with the transcript attached.
• Damaged, wrong or missing items go straight to a human, because they need photographs and a judgement call.
• Payment disputes and chargebacks are never handled by the agent.
• An angry or abusive caller is transferred, not argued with.
• No cold calling, ever. Outbound goes only to your own customers and your own order records — never bought, scraped or rented lists. Calling hours are respected, and the agent identifies your brand in the first sentence.

Everything the agent does is logged: transcript, captured intent, the field it wrote back to your order record. If it gets something wrong you can see exactly where, and the Care Plan exists to tune it rather than to leave you with a black box.

You do not have to take any of this on faith. The live demo agent is on app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai — talk to it, interrupt it, switch language mid-sentence, and judge it before you spend anything.

For the 1,200-order brand in the worked example:

The free build is an honest trade, stated plainly: it is in return for the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000/month, and an honest testimonial plus a short case study after go-live. The Care Plan lists at ₹12,000/month; the founding rate is locked for six months and is required for the first three months, optional from month four. It covers monitoring, agent tuning and behaviour changes, campaign and pricing setup help, a monthly report, priority founder WhatsApp support, unlimited Instagram automations and campaign boards for scheduled outbound over your own order lists.

Build time is days, not months, and the founder builds every agent personally.

If you want to check our figures against the rest of the market first, the primary-source pricing index is at /research/india-ai-voice-agent-pricing-index, the offer in full is at /pricing, the ecommerce build is described at /for/ecommerce, and the outbound mechanics are at /features/outbound-calls.

When you are ready, tell us your problem on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750, or apply to the founding programme at /pilot.