An AI payment reminder call in India costs ₹2 for its first billed minute at Dvaarik, and ₹2 for every whole minute after — no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. Reminder calls are short by nature: a call that reaches your customer, states the invoice number and the amount, gets a date out of them and pushes a UPI payment link to their WhatsApp can finish inside a minute. Every table below assumes exactly one billed minute per call — and that is a stated assumption, not a measurement. We do not publish an average reminder-call duration or an average connect rate, because we have not measured either across enough client books to stand behind a number. If your calls run to two minutes, double the voice line and the arithmetic still works. That rate is the easy half of the answer. The half that decides your actual monthly outgo is the ₹2,000 per 30 days for the phone number the calls go out from, and — for our 10 founding clients — the ₹5,000 Care Plan that is debited from the same credit balance in months 1, 2 and 3. Below is the full arithmetic including both, our rate beside what five named Indian vendors publish on their own pages (each figure read on 21 Jul 2026 and quoted with the terms attached to it), and an honest section on when chasing receivables by AI call is the wrong purchase.
What does an AI payment reminder call cost in India in 2026?
Reminder calling is ordinary outbound voice work, so it is priced at whatever a vendor charges per minute of live call. Here is what the India vendors we track publish, with the condition attached to each number — because in this market the number and the condition are rarely separable.
| Vendor | Published per-minute rate | What is attached to that rate | Read on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dvaarik AI | ₹2/min | Nothing gates it — ₹2/min from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. Whole-minute billing. A number we supply is ₹2,000 per 30 days, auto-debited from credits. Custom setup is ₹40,000, free for our 10 founding clients in return for the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate and an honest testimonial plus a short case study after go-live | 21 Jul 2026 |
| Botsense | ₹9/min Starter, ₹7/min Growth, ₹5/min Enterprise | The Starter card says "No monthly commitment"; Growth is capped at "Up to 10,000 minutes/month"; the Enterprise card is labelled "Best rate in India" by Botsense. Note that no tier has a self-serve checkout — every CTA on the page routes to sales or WhatsApp, so all three rates are headline rates confirmed by a salesperson. Their page states "Per minute billing" without specifying rounding, and says nothing either way about GST | 21 Jul 2026 |
| Dhiyo AI Labs | ₹5/min | Published as a floor, not a rate — their own wording is "starts at ₹5/min" and "final pricing may depend on call volume, setup and workflow requirements". And it is not on their pricing page: the ₹5 appears only in a marketing blog post. Their pricing page publishes no numbers at all — Starter, Growth and Enterprise are each listed as "Custom" | 21 Jul 2026 |
| Trikon | ₹5/min | Flat, with no subscription and no setup fee, and their page says the rate covers platform, LLM, STT, TTS, recording, dashboard and transfer. But "Telephony/DID numbers are billed separately by your carrier" — so a phone-number bill sits on top of the ₹5, and the landed cost is higher than the headline | 21 Jul 2026 |
| Edesy | ₹6/min pay-as-you-go; ₹4/min on the ₹14,999/month Ultra plan | The pay-as-you-go tier adds telephony at $0.07/min and needs a ₹500 minimum recharge; a ₹20,000 onboarding package is also sold (it converts to ₹20,000 of credits). Note that Edesy's own comparison widget quotes a different figure, ₹1.50/min, which appears nowhere on their pricing page — we cite the pricing page | 21 Jul 2026 |
| ConnectAI | ₹4/min | Requires a ₹800/month subscription to unlock the agent at all (₹499/month if bundled into their clinic suite), plus a one-time ₹1,000 clinic onboarding fee for new clinics. Scoped to clinics rather than general receivables | 21 Jul 2026 |
Every competitor figure above was read on that vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026 and is stored with the sentence it came from. None of it is taken from a search snippet, an AI summary or a rival's comparison page — each of those routes produced at least one false number when we tested them. Rates in this market moved within weeks during our own tracking, so check the vendor's page yourself before you commit. Our maintained board is the India AI voice agent pricing index.
What we will not tell you is that ₹2/min is the lowest number in India, because we cannot verify that and rates published as "starts at" or "Enterprise" are not comparable to a rate you can simply buy. What we will say is narrower and checkable: at Dvaarik there is nothing attached to ₹2/min. No plan to be on first, no volume floor to clear, no contract term. Dvaarik prices are quoted exclusive of GST; 18% is added when you load credits, so a ₹10,000 load is billed ₹11,800.
What does a month of reminder calls actually cost, after the number and the Care Plan?
The per-minute rate is the small line. Two fixed debits come out of the same credit balance and they are what a first-time buyer misses.
The phone number the reminder calls go out from is ₹2,000 per 30 days (number plus one concurrent line), auto-debited from credits. If the balance runs short the number pauses and a top-up resumes it — nothing is billed to a card behind your back.
The Care Plan at the founding rate is ₹5,000/month, list ₹12,000. It is required for the first three months — that is the honest half of the free-setup trade, stated here rather than in fine print: we build the agent free (₹40,000 otherwise) in return for the Care Plan for months 1 to 3 and an honest testimonial with a short case study after go-live. From month 4 it is optional. For a receivables use case it is not decoration: campaign boards — scheduled outbound calling over a list you upload — sit inside the Care Plan, and so does the agent tuning you will want in week two when you hear how the first calls actually went.
Here is a 90-day run at 250 connected reminder calls a month, each assumed to bill one whole minute. All figures exclusive of GST; the billed amount at each load is shown alongside.
| Line | Month 1 | Month 2 | Month 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening credit balance | ₹0 | ₹2,500 | ₹2,500 |
| Credits loaded (ex GST) | ₹10,000 — billed ₹11,800 | ₹7,500 — billed ₹8,850 | ₹7,500 — billed ₹8,850 |
| Phone number recharge | −₹2,000 | −₹2,000 | −₹2,000 |
| Care Plan, founding rate | −₹5,000 | −₹5,000 | −₹5,000 |
| 250 reminder calls × 1 billed min × ₹2 | −₹500 | −₹500 | −₹500 |
| Closing balance | ₹2,500 | ₹2,500 | ₹2,500 |
Cash out across the quarter is ₹29,500, of which ₹4,500 is GST that a GST-registered business can normally take as input tax credit — confirm that with your own accountant rather than with us. ₹25,000 lands as usable credit, ₹21,000 of it goes to the number and the Care Plan, ₹1,500 to the actual calling, and ₹2,500 is still sitting in the balance at the end of month 3. Credits never expire, so that closing balance is not a use-it-or-lose-it allowance.
The ₹10,000 first load is the minimum, and month 1 shows why: ₹2,000 and ₹5,000 come off it immediately, leaving roughly ₹3,000 for calls. ₹3,000 buys 1,500 billed minutes — 1,500 one-minute reminder calls, or 750 calls that run to two minutes because the customer wants to argue about the delivery. Later top-ups start at ₹500, so you are not forced to re-load ₹10,000 each month; the table above tops up to the month's need.
What is the true cost per reminder call once everything is counted?
Dividing everything by the number of calls is the only comparison that tells you whether this is worth doing, and it is unflattering at low volume. We would rather you saw it than found it out in month two. Same assumption throughout: one billed minute per call.
| Scenario | Fixed debits that month | Reminder calls | Voice at ₹2/billed min | Total debited | Cost per call |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3, 250 calls | ₹7,000 | 250 | ₹500 | ₹7,500 | ₹30 |
| Months 1–3, 1,000 calls | ₹7,000 | 1,000 | ₹2,000 | ₹9,000 | ₹9 |
| Month 4+, Care Plan dropped, 250 calls | ₹2,000 | 250 | ₹500 | ₹2,500 | ₹10 |
| Month 4+, Care Plan dropped, 1,000 calls | ₹2,000 | 1,000 | ₹2,000 | ₹4,000 | ₹4 |
| Month 4+, Care Plan kept, 1,000 calls | ₹7,000 | 1,000 | ₹2,000 | ₹9,000 | ₹9 |
Three things follow from that table, and none of them is a sales point.
First, the marginal call is ₹2. Once the number and the Care Plan are paid, the 251st reminder call that month costs you two rupees. If your overdue book is large, the average cost collapses toward ₹2 and the fixed lines stop mattering.
Second, at 250 calls a month in the founding quarter you are paying about ₹30 a call, and you should only accept that if the invoices are worth it. Chasing ₹1,800 restaurant supply invoices at ₹30 a call is defensible; chasing ₹400 ones is not.
Third, the arithmetic that decides it is yours, not ours. Take your overdue book, take the share you would realistically have recovered anyway with a WhatsApp nudge, and only count the recovery the calls actually caused. We have no industry recovery-uplift figure to hand you, and you should distrust any vendor who produces one. If your own number is not several times the row above that matches your volume, do not buy this. Our pricing page has the same figures without the receivables framing.
What does the agent actually say when it calls about an overdue payment?
A payment reminder call is a narrow script and the value is in the narrowness. The agent identifies your business by name in the first sentence, states the invoice number, the amount and how many days it is past due, and then does one of four things depending on what the customer says.
"I will pay today." The agent asks for a specific time, confirms it back, and the Payments agent sends a UPI payment link to that customer's WhatsApp while the call is still live. The customer pays in their own UPI app; the money moves between their bank and yours and we take no commission on it. The mechanics of the link itself — why a deep link converts better than a bank-detail SMS — are covered in our post on UPI payment links.
"I already paid." The agent does not argue. It records the claim, asks for the UTR or the date and mode of payment, and drops it into your sheet flagged for a human to reconcile. A bot insisting on a debt that has already been settled does real damage to a customer relationship, so the agent is built to fold immediately on this one.
"There is a problem with the order." This is a dispute, not a collection, and the agent routes it out — logged, marked as disputed, and sent to whoever handles it. A reminder agent that tries to resolve a dispute makes the dispute worse.
No answer. It logs the attempt and re-tries on the schedule your campaign board defines, within calling hours, with a cap on attempts per customer so it never becomes harassment.
Two constraints are absolute and you should hold any vendor to them. Outbound calls go only to your own customers who owe you money — people who transacted with you and have your invoice. We do not call bought lists, scraped numbers or anyone else's database, on any product. And calls run inside sensible calling hours with the business identified upfront. The regulatory frame around automated calling in India is worth reading before you start: is AI calling legal in India covers consent, DLT and calling-hour rules as they apply to an owner making calls to their own customers.
On language: the reminder is far more likely to land in the customer's language than in English. Bharat Standard covers 22 Indian languages plus English at the same ₹2/min — there is no regional-language tier and no upgrade to reach Telugu or Tamil. That is worth checking on any quote you compare. Two of the rate cards in our ledger gate languages by tier: Botsense's Starter plan lists "Hindi + English support" with the wider list on Growth, and Ravan.ai's Agni lists "Hindi + English (Starter) · All 30+ Indian languages (Growth+)". More on multilingual handling.
Reminder call, WhatsApp or SMS — which should chase the invoice?
The call is not the first move and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling minutes. Sequence matters more than channel.
| Channel | What it costs you | What it is good at | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp utility message | Meta bills the conversation directly to your own WhatsApp account at Meta's rate; Dvaarik adds zero markup. We do not quote Meta's rate here because Meta sets it and it varies by category — read it in your own WhatsApp Manager. If the customer replies and our chat agent handles the thread, that is ₹2 per 24-hour conversation | Low cost per touch, carries the payment link, leaves a written record both sides can see | Silence tells you nothing — you cannot distinguish "unread" from "ignoring you" |
| SMS | Your own DLT-registered SMS vendor's rate — we neither supply nor resell it, so we do not quote it | Reaches feature phones and customers who do not use WhatsApp | Low attention, no reply path, easily lost in an OTP stream |
| AI reminder call | ₹2 per billed minute, on top of the ₹2,000 per 30 days number | Extracts a spoken commitment and a date; sends the link mid-conversation; surfaces the real reason for the delay | Costs more per touch; a poor first contact for a customer only three days late |
| You calling personally | Your time, which is the most expensive input you have | Your top five accounts, where the relationship is the asset | Stops scaling as soon as the list outgrows your calendar, and the calls at the bottom of the list never happen |
The sequence that makes the arithmetic work: WhatsApp on day 1 with the link, WhatsApp again on day 7, and the AI call only from day 15 onward for invoices above a threshold you set. That way the ₹2/min is spent on the accounts where a conversation is genuinely the next step, and the cheap channels have already cleared everyone who was simply going to forget. The Booking agent runs the same escalation logic for appointment reminders, and outbound calling covers how the campaign boards schedule the whole thing.
When a payment reminder agent is the wrong thing to buy
Four situations where we would tell you not to do this.
Your overdue list is five invoices a month. Call them yourself. You will collect more, you will hear things the agent will not, and it costs nothing but twenty minutes. The fixed ₹2,000 number plus ₹5,000 Care Plan in the founding quarter cannot be justified on five calls, and the ₹30-per-call row above is the honest version of that.
The money is stuck because of a dispute, not forgetfulness. If your receivables are aged because customers are unhappy with the work, an automated reminder is a machine repeating a demand into a grievance. That gets worse each time it calls. Fix the dispute first.
You are running regulated recovery at scale. If you are an NBFC or a lender making collections calls at volume under the RBI's recovery-agent norms, with audit trails, recording retention and grievance workflows as compliance obligations rather than nice-to-haves, we are not the right vendor. That is a specialist collections platform with a compliance team behind it. We build for the business owner chasing their own receivables, and we would rather say so than sell into a use case we are not built for.
You want zero relationship with a vendor. Trikon publishes a flat ₹5/min with no subscription and no setup fee. If you already have a carrier, you want no onboarding conversation and no Care Plan, and you are comfortable that telephony is billed separately by your own carrier on top, that is a coherent choice and cheaper to start than ours in the founding quarter. Our model is the opposite: we build the agent for your specific invoices, your escalation ladder and your customers' languages, and we stay on it. That is worth more to some buyers and nothing at all to others.
If you are in the first three groups, do not buy from anyone. If you are in the fourth, buy from them.
If the arithmetic does work for you, the fastest way to judge whether the agent is good enough to represent you on a money conversation is to talk to it. The live demo agent answers in the same voice stack your reminder calls would use. Then tell us what your overdue book actually looks like on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750 — how many invoices, what they average, how late they run — and we will do this arithmetic against your numbers before either of us commits to anything.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to call 100 customers about overdue payments?
At ₹2 per billed minute, 100 reminder calls that each bill one whole minute cost ₹200 in voice. That is the marginal cost only. If you are in the founding quarter with the ₹2,000 per 30 days number and the ₹5,000 Care Plan coming out of the same balance, the month costs ₹7,200 in total and works out to ₹72 per call at that volume — which is why 100 calls a month is too few to justify this. At 1,000 calls the same month costs ₹9,000, or ₹9 a call. From month 4, with the Care Plan optional, 1,000 calls cost ₹4,000, or ₹4 a call. All figures assume one billed minute per call and are exclusive of GST; 18% is added when you load credits.
Can the AI actually take the payment on the call?
It sends the payment link, it does not take the money. Mid-conversation the agent pushes a UPI payment link to that customer's WhatsApp, and the customer pays from their own UPI app straight into your account. The agent never asks for card numbers, CVVs or UPI PINs, and Dvaarik takes no commission on anything collected — the transaction is between your customer's bank and yours. That is deliberate: an AI voice on the phone asking for payment credentials is exactly what a scam sounds like, and it would cost you more in trust than it recovers in rupees.
Is it legal to make automated payment reminder calls in India?
Calling your own customers about their own outstanding invoice with you sits on much firmer ground than cold outreach, because there is an existing commercial relationship and a transaction the customer initiated. The things that matter in practice are calling hours, identifying your business at the start of the call, honouring a request to stop, capping repeat attempts, and how your telecom setup is registered. We build to those constraints by default and our agents only ever call your own leads and customers — never a purchased or scraped list. Read our fuller treatment at is AI calling legal in India, and take your own legal advice for your specific sector, particularly if you are in lending or insurance.
Will my customers get annoyed at a robot calling them about money?
Some will, and how you sequence it decides how many. A call on day 3 of a delay reads as aggressive whatever voice makes it. A call on day 20, after two WhatsApp messages went unanswered, reads as a business doing what it said it would. The other lever is the script: the agent identifies your business immediately, states the invoice and amount rather than fishing, accepts "I already paid" without arguing and hands the matter to a human, and stops calling that customer once the attempt cap is reached. Judge it for yourself on the live demo at app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai before you point it at a customer.
Do I need a CRM or accounting software for this to work?
No. A sheet is enough — customer name, number, invoice number, amount, due date. You upload the overdue list to a campaign board, the board schedules the calls inside your calling hours, and the outcome of each call writes back to the sheet: promised-to-pay with a date, claims-already-paid with a UTR, disputed, or no answer with the attempt count. Campaign boards are part of the Care Plan, so founding clients have them from day one. If you do run a CRM or accounting system with an API, we can wire into it — that is an enterprise build rather than the standard one.
What if the customer picks up and says they already paid?
The agent stops collecting and starts recording. It asks for the UTR, or the date and mode of payment, thanks them, and writes the claim into your sheet flagged for a human to reconcile against your bank statement. It does not challenge the claim, does not repeat the demand, and does not call that customer again until someone has checked. Reconciliation errors happen in every receivables book, and an agent that argues with a customer who has genuinely paid does damage that the month of calling will not recover.
Can it call in Telugu, Hindi and Tamil, and does that cost more?
Yes, and no. Bharat Standard covers 22 Indian languages plus English at the same ₹2/min — there is no regional-language surcharge and no plan upgrade needed to reach Telugu, Tamil, Marathi or Bengali. The agent can also switch language mid-call when the customer answers in a different one from the one it opened in. This is worth checking specifically on any competing quote: Botsense's Starter plan publishes "Hindi + English support" with the wider list on Growth, and Ravan.ai's Agni publishes "Hindi + English (Starter) · All 30+ Indian languages (Growth+)", which changes the comparison materially if your customers do not do business in English.
Reminder calling is cheap per call and only worth it at volume, and the honest version of this page says both. At ₹2 a billed minute the calls themselves barely register; the number recharge and the Care Plan are what decide your monthly total, which is why 100 reminders a month is the wrong reason to buy this and 1,000 is a sensible one. And if your receivables problem is twenty large invoices rather than a long tail of small ones, the answer is a phone call from a person who knows the customer, not an agent.
Tell us on WhatsApp how many invoices go overdue in a normal month and we will tell you honestly whether calling them is worth automating.
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Written by
Rohith Sriramula
Founder & CEO, Dvaarik AI
A laid-off engineer who went all in on Dvaarik AI — he builds every custom AI voice agent personally. This is written from hands-on work with Indian businesses, not theory.