Regional Language Voice AI India: ₹2/min

Every competitor cell below was read on that vendor's own site on 21 Jul 2026 and is stored with the sentence it came from. Rates and language counts in this category move within weeks — re-check before you buy.

Two global platforms sit outside this table because they publish in dollars rather than rupees: Retell AI publishes $0.07–$0.31/min for its platform stack, excluding telephony, and Vapi publishes $0.05/min under a heading that reads "Vapi Hosting Cost — Excludes Model Provider Costs", with model costs passed on to the customer. Neither is a like-for-like comparison against an all-in rupee rate, and we have not converted them.

Three things this table is not. It is not a ranking — a bigger language count says nothing about whether the agent survives one Tenglish sentence. It is not audited — every count here, ours included, is a vendor describing itself, and we could find no independent body that grades Indian voice agents on regional-language quality. And it is not a claim that we are cheapest: Scalify publishes ₹0.40/min and Agni publishes "upto ₹2/min", both real published numbers with the conditions shown above attached. Our claim is about terms — ₹2/min from the very first minute, in every one of the 22 languages, with no subscription, no minimum volume and no lock-in. The rate side of this is maintained separately in the India AI voice agent pricing index.

On the fourteen competitor pages we read on 21 Jul 2026, no vendor publishes a per-minute regional-language surcharge as its own rate-card policy. That is the honest headline, and it is more useful than the rumour, because it tells you exactly where to push.

What does exist, in four distinct forms:

1. Language named as a rate variable, with no number attached. SquadStack's own FAQ states: "The per-minute rate depends on language mix, call complexity, integration depth, and the engagement scale." Dhiyo AI Labs states: "The final pricing may depend on call volume, workflow, setup, language requirement, integration and business use case." Both are first-party published sentences. Neither is a surcharge you can price in advance — they are notice that your language mix will be an input to a quote you have not received yet. Note that SquadStack also publishes a one-time setup fee per use-case whose amount is not stated, and gates its entry tier behind a 90-day commitment.

2. The tier gate, which functions like a surcharge without being called one. Agni's pricing page reads "Hindi + English (Starter) · All 30+ Indian languages (Growth+)". Botsense's Starter card reads "Hindi + English support", with the six named Indian languages appearing on Growth. In both cases a buyer who needs Telugu cannot buy the advertised entry price at all. This is the most expensive mechanism on the page and the least discussed.

3. A surcharge described as an industry norm, by a vendor, about the industry. Scalify Labs' blog states that "Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali typically add ₹0.10–₹0.20/min premium depending on the platform and voice quality required", and that "Hindi + English is standard". Read that carefully: it is Scalify describing what they believe the market does, not publishing their own regional rate. Attributing that premium to Scalify as their policy would be wrong, and we are not doing it. The same blog does list "custom language/dialect support beyond Hindi + English" under things typically charged extra.

4. Languages explicitly published as free. Trikon's comparison page states "Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali & 10+ languages — included free" against its ₹5/min flat rate. That is a clear published position, and it is worth crediting.

Dvaarik's position, plainly: all 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution are billed at the same ₹2/min base rate, with no per-language surcharge across Indian languages. Where a full breakdown is warranted, our voice menu is Bharat Standard ₹2/min, Studio HD ₹3/min, Global (99 languages) ₹4–5/min, Ultra realtime ₹10/min, and call recording at +₹0.10/min — the base advertised rate is always ₹2/min, and every Indian language sits inside it.

The single question to put in writing to every vendor on your shortlist: *is Telugu billed at the same per-minute rate as Hindi, and is Hindi billed at the same rate as English — on the tier I am actually buying?* The last clause is the one that catches the tier gate.

A count like "30+ Indian languages" is a claim. A named language is a commitment. Across the fourteen competitor pages we read on 21 Jul 2026, ten of the 22 Eighth Schedule languages are named by name at least once. Twelve are named on none of them.

Be precise about what that means. Several of those vendors publish counts — 30+, 27, 20+ — that may well include Assamese or Urdu. The finding is that they do not name them, not that they cannot speak them. If your callers speak Urdu in Hyderabad, Assamese in Guwahati or Konkani in Goa, you are buying on an unnamed number, and the only sensible response is to call the demo line in that language before you pay anyone.

The 22 languages of the Eighth Schedule are Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Maithili, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu (Department of Official Language, Ministry of Home Affairs). That constitutional list, plus code-mixed Hinglish, Tenglish and Tanglish, is the line Dvaarik draws — deliberately bounded rather than open-ended. It is not the largest number on this search results page, and I would rather have a checkable list than a bigger one. Most world languages are supported and priced separately; ask for the rate. More detail on how the switching works is on the multilingual agent page.

Twelve hundred voice minutes is 600 calls of two minutes. It is a volume, not a benchmark — pick the number nearest your own call log, because the arithmetic below works the same way at any of them. Here is that month priced against every vendor whose published figures allow the sum to be done.

Read the last column before the third. Where a total is our arithmetic on a vendor's published plan price, included minutes and overage rate, it is labelled as such and is not a figure that vendor publishes.

What that table honestly shows

In months 1–3, at 1,200 minutes, Dvaarik at ₹9,400 sits above Trikon, Agni Growth, Edesy and Botsense Growth. That is real, and it is the Care Plan doing it. If you are comparing on month-one outlay alone at this volume, four totals come out lower than ours — three of those four being our arithmetic on their published rates rather than figures they publish — and Trikon's ₹6,000, before its separate telephony bill, is the lowest computable total among vendors that publish regional languages at all. ConnectAI's ₹5,600 is lower still, but their own comparison table claims only Hindi and Indian English.

From month 4, with the Care Plan optional and dropped, ₹4,400 is below every computable total in that table. That is arithmetic at one specific volume on published rates — not a claim about the category, and not a claim to be cheapest. Scalify publishes ₹0.40/min and Agni publishes "upto ₹2/min"; both are real, and both come with the conditions listed in the first table.

One axis where the comparison is genuinely like-for-like: Dvaarik, Agni and VaniAgent all publish prices exclusive of 18% GST, and MyOperator states GST is applicable. Two vendors we read — Botsense and ConnectAI — publish no GST statement at all, so their figures cannot be described as inclusive or exclusive of it. For the rest we did not record a GST statement either way, which is its own reason to ask before you compare totals.

Same scrutiny, applied inward. Dvaarik is a build studio: I design and build a custom agent for your business. There is no self-serve signup, no plans, no tiers and no per-seat fee.

The founding trade, stated plainly rather than in fine print: the ₹40,000 build is free in return for (a) the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate and (b) an honest testimonial and a short case study after go-live. If the agent does not work well enough for you to say something honest about it, I have not earned the trade.

Month one, arithmetically. You load ₹10,000, billed ₹11,800 with GST. That balance is debited ₹2,000 for the number recharge and ₹5,000 for the Care Plan, leaving roughly ₹3,000 — about 1,500 voice minutes at ₹2/min, in any of the 22 languages.

Where the ₹2/min stops being the number that matters

Fixed costs are ₹7,000 a month in months 1–3 (₹5,000 Care Plan plus ₹2,000 number recharge) and ₹2,000 a month from month 4 if you drop the Care Plan. Here is what that does to the real per-minute cost.

Read the top row honestly. At 300 regional-language minutes a month, our model costs you ₹25.33 a minute in months 1–3 and you should not buy it. Below roughly 1,000 minutes a month — the point at which usage stops covering even the ₹2,000 number recharge — the fixed component dominates, and a flat per-minute vendor with no plan fee, or a part-time human who speaks the language, is the better answer. Our model earns its keep when you have real call volume, genuinely need several Indian languages on one number, and want the agent built around your actual booking and follow-up process rather than configured in a dashboard. Run your own volume through the missed call calculator before you talk to me, and the full offer is on the pricing page.

This is the mechanism that costs regional-language buyers the most money, and it never appears as a line item called "surcharge".

Take Agni. Their advertised entry is ₹2,999/mo including 300 minutes. Their pricing page also publishes, next to the language row, "Hindi + English (Starter) · All 30+ Indian languages (Growth+)". So a Hindi-and-English business enters at ₹2,999/mo. A Telugu business cannot — its real entry is Growth at ₹5,999/mo including 1,000 minutes, with ₹6/min overage instead of ₹8/min. The difference between those two published entry prices is ₹3,000 a month, and it is a language decision, not a volume decision.

Botsense works the same way with different numbers. Their Starter card is ₹9/min and is published as "Hindi + English support". The six Indian languages they name — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi — appear on Growth at ₹7/min. In their case the regional buyer moves to a *lower* per-minute rate, which is a genuinely fair structure, though their Growth card also carries an "Up to 10,000 minutes/month" ceiling.

Worth crediting where the gate does not exist: Trikon publishes languages as "included free" on a ₹5/min flat rate with no subscription and no setup fee, with telephony explicitly excluded and billed by your own carrier.

The general lesson is not about any one vendor. It is that the advertised entry price of an Indian voice AI platform is frequently a Hindi-and-English price. Before you compare per-minute rates at all, establish which tier actually gives you the language your callers speak, and compare from there. On Dvaarik there is no tier to move to — the ₹2/min applies from the first minute in every one of the 22 languages, which is a simpler structure to compare but not automatically a cheaper one at every volume, as the previous section shows.

Six situations where Dvaarik is the wrong choice for a regional-language agent. I would rather lose the enquiry than the argument three months in.

1. Your volume is under roughly 1,000 minutes a month. At 300 minutes our effective rate is ₹25.33/min in months 1–3. A flat per-minute vendor with no plan fee is straightforwardly better arithmetic for you, and I have shown you the table rather than hiding it.

1. You are optimising for the lowest published sticker price. Scalify Labs publishes ₹0.40/min and Agni publishes "upto ₹2/min". Both carry conditions — Scalify's is a self-labelled estimate sitting on top of a ₹15,000/mo plan with a 10,000 minute minimum and a 3-month commitment; Agni's is a quote-only Enterprise rate at 10,000+ minutes. But they are real published numbers below ours, and I am not going to claim to be cheapest.

1. Your callers all speak one language and you answer nearly every call yourself. Then multilingual capability is not what you are buying, and you may not need an agent at all yet. Spend the budget on demand generation and come back when the missed calls are real.

1. You need a research-grade Indic speech vendor rather than an agent builder. Sarvam AI builds actual Indic speech models. We integrate on top of that generation of technology and do not claim otherwise. If you need model-level control or custom acoustic training, go to the people who build the models.

1. You want an established telephony brand with an enterprise support structure. MyOperator has a long-running product, published plan prices and a published 30-day refund policy. If buying from an incumbent matters to your organisation, that is a real thing to buy, and I am a one-person studio in Telangana.

1. You want proof from a long client list. We are pre-revenue with founding slots open. There are no case studies on this site because there are none to show yet. The only proof I can offer is a demo line you can attack right now without speaking to me — which is exactly why the next section exists.

One standing limit that applies whoever you choose: on outbound, Dvaarik agents call only your own leads and enquiries — people who contacted you, filled your form or clicked your ad. Never a purchased list. If your plan depends on calling bought data in a regional language, we are not the vendor.

We could find no independent body that publishes graded quality scores for Indian voice agents by language, so the only evidence available to you is a phone call. Run these six back to back, in one sitting, per vendor.

Six calls, in the language you actually need — not in Hindi

1. A full request in pure Telugu, Tamil, Kannada or Marathi, no English words. Does it get the intent first time?
2. The same request starting in that language and switching to English mid-sentence, then back. Tenglish and Tanglish are how people actually book things. Does it restart or follow?
3. A date, a time and an amount spoken in that language. Read back correctly, all three?
4. The same request in a district accent rather than a city one. Get a colleague if you need to.
5. An out-of-scope question. Does it say it does not know, or invent an answer? An agent that invents a price is more expensive than one that says it will check.
6. "Put me through to a person." Does the escalation actually reach a human or a same-day callback?

Mark each pass, partial or fail, and count partial as fail. Run the identical six against every shortlisted vendor, and run them again in each language you need — strength in Hindi tells you nothing about Telugu. If a vendor will not give you an unattended number to try before a sales conversation, that refusal is itself a finding.

Eight questions to put in writing before you pay anyone

• Is Telugu billed at the same per-minute rate as Hindi, and Hindi at the same rate as English — on the tier I am buying?
• Which tier is the cheapest one that includes the language I need?
• Is there a monthly platform fee, a usage minimum, a setup fee or a minimum contract term? What is my total first-month rupee outlay?
• Is telephony included in the quoted rate, or billed separately by my own carrier?
• Is billing per whole minute or per second? (Ours is whole minutes. Compare like for like.)
• Are the published prices inclusive or exclusive of GST?
• Can I call an unattended demo line today, in my language, without a sales call?
• Who owns the phone number and the call recordings if I leave?

Dvaarik's demo is live at app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai and you can point all six calls at it today, in Telugu, without talking to me first — and you should point the same six at everyone else on the table above. Related reading: Hindi voice AI and the 22-language question, AI calling agent price in India 2026, and the founding client programme.