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Kadeno vs Retell AI: Infrastructure vs Platform
Retell AI is a managed voice agent platform with built-in STT, LLM, and TTS. Kadeno is the telephony layer beneath — bring your own AI and pay 10-40x less for the phone line.
The math: Retell charges $0.07-0.31/min (telephony + AI bundled). Kadeno charges $0.007/min (telephony only). If you run your own AI pipeline at ~$0.02/min, your total is $0.027/min — 60-90% cheaper than Retell.
Pricing Comparison
| Kadeno | Retell AI |
|---|
| Telephony | $0.007/min | $0.055/min (infra fee) |
| Phone number | $1.00/mo | $2.00/mo |
| STT + LLM + TTS | Bring your own | $0.03-0.16/min |
| Concurrency (20 calls) | Included | Included |
| Extra concurrency | Included | $8/slot/mo |
| SMS | $0.008/msg | $20/mo flat |
| Knowledge base | N/A | $8/KB/mo (after 10) |
Cost at 10,000 Minutes/Month
| Kadeno + Own AI | Retell AI |
|---|
| Telephony | $70 | $550 |
| AI (STT+LLM+TTS) | ~$200 (your cost) | $300-1,600 |
| Numbers (10) | $10 | $20 |
| Total | ~$280 | $870-2,170 |
When to Choose Kadeno
- You have your own AI pipeline — Running Whisper + GPT + ElevenLabs yourself? Kadeno provides the phone line, you keep full control and margin.
- Cost matters — At scale, the difference between $0.027/min (Kadeno + own AI) and $0.15/min (Retell) is enormous.
- You're not building a chatbot — VoIP apps, call centers, transcription pipelines, and analytics don't need Retell's agent framework.
- You want to choose your own models — Use any STT, LLM, TTS combination. Switch models without switching telephony providers.
When to Choose Retell AI
- Speed to market — Retell gets you a working voice agent in minutes with zero AI infrastructure to manage.
- You don't want to manage AI — Model selection, prompt engineering, latency optimization, and failover are handled by Retell.
- Built-in features — Function calling, knowledge bases, conversation analysis, and agent quality scoring are included.
- Small scale — Under 1,000 minutes/month, the convenience of Retell may outweigh the cost savings of running your own stack.