AI Phone Screening Software Pricing: Cost per Screen

AI phone screening software costs between about 50 cents and 7.45 dollars per completed screen among the vendors that publish enough to work it out. Of the twelve tools below, five publish a price and seven do not. The spread is not about quality: it comes from three different pricing units, per interview, per minute and per credit, and from whether a recruiter still has to be on the call.

Every buyer in this category asks the same question in the same order. How much does AI voice interview software cost, what does the number actually buy, and what happens when we go over. The first question is the only one most roundups answer, usually by repeating a figure nobody can trace back to the vendor. So this page does it the other way round: every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on the date stated, and where a vendor publishes nothing, the row says so rather than guessing.

It is written for whoever signs the contract at a US company running phone screens at volume: a talent acquisition lead, an agency owner, an operations manager at a frontline employer. If you want the mechanics of how these tools work rather than what they cost, that is a different page, how AI phone screening works.

How much does AI phone screening software cost?

Published plans run from 59 dollars a month at the entry end to 1,995 dollars a month where an enterprise floor is stated. Most vendors in the category publish nothing at all. Here is the field, with the date each figure was read.

Seven of twelve publish nothing, which is worth remembering whenever you read an AI phone screening software comparison that puts a confident dollar figure next to all twelve. Those extra figures are third-party estimates, and in this category they are routinely wrong by a factor of five. Seven of twelve publishing nothing is the single most useful fact on this page, because it tells you how long your evaluation will take. Five of these vendors can be sized against your volume in about a minute. The other seven each need a discovery call before you learn whether they fit the budget you already have.

What does AI voice interview software cost per completed screen?

Almost every AI voice interview software pricing page quotes a monthly figure, and a monthly figure is the wrong unit. You buy screens, so divide. This table only includes vendors that publish both a price and the volume it covers, because you cannot compute a unit cost from a demo request.

Two things jump out of that table and neither is obvious from published AI voice interview platform pricing.

The first is that a higher tier does not always buy a lower rate. HireFoundry charges roughly ten cents a minute on both published plans, so Premium buys ten times the capacity at the same unit price. HappyFleet and Classet both do reduce the rate as volume grows, and ours does too. Check which model you are buying before you assume the bigger plan is the better deal.

The second is the recruiter. HireFoundry is deliberately built as a copilot: its Interview Agent joins a call the recruiter leads and suggests what to ask next. That is a genuine strength when a recruiter is interviewing outside their own field, and the vendor is clear about it. It also means thirty minutes of recruiter time goes with every screen. At a fully loaded 45 dollars an hour, that is about 22 dollars of labor stacked on top of 3 dollars of software, which changes the comparison completely at any real volume. We wrote up the whole field on the HireFoundry alternative page.

Why do vendors price in minutes, credits and interviews?

Three units, three very different risks for you.

Per interview is the easiest to budget. You know how many applicants you screen a month, so you know the bill. The risk is that an interview is not a fixed thing, and a vendor counting a two-minute drop-off as a completed interview is charging you for nothing. Ask what counts as completed.

Per minute follows the actual conversation, which sounds fairer and usually is. The risk is variance. A chatty candidate on a technical role can run to 45 minutes, so the same monthly allowance buys 33 screens some months and 22 in others. If you run long interviews, minutes cost you more than the headline suggests.

Per credit is the one to read twice, because a credit is whatever the vendor says it is. Some tools spend one credit per interview; others spend several for the same event, which quietly multiplies the real cost per screen. InterviewFlowAI is unusually clear here, publishing both the credit allowance and the resulting 83 cents per credit on its yearly plans, so the arithmetic is done for you. Where a vendor does not state the credits-per-interview rule, ask for it in writing before signing, because it is the difference between a 4 dollar screen and a 7 dollar one.

What is not included in the sticker price?

Four costs land outside the plan on almost every deal in this category.

Overage. Classet publishes its overage plainly at 5 dollars per interview on Starter and 4 dollars on Scale, and shows a running ceiling in the product. Most vendors do not publish an overage rate at all, which means you find it out in month two of a hiring surge. Ask for the number before you sign, not after.

Annual commitment. Several published prices are annual-only. Classet Starter, Classet Scale and both HireFoundry plans are billed annually, and HireFoundry bills upfront. That is normal in enterprise software, but it converts a 99 dollar monthly headline into a 1,188 dollar cheque, which is a different approval path at most companies.

Telephony. A phone screening tool places real calls, and how those calls appear on a candidate's handset affects how many get answered. Some vendors include a number, others expect you to bring your own, and answer rates are visibly better when the call shows a recognizable local area code rather than an unknown one. If you end up sourcing numbers yourself, a cloud business phone system with local and toll-free numbers is usually cheaper than buying them through the hiring platform, and it keeps the callback number under your control when candidates ring back.

The seats. Watch for per-user pricing hiding under a per-interview headline. HireFoundry includes unlimited seats on every plan, which is genuinely unusual and worth crediting. Interview intelligence tools priced per recruiter seat behave very differently as a team grows, which is why the cost per screen collapses on some plans and the cost per recruiter does not.

How do you size a plan for your hiring volume?

Working out your AI phone interview software cost starts with counting first-round screens, not openings and not applicants. The number you want is how many candidates are worth a fifteen to thirty minute conversation each month, which is usually somewhere between a fifth and a half of applicants after knockout questions.

A worked example. A regional employer posting ten roles a month, drawing 60 applicants each, keeps about 25 percent past the knockout stage. That is 150 screens a month. On the published plans above, those 150 screens cost 399 dollars on our Growth plan, 499 on HappyFleet Growth, roughly 750 on Classet if you take Starter plus 100 interviews of overage, and 449 dollars of software plus about 75 hours of recruiter time on HireFoundry. Same workload, four very different bills, and only one of them removes the 75 hours.

Then add a margin for seasonality. Frontline and hourly hiring is not flat, and the month your volume doubles is the month overage rates matter more than list prices. If your peak is more than double your median, a plan with a published overage rate is worth more than a slightly cheaper plan with an undisclosed one.

Is AI phone screening cheaper than one-way video interviewing?

Usually, but not in the way most comparisons claim. One-way video platforms look cheap on the monthly line, and some genuinely are. What they do not remove is the review time: someone on your team still watches every recording. At 150 screens a month and five minutes of review each, that is 12.5 hours of somebody's week, which costs more than the software difference at any reasonable hourly rate.

Phone screening that is conducted and scored by an agent removes the recording review as well as the scheduling, which is where the saving actually comes from. The published prices for the recorded-video category, dated the same way as this page, are in our one-way video interview software pricing breakdown, and the wider category of tools that conduct rather than record is compared on AI interview software.

What to do with this

Published automated phone screening software pricing gets you to a shortlist and no further. Work out your monthly screen count, then ask every shortlisted vendor four questions in writing: what counts as a completed interview, what the overage rate is, whether the plan is annual or monthly, and whether a recruiter has to be on the call. Those four answers decide the real bill far more than the number on the pricing page.

If you want to see what a conducted and scored phone screen looks like before you compare anything, the agent at the top of this page will run one. Our own plans are 149, 399 and 999 dollars a month for 100, 500 and 2,000 interviews, listed in full on the pricing page, and what the agent actually does on the call is on AI phone screening.