Cresta AI Pricing in 2026: The Complete Breakdown
According to Gartner's August 2026 survey of 199 service and support leaders, spending on AI in customer service has risen 38% while overall service and support budgets grew just 2%. That's the squeeze you're in: buy AI out of a budget that hasn't moved, from a vendor that won't name a number until after the demo. Before you book that demo, it helps to know what voice AI actually costs when a vendor does publish the rate.
TL;DR: What Cresta AI Actually Costs
Cresta sells products, not plans, and quotes nearly all of them privately. To sum up:
- No pricing page exists.Cresta doesn't even have a dedicated pricing page on its website, and there are no mentions in its sitemap.
- One public figure, on AWS only.$150,000 for a 12-month Agent Assist subscription. Nothing else on the platform is publicly priced.
- The commitment buys no discount.$150,000 divided by the cap equals the metered rate to the cent, on both voice and chat.
- No free trial at any tier.Seven product-specific demo funnels, no self-serve signup, and subscriptions are non-cancellable for the term.
- A transparent alternative:CloudTalk publishes every plan and add-on rate, starting at $25/user/month with a 14-day free trial you can start without a sales call.
Know the costs before making any moves.
How Much Does Cresta AI Cost?
Cresta sells products, not plans. Agent Assist, AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence and Quality Management are separate purchases with separate demo funnels. Voice and chat bill as two independent line items, usage above your cap meters at $1.50 per call or $1.20 per chat, and there is no free trial at any tier. Most AI call center software publishes at least an entry rate. Cresta publishes none.
Cresta AI Pricing at a Glance
| Product | What it does | Public price | How it is actually priced | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent Assist (Voice) | Real-time guidance, knowledge and summaries for live human agents on calls | $150,000 / 12 months, up to 100,000 assisted calls | 12-month AWS Marketplace contract, or $1.50 per assisted call metered | None |
| Agent Assist (Chat) | The same real-time guidance layer on digital conversations | $150,000 / 12 months, up to 125,000 assisted chats | 12-month AWS Marketplace contract, or $1.20 per assisted chat metered | None |
| AI Agent | Autonomous voice, chat and SMS agent that resolves interactions end to end in 30+ languages | Not publicly listed | Quoted by sales after a product-specific demo | None |
| Conversation Intelligence | Analytics and QA across both human and AI conversations | Not publicly listed | Quoted by sales after a product-specific demo | None |
| Quality Management, Coach, AI Analyst, Knowledge Agent | Further modules layered on the platform | Not publicly listed | Quoted individually; each has its own demo funnel | None |
What Is Cresta AI, and What Does It Do?
Cresta is contact center AI software built for large voice and digital operations. The platform splits into three surfaces:
- An autonomous AI agent that handles interactions on its own
- Agent Assist that coaches human agents live on the call
- Conversation Intelligence that analyzes what happened afterwards
The company sells into enterprise contact centers, and the product reflects that. Cresta software integrates with the telephony and CRM you already run rather than replacing them, using API and MCP function calling, and its AI Agent covers 30+ languages with localized voices. Cresta has raised over $270 million in venture funding to date.
Why Cresta AI Has No Published Pricing Plans
There are no Cresta AI pricing plans to compare, because Cresta doesn't have named tiers. There is no rate card to take to finance either. Most vendors give you a Starter, a Pro and an Enterprise. Cresta gives you a product portfolio, each element quoted individually.
So when someone quotes you Cresta pricing plans with tier names attached, they're describing a structure they've inferred, not one Cresta publishes. UsagePricing's Cresta blueprint, a third-party pricing-analysis page, characterizes Cresta's commercial model as a per-agent-seat subscription layered with feature tiers on annual contracts, and states plainly that Cresta publishes no per-seat rates. That's a reasonable read of the shape. It isn't a price list. Compare it with the way published contact center pricing normally works, where the tier names and the rates sit on the same page.
How to Read Cresta's AWS Marketplace Listing
One place does carry real Cresta numbers: the "Contact Center AI Platform" listing on AWS Marketplace, sold by Cresta Intelligence. It has four line items, and this is the whole of Cresta's public pricing record.
| Line item | Listing description | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Agent Assist for Voice | "Real-Time Agent Assist for Voice, up to 100,000 call subscription" | $150,000 / 12 months |
| Agent Assist for Chat | "Real-Time Agent Assist for Chat, up to 125,000 chat subscription" | $150,000 / 12 months |
| Per-call metering | Real-Time Agent Assist for Voice, per call | $1.50 |
| Per-chat metering | Real-Time Agent Assist for Chat, per chat | $1.20 |
Before you anchor your budget to those numbers, four scoping limits matter, and most articles quoting the $150,000 figure skip all four.
- 01Agent Assist only.AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence, Quality Management, Coach, AI Analyst and Knowledge Agent are all absent from the listing.
- 02The AWS procurement route only.That route is a real advantage if you have committed AWS spend to draw down, but it isn't Cresta's own rate card.
- 03A 12-month term only.The listing shows no monthly rate and no multi-year rate.
- 04List price, not enterprise price.This is the one that moves the number most. Cresta's own note on the listing tells buyers to email
partners@cresta.aifor custom pricing or a private offer, which is good evidence that real deals get negotiated somewhere below it.
Cresta AI Agent: Autonomous Voice and Chat, Price on Request
AI Agent is Cresta's autonomous product: it resolves customer interactions end to end across voice, chat and SMS without a human on the line, in 30+ languages with localized on-brand voices. AI Agent plugs into your existing telephony and CRM instead of replacing them, and Cresta builds these agents in a surface it calls Conductor. There is no public price, no per-conversation rate, and no presence on the AWS Marketplace listing, so the only route to a number is a product-specific demo request.
What's Included in Cresta's AI Agent?
- End-to-end resolution of voice, chat and SMS interactions without human handoff
- Omnichannel journeys that carry context when a customer switches channel
- Action-taking mid-conversation rather than answer-only responses
- 30+ languages with localized, on-brand voice options
- Conductor, the agent-building surface, plus a hardening workflow for scaling agents into production
Who it's for, and what to watch:
AI Agent suits a contact center with enough repeatable, high-volume interaction types to justify automating whole conversations rather than assisting them. On value for money, you're buying blind. With no published rate and no free trial, you can't model cost per resolution before you commit, and there's no list price to sanity-check a quote against. If you need to size an AI voice deployment against a budget line this quarter, start with one of the best AI voice agents that publishes its usage rate up front.
Cresta Agent Assist: The Only Product With a Public Price
Agent Assist is Cresta's heritage product and the one you can actually price. It sits alongside a live human agent and delivers behavioral guidance during the conversation, pulls knowledge in real time, and writes the summary afterwards. On the AWS route, it costs $150,000 for 12 months on voice (up to 100,000 assisted calls) or $150,000 for 12 months on chat (up to 125,000 assisted chats), billed upfront or in installments through your AWS bill.
The billing mechanics are where budgets go wrong. Chat and voice are priced and billed separately across every option and never combine into a single metric, so covering both channels means buying two dimensions. The subscription fee applies "regardless of how many you use within that cap," per the listing's own buyer FAQ, and anything above the cap meters on top at the per-unit rate.
What's Included in Cresta's Agent Assist?
- Behavioral guidance delivered to the agent live, mid-conversation
- Real-time knowledge retrieval so agents resolve issues without searching
- AI summaries that capture call data and cut after-call work
- Coverage for digital conversations at volume as well as voice
- Implementation, training, and customer success services, which Cresta confirms it provides but does not price
Who it's for, and what to watch:
Agent Assist fits an operation keeping its human agents and wanting to raise their consistency. The value question is sharper here than anywhere else on the page, because at the cap you pay exactly the metered rate. If your assisted volume is lumpy or seasonal, the flat cap works against you, and the contract is non-cancellable for the term. And if the business case rests on reducing average handle time, price the vendors that meter by the minute before you sign up to a 12-month cap.
Cresta Conversation Intelligence: Analytics at an Unpublished Price
Conversation Intelligence is the analytics and quality assurance (QA) layer across both human and AI conversations. Cresta covers outcome tracking, root-cause analysis, automation planning, and pushing insight back into the conversation. Their Conversation Intelligence is sold separately from Agent Assist and has its own demo funnel, and it carries no public price of any kind.
What's Included in Cresta's Conversation Intelligence?
- Outcome tracking across the full conversation set, human and AI
- Root-cause analysis that moves past what happened to why
- A blueprint view for deciding which interactions to automate next
- Insight delivery inside and outside the live conversation
Who it's for, and what to watch:
This is a QA and CX-strategy tool for teams with an analyst who'll act on it. There's nothing to assess on value for money, because Cresta won't say what it costs. You can't weigh it against the conversation intelligence bundled into a CCaaS platform, or against the kind sold per seat elsewhere. Buying it alongside Agent Assist also means two negotiations and no published bundle discount. Plenty of conversation intelligence software carries a per-seat rate you can read, which at least gives you something to hold the quote against.
Cresta's Other Products: Quality Management, Coach, and Knowledge Agent
Beyond the three headline products, Cresta sells Quality Management, Coach, AI Analyst, and Knowledge Agent as further modules. Quality Management has its own dedicated demo path in the sitemap, which confirms it's a separate commercial motion rather than a feature of Conversation Intelligence. None of them appear on the AWS Marketplace listing, and none has a published price. Quality Management and Coach are contact center workforce management tooling under a different name, and that category does have vendors who publish a number.
What Should You Expect When You Add Cresta's Other Modules?
- Each module is a separate purchase with its own demo request, not an upgrade toggle
- No published price, bundle rate, or discount schedule exists for any of them
- Every addition means another negotiation rather than clicking upgrade
Who it's for, and what to watch:
These modules make sense for an organization already running Cresta and extending it across QA and coaching. The cost risk compounds, because a platform where every capability is a separate quote leaves you no way to forecast year two. Ask for the whole portfolio priced in one document before you sign the first piece of it.
See what's actually included.
Is Cresta AI Pricing Per User or Usage-Based?
Cresta AI pricing per user does not exist as a published figure. There is no per-seat rate on cresta.com, no per-agent figure on the AWS listing, and no published cost for adding an agent to an existing contract. Buyers get this wrong more often than anything else on the page.
The public prices are usage-based instead: every Cresta figure in existence is denominated in conversations rather than seats. A subscription covers a volume of assisted calls or chats, and metering above it is charged per call or per chat. That's a different unit from the per-seat model most contact center software uses, and it changes how you forecast.
Cresta AI pricing per agent shows up on plenty of blogs anyway. A figure of roughly $100 to $200 per agent per month circulates across several vendor-published articles, and you should treat it as an unverified third-party estimate with no primary source behind it. We could not trace it to Cresta, to a document, or to a named buyer. The same goes for the "$150,000 to $300,000 annually for a 100-agent operation" range you'll see attributed to "industry reports" with no report named. The four AWS line items above are the only Cresta numbers on this page that came from a primary source, and they're the only ones we'd budget against.
The move away from seat-based licensing is bigger than Cresta, and it shapes how these contracts get written. Gartner reported in July 2026 that up to $234 billion of enterprise application spending is exposed to agentic AI through 2030, and that agentic systems break the link between seat growth and revenue growth for software vendors. Managing Vice President George Brocklehurst put the buyer side bluntly: enterprise buyers "want better outcomes and adding more AI features often creates more cost, not better outcomes." A vendor whose only public price is per conversation sits on the right side of that shift. One that publishes neither number is just harder to compare.
So, What's the Real Price of Cresta AI?
On its only public route, Cresta will cost you $150,000 a year at an absolute minimum, and that buys real-time guidance on one channel of one product. Everything else on the platform is priced on request.
Gartner's January 2026 Predicts report forecasts that cost per resolution for generative AI will exceed $3 by 2030, higher than many B2C offshore human agents. Senior Director Analyst Patrick Quinlan's summary is that full automation "will be prohibitively expensive for most organizations." Against that benchmark, Cresta's verified $1.50 per assisted call looks reasonable for guidance on a human-handled call, and it also tells you the direction of travel on renewal.
Every scenario below is built only on the four verified AWS figures, with no assumptions or estimates added on top.
Four Cresta Cost Scenarios, Built Only on Verified Figures
| Scenario | Assisted volume per year | Calculation | Annual total | Monthly equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A. Voice only, inside the cap | 100,000 calls | $150,000 subscription, nothing metered | $150,000 | $12,500 |
| B. Voice only, 50% over the cap | 150,000 calls | $150,000 + (50,000 x $1.50) | $225,000 | $18,750 |
| C. Voice and chat, both at cap | 100,000 calls + 125,000 chats | $150,000 + $150,000, billed as two separate dimensions | $300,000 | $25,000 |
| D. Voice at three times the cap | 300,000 calls | $150,000 + (200,000 x $1.50) | $450,000 | $37,500 |
Three caveats on that table:
- 01Every figure covers Agent Assist alone, so AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence, Quality Management, Coach, AI Analyst, and Knowledge Agent all sit on top of that price.
- 02Scenario C is the omnichannel tax: covering two channels costs you exactly what covering them separately would, because the dimensions never merge.
- 03Then there's scenario D, where the commitment stops protecting you and Cresta bills every extra call at full rate.
Choose a more transparent and reliable alternative.
Are There Hidden Costs in Cresta AI?
Yes. The most expensive one is the commitment itself.
Does the 12-Month Commitment Buy a Volume Discount?
Run the arithmetic on Cresta's own two published figures and the two rates match to the cent:
- Voice:$150,000 divided by 100,000 calls = $1.50 per call, identical to the $1.50 per-call metered rate.
- Chat:$150,000 divided by 125,000 chats = $1.20 per chat, identical to the $1.20 per-chat metered rate.
Both figures are read straight off Cresta's AWS Marketplace listing, and the division is the only step we added. Signing a 12-month volume subscription therefore gets you no volume discount whatsoever against just metering per conversation. The commitment changes your risk instead, in one direction only. Use less than the cap and you've overpaid, because the fee applies regardless of how much of the cap you consume. Use more and you pay the same $1.50 you'd have paid anyway, on top of the commitment. There's no published tier that rewards scale, and the subscription is non-cancellable and non-refundable for the period subscribed.
What Do Implementation, Onboarding and Professional Services Cost?
Cresta states on the listing that it "provides comprehensive implementation, training, and customer success services to help ensure you are getting maximum value from Cresta solutions." It doesn't say whether those services come with the subscription or arrive as a separate invoice, and no price appears anywhere for any of them.
That silence is the finding. For a deployment of this size, professional services are usually a five-figure line item at minimum, so get it quoted in writing before you compare Cresta's total cost of ownership against anything else. Separately, the listing notes that "additional AWS infrastructure costs may apply" on top of the software charge, which you'd estimate yourself in the AWS Pricing Calculator.
What Are Cresta's Support Hours and Contract Terms?
Cresta's published support window is Monday to Friday, 5AM to 6PM PST. That's a 13-hour weekday window with no documented weekend coverage, no 24/7 tier, and no published SLA or response-time commitment. For a contact center running evenings or weekends, extended support is a cost you'll be negotiating rather than reading off a page.
Two contract mechanics matter just as much. Subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable for the term. And if you don't renew or replace the contract before it ends, access to your entitlements expires, which makes renewal a hard cutover rather than a decision you can defer a month. The end user license agreement isn't published on the listing either, so the terms you'll be agreeing to aren't public before purchase.
Cresta's Unpriced Cost Categories
| Cost category | What's verified | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Overage above your cap | Metered and "applied on top of the contract price" | $1.50 per call, $1.20 per chat |
| Second channel | Voice and chat never combine into one metric | 2 x $150,000 = $300,000 per year at the listed caps |
| AWS infrastructure | "Additional AWS infrastructure costs may apply" | Not quantified by the listing |
| Implementation, training, customer success | Confirmed as provided; inclusion not stated | Not publicly listed |
| Extended or 24/7 support | Standard hours are Mon to Fri, 5AM to 6PM PST | Not publicly listed; no 24/7 tier documented |
| Every other module | AI Agent, Conversation Intelligence, Quality Management, Coach, AI Analyst, Knowledge Agent are separate buys | Not publicly listed |
| Integrations and API access | No connector fee or API charge published either way | Not publicly documented |
| Additional agents | No public per-seat rate, so the marginal cost of one more agent can't be verified | Not publicly listed |
| Early termination | "All subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable for the period subscribed" | No exit during the paid term |
| Renewal | Entitlements expire on the contract end date if not renewed or replaced | Hard cutover risk |
Add it up and the real Cresta subscription cost is the $150,000 dimension plus a set of line items whose prices we don't know. That's the part how to evaluate VoIP pricing gets right: the published rate is only the first line of the quote.
What Do Buyers Say About Cresta AI's Pricing?
Cresta holds 4.2 out of 5 on G2 from 43 reviews. That is a genuinely small sample, well below the 100-review floor we normally treat as reliable for review analysis, so read it as directional rather than decisive. The reviewer base skews mid-market and enterprise, which is consistent with a product sold on six-figure annual contracts.
What almost no reviewer discusses is price, because buyers on negotiated enterprise contracts rarely publish what they paid. So rather than characterize sentiment we can't verify, here is what the public record establishes on each theme buyers usually want covered. It's objective and checkable, even where opinion isn't available.
What Are Cresta AI's Best Features for the Money?
Three capabilities carry most of the value in an Agent Assist contract. Judge the price against these rather than the full feature list. They're also the three to weigh against the best AI voice agents for customer support and service, if what you're deciding is whether to assist your agents or automate the call outright.
Real-Time Behavioral Guidance
Cresta's pitch for Agent Assist is turning every agent into a top performer with guidance delivered live on the call. It's the feature that separates Cresta from a post-call analytics tool, and where the $1.50 per assisted call earns its keep or doesn't. The value depends on the gap between your best and median agent: a wide spread means recoverable revenue, a narrow one means you're paying for guidance nobody needs.
How Does Real-Time Knowledge Retrieval Work?
Agents resolve issues faster when the answer surfaces on screen instead of in a wiki search. Cresta calls this precise, real-time knowledge, and for operations with complex product or policy trees it's usually the fastest route to lower handle time. The cost lever is your own documentation quality rather than Cresta's model, so budget for content work alongside the license. This is also the capability reviewers most often flag as needing tuning before it performs.
What Do AI Summaries and Conversation Analytics Deliver?
Cresta's summaries capture better data while cutting after-call work, and Conversation Intelligence aggregates it into outcome analysis. At enterprise volume the after-call-work saving alone can justify a guidance tool. The catch is commercial rather than technical: the summary sits inside Agent Assist, while the analysis layer that makes it useful across thousands of calls is a separate purchase at an unpublished price.
What Are the Pros and Cons of Cresta AI?
Weighted for a pricing decision rather than a feature bake-off, this is where Cresta lands.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Purpose-built for enterprise contact center voice and digital volume, with AI Agent covering 30+ languages | No published pricing anywhere on cresta.com; the first number arrives after a demo |
| Real-time guidance delivered during the live call, where a post-call analytics tool can only review it afterwards | No free trial and no documented pilot terms; subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable |
| One platform spanning human and AI agents, so the same conversation data feeds both | Voice and chat bill separately, so omnichannel coverage means two $150,000 dimensions at the listed caps |
| Integrates with existing telephony and CRM via API and MCP function calling rather than replacing them | The 12-month volume subscription is priced at exactly the per-unit rate, so committing buys no discount |
| Available through AWS Marketplace, so buyers can draw the spend down against existing AWS commitments | Support runs a 13-hour weekday window with no documented weekend or 24/7 coverage |
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Which Alternatives Are Better and Cheaper Than Cresta AI?
CloudTalk, Talkdesk, and Five9 all publish a per-seat price you can put in a budget today. And if the cheapest route to AI on your calls is what you're after, skip the contact center AI platforms entirely and look at cloud contact center software with AI sold as a metered add-on, where you can read the rate before you talk to anyone.
1. CloudTalk: Best for Teams That Need a Price Before a Demo
What Is CloudTalk?
CloudTalk replaces traditional on-premise PBX hardware with a fully cloud-based VoIP service that distributed sales and support teams can run from a browser, a desktop app or a mobile app. Voice calls, SMS, MMS and WhatsApp conversations live in one workspace alongside recordings, transcripts, AI summaries, tags, contact records and analytics. CloudTalk serves 5,500+ customers with numbers in 160 countries.
Why CloudTalk Is Better Than Cresta AI
- You can price it before you speak to sales.Every plan and add-on rate is on the pricing page, and you can start a 14-day free trial without a call. Cresta reverses that order: demo first, number later.
- AI is metered, so you can size it.AI Voice Agents are a usage-based add-on starting at $99/month for 200 minutes, with volume discounts at scale, so a pilot costs two figures rather than six.
- Call routing is not locked in the most expensive plan.IVR and skill and smart condition-based routing are included from the Essential plan.
- No non-cancellable annual floor.You can run a real trial, then buy monthly or annually, instead of committing to 12 months up front with no refund.
"When we implemented the voice agents, I said to my manager that if the number would decrease by 10%, I will be happy. And I think it’s much, much more right now—around 40%."
Customer Support Lead at Autenti
What Is CloudTalk Pricing?
Flexible Pricing Plans to Scale with You
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Click through the product yourself. No sign-up, no sales call.
CloudTalk Pricing vs Cresta AI Pricing
Different shape, different commitment. CloudTalk is a per-seat phone system with AI bought by the minute; Cresta is a per-conversation AI layer bought by the year.
A 50-seat CloudTalk team on Essential is a four-figure monthly line item with an AI add-on you can switch on for a single campaign, against a $150,000 twelve-month minimum for one channel of one Cresta product. If you need AI on calls and a phone system to run them on, CloudTalk gets you there without a procurement cycle. If you're adding real-time guidance to an existing 500-seat contact center, that's Cresta's home ground.
Talkdesk: Best for Enterprise CCaaS With Published Per-Seat Pricing
What Is Talkdesk?
Talkdesk is an enterprise contact center as a service (CCaaS) platform competing for the same large contact centers Cresta targets, with AI layered on top through Talkdesk Copilot, Autopilot and Customer Experience Automation. It's the cleanest transparency contrast available: same buyer, same market, opposite pricing posture.
Why Talkdesk Is Better Than Cresta AI
- Four per-user prices, published in USD.You can build a seat-count model from the pricing page without a conversation.
- It's the whole contact center, not a layer on top.Routing, channels and workforce tooling come with the platform rather than requiring an underlying CCaaS licence as well.
- Editions rather than separate quotes.Capabilities step up through named tiers, so you can see what upgrading costs before you ask.
What Is Talkdesk Pricing?
- Digital Essentials:$85 USD per user, per month.
- Voice Essentials:$105 USD per user, per month.
- Elite:$165 USD per user, per month, described as everything in Essentials plus.
- Industry Experience Clouds:$225 USD per user, per month, described as all Elite capabilities plus.
- Not publicly priced:Customer Experience Automation, Talkdesk Copilot and Talkdesk Autopilot are listed on the same page without prices.
- G2 rating:4.4/5 from 2598+ reviews on G2.
Talkdesk Pricing vs Cresta AI Pricing
At $105 per user per month for Voice Essentials, a 100-seat Talkdesk deployment runs $126,000 a year, and you can check every input before you talk to anyone. Talkdesk's AI products are quote-only too, so neither vendor publishes an agent-assist rate. Talkdesk at least prices the ground floor you'd be standing on.
Five9: Best for Modular AI on a CCaaS Core
What Is Five9?
Five9 is an enterprise CCaaS platform that publishes entry per-seat prices and breaks its AI out as named add-on bundles, including Intelligent Virtual Agent, AI Agents and its own Agent Assist. That last one matters: Five9 sells the same AI agent assist category as Cresta and still puts a number on the platform underneath it.
Why Five9 Is Better Than Cresta AI
- A published entry price on the same product category.Two of five tiers carry public per-seat rates, so the floor is knowable.
- AI is modular and named.You buy Intelligent Virtual Agent, AI Agents or Agent Assist as discrete bundles rather than negotiating an undifferentiated platform quote.
- Workforce tooling and CRM adapters are catalogued.WEM options and CRM and UC adapters are listed as line items, which makes a total-cost model possible.
What Is Five9 Pricing?
- Digital (digital channels only):$119 USD monthly per seat.
- Core (all channels with AI essential):$159 USD monthly per seat.
- Plus, Pro and Enterprise:Contact sales for flexible pricing. Not publicly listed.
- Not publicly priced:Intelligent Virtual Agent, AI Agents and Agent Assist add-on bundles, plus CRM and UC adapters, WEM and advanced analytics.
- G2 rating:4.1/5 from 625+ reviews on G2.
Five9 Pricing vs Cresta AI Pricing
Five9 gives you a starting point Cresta doesn't: $159 per seat per month on Core tells a 100-seat operation it's looking at roughly $190,800 a year before AI. Three of its five tiers are still quote-only and its Agent Assist bundle has no public rate, so this is a published floor against no floor at all rather than full transparency against none.
Test it on your own calls
Is Cresta AI Worth It? Who Should Buy It?
Cresta is a credible company. It has raised over $270 million, including a $125 million Series D in November 2024 with Accenture, Qualcomm, Workday Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia among the investors. Cresta says it nearly quadrupled annual recurring revenue and nearly doubled its customer base in the two years to that round. Its credibility isn't in question here. Its pricing opacity is the reason this guide needed writing.
Cresta is worth it if you run a large contact center, you're keeping your human agents, and your assisted volume is high and predictable enough that a 12-month cap is a fit rather than a gamble. Committed AWS spend helps, and procurement weight to negotiate a private offer below the $150,000 list price helps more. At 500 seats with steady volume and an analyst to act on Conversation Intelligence, Cresta does something the alternatives don't do as well.
Skip Cresta if you're under 100 agents, your volume is seasonal, you need a price this quarter, or you need to run a real trial before committing budget. A Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders, published in February 2026, found 91% are under executive pressure to implement AI, and pressure is exactly the wrong condition under which to sign a non-cancellable annual contract you couldn't model in advance.
One cost most agent-assist evaluations miss: Agent Assist sits next to your agents rather than replacing them, so you keep paying for both. And you'll keep needing the humans. A Gartner survey of 3,566 customers published in August 2026 found 87% consider it essential to be able to reach a human agent when a company uses generative AI. Any model that treats AI spend as a substitute for labor cost will therefore underestimate the real total.
Now put a number on it.
Cresta AI Pricing FAQ
Based on usage, as far as anything public goes. Cresta's only verifiable prices are volume-based: a 12-month subscription covering up to 100,000 assisted calls or up to 125,000 assisted chats, with metering above that at $1.50 per call and $1.20 per chat. That's one of several call center pricing models in use, and it isn't the per-seat one most buyers arrive expecting. A third-party pricing analysis site describes Cresta's direct contracts as per-agent-seat subscriptions with feature tiers, but Cresta publishes no per-seat rate anywhere.
Yes, and several of them are unpriced. Cresta confirms it provides implementation, training and customer success services but doesn't say whether they're included or invoiced separately, and publishes no figure for any of them. On top of that: overage at $1.50 per call and $1.20 per chat, additional AWS infrastructure costs, a separate purchase for every module beyond Agent Assist, and voice and chat billed as two line items. Nothing published says whether connectors carry a fee either, which is unusual when most vendors list their integrations and what each one costs. Get all of it quoted in one document before you compare total cost against another vendor.
A demo only. There's no free trial: "free trial" appears zero times across Cresta's AI Agent, Agent Assist and Conversation Intelligence pages, no URL in its 1,718-page sitemap contains "trial," and the AWS Marketplace listing states that subscriptions are non-cancellable and non-refundable for the period subscribed. With no trial and no published pilot terms, your evaluation is a demo against whatever you can model yourself, the same bind you hit when weighing building voice AI in-house against paying for it. Cresta runs seven product-specific demo funnels instead, and no pilot programme or proof-of-concept terms could be verified at any primary source.
Cresta publishes no per-agent price, and seat count isn't what drives the bill. The unit is assisted conversations, so a 50-agent team and a 100-agent team handling the same 100,000 assisted calls a year both pay the same $150,000 on the AWS route. Work from volume instead: $150,000 up to 100,000 calls, then $1.50 for each call above it, which is the same conversation-based unit used to price AI voice agents for high call volume. At 500 agents the list rate is no longer a meaningful reference, because Cresta directs that buyer to partners@cresta.ai for a private offer, and private-offer terms aren't public.
Because it's built and sold for large contact centers, and every part of it is quoted individually. Six factors drive a Cresta quote, all verifiable from its own published material. Three are scope: which products you take, since AI Agent, Agent Assist and Conversation Intelligence are separate; which channels you cover, since voice and chat never combine; and your assisted conversation volume, which is the actual billing unit. The other three are contract duration, procurement route (AWS list price against a direct private offer), and the scope of implementation and training services. That last one scales with how much tuning your own call types need, which is where the accuracy and limitations of voice AI turn into billable hours. Cresta has also raised over $270 million, which tends to come with enterprise revenue targets attached.
It depends on whether opacity is a dealbreaker for you. Cresta is worth a six-figure commitment for a large contact center with predictable volume, human agents it intends to keep, and the procurement weight to negotiate below list. For everyone else, a published price beats a strong demo. CloudTalk starts at $25/user/month with IVR and call routing on the entry plan, AI Voice Agents as a usage-based add-on from $99/month for 200 minutes, and a 14-day free trial you can start without talking to anyone.
