One plan, one number. Ringly charges $99 a month, which covers your first 50 phone conversations, then $1.99 for every conversation after that. There is no per-minute billing anymore. Above 1,000 calls a month Ringly works out a custom rate with you.
This replaced the old Grow ($349) and Pro ($799) minute plans on 12 September 2026. If you signed up before then, you are still on Grow or Pro and nothing changes unless you ask.
The two things that now decide your bill:
- How many calls are billable. Spam, hang-ups, wrong numbers, callers who only want a human, and your own test calls are free. Ringly says about 80% of incoming calls end up billable across its stores.
- How many calls you get, full stop. Call length no longer matters. A 67-second order lookup and a three-minute product chat both cost $1.99.
Three-plus years now I have been on a team that puts AI agents onto live support queues. There is one number out of our own trials that shapes how I read every voice rate card since. A German jewellery brand, roughly 1,000 tickets a month. Our agent got to 93% triage accuracy there and 100% spam detection, and it still carried a 7% factual error rate. On email you survive that, because a human reads the draft before it goes out. A live phone call has no draft step at all. That is why the guarantee terms matter as much as the unit price here, and why I get to the per-call number first.
Price your own Ringly bill
Set your monthly incoming calls and the share you expect to be billable. Ringly's own figure is 80%. The call length slider does not change the bill. It only shows what $1.99 per conversation works out to per minute, so you can compare it with per-minute vendors.
Ringly.io pricing at a glance
Ringly sells one product: Seth, an AI phone agent that answers a Shopify store's inbound calls, looks up orders, handles returns and cancellations, and transfers what it cannot resolve. It is the narrowest product in the Shopify support AI category, and since September 2026 it has one plan.
| Pay per call | |
|---|---|
| Monthly fee | $99 |
| Conversations included | 50 |
| Each conversation after 50 | $1.99 |
| Per-minute billing | No, same price for any call length |
| Free calls | Spam, hang-ups, wrong numbers, callers who only want a human, test calls |
| Above 1,000 calls a month | Custom rate |
| Phone number and knowledge base | Included |
| Free trial | No, but $99 back as credit if you go live within 2 weeks |
| Money-back guarantee | 30 days, on the $99 |
| 65% resolution guarantee | Yes, after 90 days and with conditions |
| Spend cap | Yes, set in Settings |
| Contract | None, month to month |
Here is what that comes to at a few volumes. These are billable conversations, not incoming calls.
| Billable conversations / month | Monthly bill | Cost per conversation |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | $99.00 | $3.96 |
| 50 | $99.00 | $1.98 |
| 100 | $198.50 | $1.99 |
| 250 | $497.00 | $1.99 |
| 500 | $994.50 | $1.99 |
| 1,000 | $1,989.50 (before any custom rate) | $1.99 |
The shape is simple. Past 50 conversations, every conversation costs $1.99 and nothing else moves. Under 50, the $99 floor is the expensive part, and a store taking 25 billable calls pays almost $4 each. Ringly's own page says it is for stores getting around 60 calls a month or more, which lines up with where that floor stops hurting.
What Ringly counts as a conversation
On a per-conversation plan the definition of a conversation is the whole meter, so it is the first thing I checked. Ringly's billing doc defines it as a call where Seth and your customer both spoke.
These calls are free and never counted:
- Hang-ups and calls where nobody spoke
- Wrong numbers and spam
- Callers who only asked for a human and got handed off
- Test calls you start from your dashboard
- Calls from up to five of your own numbers, which you add in Settings
A call where Seth helps first and then hands over to your team is billed. A caller who asks for a person straight away is not. That split is fair: you pay when Seth does work, not when he passes the phone.
Every call in your call history shows a "Not billed" tag with the reason if it did not count. That is the part I would test in the first week, because the gap between incoming calls and billable conversations is where your real cost per call comes from. Ringly puts the billable share at about 80% across its stores, so 100 incoming calls is roughly 80 conversations. A store with a lot of spam or "just put me through" callers will sit lower.
Phone numbers and Seth's knowledge base are included. The $5 phone number and $9 knowledge base charges still listed in Ringly's pricing article apply only to its older custom agents, not to Seth.
So the practical read here is that Ringly bills one monthly fee and one per-conversation rate, and that is the whole meter. For anybody who has priced the multi-meter rate cards that became normal in this category, that is the exception.
Why call length stopped mattering, and who that helps
Under the old minute plans, the most important number for your bill was your average call length. Ringly's plan labels assumed two minutes, and most of its own case studies ran longer. That problem is gone. A two-minute call and a nine-minute call now cost the same.
Six of the brands Ringly features publish an average call length, or enough data to work one out. All figures come from Ringly's own customer pages.
| Brand | What they sell | Average call | Resolved without a human | $1.99 works out to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BioLongevity Labs | Research peptides | 1:07 | 79% | $1.78/min |
| Hey Zeyla | Scaling skincare | 2:36 | 78.9% | $0.77/min |
| Vynzo | Everyday skincare | 2:41 (derived) | 78% | $0.74/min |
| Gear Rider | Motorcycle gear | 2:43 | 75% | $0.73/min |
| Herbionyx | Supplements | 2:48 | 71% | $0.71/min |
| Luxeveria | Premium skincare | 3:06 | 78% | $0.64/min |
The longer your calls, the cheaper each minute gets. Luxeveria sells premium skincare, where its page reports that 64.3% of calls run longer than two minutes because a trust purchase involves a real conversation about whether a serum layers with retinol. On a per-minute plan that store paid for every one of those minutes. On Pay per call it pays $1.99 whatever the length.
The flip side is quick-lookup stores. BioLongevity's calls are mostly "is it in stock" and "where is my order", and at 67 seconds each, $1.99 is $1.78 a minute. If your calls are that short, the cheaper move is often to answer them before they become calls at all. More on that below.
What the documented stores would pay now
Three of Ringly's case studies publish enough to work out a monthly volume. Here is what they would pay on Pay per call at list price, once if every call were billable and once at Ringly's 80% figure.
| Account | Calls / month | Bill if every call billable | Bill at 80% billable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gear Rider | 532 | $1,058.18 | $847.24 |
| Vynzo | 557 | $1,107.93 | $887.04 |
| BioLongevity Labs | 1,127 | Custom rate (over 1,000 calls) | Custom rate |
Resolution rates on those stores sit at 75% to 79%, so these bills buy roughly three in four calls finished without a person. The useful way to read that is cost per resolved call. At Gear Rider's 75%, the 80% billable bill works out to about $2.12 per call Seth fully resolves. Set that against what a human phone rep costs per call, and against cost per resolution on your other channels, before deciding.
The guarantees, and the conditions behind them
There is no free trial period. You pay $99 when you switch Seth on, then on the same day each month. Three things reduce the risk of that first payment.
- The $99-back credit. Put Seth on your store's phone line within two weeks of activating, and once five different customers have had a conversation with him, you get the $99 back as credit, $49.50 off each of your next two bills. You do not need to claim it.
- The 30-day money-back guarantee. Not happy in the first 30 days, ask in the chat and Ringly refunds the $99 and cancels. Conversations above the included 50 stay billed.
- The 65% resolution guarantee. If Seth resolves under 65% of your support calls in a billing month, that month's bill comes back as credit, after a call where Ringly goes through the missed calls with you.
The 65% guarantee is the most interesting of the three, and it is a rare thing. Most vendors in conversational AI quote you a deflection target in a slide and put nothing behind it. Set it next to how Sierra prices its outcomes and the difference is obvious. It is also the only part of the rate card that speaks to support ROI rather than unit price.
It does come with conditions, listed in the billing doc and the guarantee page:
- 90 days on Pay per call before it applies
- 300 phone conversations in the 90 days before the month you claim, so roughly 100 a month
- Shopify connected, with the order status and cancellation skills on
- All support calls routed to Seth, with "try to resolve first" on
- Replies to Ringly within one business day, and a claim within 7 days of the month ending
Those are reasonable for a guarantee with money attached, but they mean a store under about 100 conversations a month will not qualify. Small stores get the $99-back credit and the 30-day refund, not the resolution floor.
If you are still on Grow or Pro
Stores that signed up before 12 September 2026 keep their plan, included minutes, and overage rate, shown in Settings. For reference, the old plans were:
| Grow | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $349 | $799 |
| Included minutes | 1,000 | 2,500 |
| Overage | $0.29/min | $0.19/min |
You can move to Pay per call by messaging Ringly in the chat. Whether you should comes down to volume. On list prices, Pay per call beats a $349 Grow bill only below about 175 billable conversations a month, and beats a $799 Pro bill below about 401. Above those lines, a minute plan is cheaper unless your calls are long enough that you were paying heavy overage. Pull a month of call history, count the billable conversations, and run both numbers before you switch.
What $1.99 a conversation buys next to the rest of the voice market
Ringly's flat $1.99 per conversation looks steep against the headline rates on developer voice platforms, and this is where most comparisons go wrong.
The advertised numbers on build-it-yourself platforms are usually platform fees, not the whole bill. Vapi lists $0.05/min and Retell about $0.07/min for voice infrastructure, and you then pay separately for the language model, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and telephony. A production stack lands somewhere around $0.11 to $0.30 a minute. ElevenLabs Agents is a clean comparison at a flat $0.08/min across its paid tiers, and Bland's Start tier bundles the model, transcription, and speech into one $0.14/min number.
At the 2:42 median call length from Ringly's case studies, a fully loaded DIY stack costs roughly $0.30 to $0.81 per call. Ringly charges $1.99. So about $1.20 to $1.70 of each conversation is the integration layer rather than the compute: the Shopify order lookups, live tracking across carriers, returns and cancellations, escalation rules, transcripts, and revenue attribution. A DIY stack also bills you for spam and hang-ups, which Ringly does not.
Whether that trade is right for you comes down to one question. Do you want to own the integration? If you have an engineer with spare cycles and an appetite for maintaining a voice stack, Retell's pricing will be cheaper per call and more expensive in salary. The same goes for Vapi if you would rather assemble the stack yourself. If you do not, the premium is the cheaper option. I went through the full field of substitutes in my roundup of Ringly alternatives.
One billing detail worth knowing: on Shopify billing the charge appears on your Shopify bill, and on card billing you get an emailed invoice. If you cancel on card billing the plan ends right away, while on Shopify billing Seth keeps answering until the end of the month you paid for.
Before you pay per call, check whether the call should exist
Every per-call rate card has the same blind spot. It prices the calls you get rather than the calls you ought to be getting. A meaningful share of inbound ecommerce calls are people who could not find an answer anywhere else.
This is not a hypothetical objection. It is the loudest thing in the community discussion around voice agents. On Retell's Launch HN thread, one commenter put the question every Shopify founder should sit with:
"why would a company have a fully automated voice line rather than a booking interface? As a customer I'm never happy to call a company to make a reservation. I'd be extra annoyed if an AI picked up and I had to go through the motions of a conversation instead of doing two clicks in a Web UI."
Another was blunter about the support case specifically:
"What I don't want to do is talk to LLMs for customer support. For that, I always want to talk to a real person. It would be infuriating for an LLM to pick up when calling a business."
You can disagree with both and still take the pricing lesson: a per-conversation meter charges you for demand you might be able to remove. And with a flat $1.99, the shortest calls are the most expensive per minute. Order status, returns and shipping questions all resolve fine in chat and email, and every one that resolves there is $1.99 you never pay. Your deflection rate decides how many conversations you are paying for at all.
So fix order tracking automation in your existing channels first. Do the same for returns and refunds, measure the calls that are left, and price conversations against that number rather than today's volume. A self-service layer that actually answers questions is the cheapest call you will ever handle.
This is also the honest place to say what my own product does, and what it does not. eesel has no voice channel. It will not answer your phone, and if inbound calls are the problem you are solving this week, Ringly is a more direct answer than anything I sell. My roundup of voice customer support tools is the better starting point for that job. What eesel does is sit on the Shopify side of the same store, or the Gorgias inbox behind it, and resolve the order-status, returns, and product-question volume in chat and email before it ever becomes a phone call, trained on your help center and your past tickets.
If you are already pricing Ringly's conversations, that is the arithmetic worth running alongside it. eesel is one fixed monthly price from $299 for 500 credits (one credit per ticket or chat) with no platform fee and no seat cost, and the calls it prevents are conversations you do not pay $1.99 each for. There is a free plan with 100 credits and no credit card at signup, so you can find out what your deflection rate actually is before you pay anything. Try eesel on the volume that never needed a phone line, then let Seth take whatever is actually left.
So is Ringly.io worth the money?
For a Shopify store with real inbound phone volume that a human is answering right now, yes, and the new pricing is easier to predict than almost anything in this category. Free spam and hang-ups, free "just give me a person" calls, no per-minute billing, a spend cap, no contract, and a 65% resolution guarantee are all points in Ringly's favour.
The three things I would do before signing anything:
- Count your billable calls, not your total calls. Take a month of phone logs, strip out spam, hang-ups, and callers who only wanted a person, and multiply what is left by $1.99. If you cannot split them, use Ringly's 80%.
- Check you clear the floor. Under 50 billable conversations a month you pay $1.98 or more per call, and under about 100 a month the 65% guarantee does not apply.
- Go live inside two weeks. That is what turns the first $99 into credit, and the 30-day refund covers you if it does not work out.
And the thing I would want tested before any of it goes live on a real phone line: what happens on the calls it gets wrong. That 7% factual error rate out of our own jewellery trial did not show up in a demo. It showed up when we cross-validated against a hundred real tickets. Voice has no draft step and no undo, so the escalation rules and the handoff are not a footnote on this purchase. They are the purchase. Whatever you buy, track containment and escalation quality from week one.
Sources
- Ringly.io pricing page - $99 plan fee, 50 included conversations, $1.99 per conversation, free call types, 80% billable estimate, custom plans above 1,000 calls, comparison table, FAQ
- Ringly.io help center: How Pay per call billing works - conversation definition, billing dates, $99-back credit, 30-day and 65% guarantees with conditions, spend cap, numbers never billed
- Ringly.io help center: Pricing - plan summary, legacy custom-agent add-ons, Grow and Pro customers who signed up before 12 September 2026
- Ringly customer pages: BioLongevity Labs, Gear Rider, Luxeveria, Herbionyx, Vynzo, Hey Zeyla - call durations, volumes, resolution rates
- ElevenLabs pricing and Bland AI pricing - comparison per-minute rates
- Launch HN: Retell AI - community discussion on whether inbound calls should be calls
- eesel AI pricing - from $299/month for 500 credits (1 credit per ticket or chat), no platform fee, 100 free credits