Cost per minute · Sunday 16 August 2026
This is the cost report. It answers one question in full: what does it actually cost us to run Josh for a minute? The answer is about six cents, and a booked call comes to roughly forty-three cents. This report shows where every penny goes, how we checked it, what it means for each client, and the one number we still need before anyone can set a price.
Read this first This report works out costs. It does not set a price. No price has been agreed and none has been published. What we charge is Ken's and Beth's decision.
Every figure here was checked, not guessed. The supplier rates were read off our own running server. The call volumes come from four months of real records for twelve home inspection companies. Where something is still unknown, this report says so.
The whole picture, before the detail.
Josh answers the phone for our clients. Every second he is on a call, other companies are billing us. If we do not know what that adds up to, we cannot set a fair price. We could charge too little and lose money on every client. We could charge too much and lose the sale.
So we set out to answer it properly. The answer is about six cents a minute.
To get there you need two halves, and one without the other is useless:
The two halves
Both halves are finished. Put them together and you get what it costs us to serve a real client for a month. The average works out at about $31. The busiest company we have records for comes to about $81.
Those numbers are smaller than people feared. That leads to the main finding of this report, and it is not the one the question usually expects.
The main finding The cost of a call is not what holds our price back. It is a small part of any price we have discussed. Our fixed monthly bills are what really decide the price — the server, the software, the phone numbers, the setup time.
Those bills get split between however many clients we have. With two clients that split hurts a lot. With twelve it almost disappears. So the price depends far more on how many clients we sign than on what a call costs.
That fixed bills figure is the one thing still missing. Beth is working it out. It is the only real blocker left on the cost side.
Four suppliers. Here is the full list.
Every minute Josh talks, four companies charge us. Each one does a different job.
| Supplier | What they do for us | Cost a minute |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Josh's speaking voice | $0.0405 |
| Claude | Josh's thinking — deciding what to say | $0.0113 |
| Telnyx | Carries the phone call and records it | $0.0075 |
| Deepgram | Turns what the caller says into words | $0.0048 |
| Total for one minute | $0.064 |
A booked call runs about seven minutes. So a call that turns into a real job costs us about 43 cents.
The voice is nearly two thirds of it Josh's voice costs more than everything else put together. The phone line, the recording, the listening and the thinking combined still come to less than the voice alone.
That surprises almost everyone who sees it. It is also the first place anyone would look to save money.
There is a cheaper voice available from the same supplier. It would cut our cost from 6 cents to about 4.4 cents a minute. Across all twelve companies that saves roughly $116 a month.
We are not switching to it. Ken has run both on real calls. The cheap one sounded rough and garbled. Our own notes describe the one we use as the cleanest sounding of the two.
Saving $116 a month is not worth a customer hearing a street name that nobody said. A cheaper voice that sounds worse is a failed test, not a saving.
Telnyx bills us three separate times on a single call. Once for the phone line. Once for recording it. And once for sending the audio over to Josh so he can hear it.
That third charge is $0.0035 a minute, and it is bigger than the phone call itself. Nobody had counted it before. There is no way to avoid it either, because not sending Josh the audio means not having Josh.
Three separate checks, not one.
We did not look up list prices and hope we were on them. We opened the live settings file on the machine that runs Josh and read what it is actually set to.
That is how we found we are on the more expensive voice, not the cheaper one our code suggests by default. Someone had changed it and it had never been written down.
Our system has quietly been recording the length of every call since 24 July. That is 370 calls and 2,097 minutes of real conversations.
A booked call averages just under 7 minutes. We used that, rather than a guess, to work out the cost of a call.
The six cent figure was first worked out on 11 August. Today we built it again from the supplier rates without looking at the old answer.
It came to the same number. Every company figure matched the earlier report exactly. That is the kind of check worth doing before anyone builds a price on it.
Four months of real records from twelve companies.
A cost per minute on its own tells you nothing. You need to know how many minutes a real client uses in a month.
We have that. Ken supplied four months of phone records covering twelve home inspection companies — 5,097 calls and 16,198 minutes between April and July.
Two of those twelve are ours. GC Home Inspection is Chad. Quality Home Inspections is Ted. That matters, because it means we are not guessing how our own clients compare to these companies. Two of them are our clients.
| What we learned | The number |
|---|---|
| Calls per company each month | 106 on average |
| Minutes per company each month, today | 337 |
| Minutes once Josh answers everything | about 479 |
| Length of a typical call today | just over 3 minutes |
This corrected a bad assumption Our July cost model assumed each client would take 25 calls a month. The real number is 106. We were out by four times.
That single correction is why the whole cost model was rebuilt. A cost per minute multiplied by the wrong number of minutes is a wrong answer that looks right.
Three of the twelve companies average under 90 seconds a call. That is not a conversation. That is a phone ringing out, a voicemail, or someone giving up.
Josh answers every call. So those companies would not grow a little — their minutes would roughly triple. Today's minutes are a floor, not a normal level. Any forecast that just scales up today's numbers would miss that completely.
The two halves multiplied together.
Here is every company in the records. "Minutes with Josh" is what we expect them to use once Josh answers all their calls. "Costs us" is what we would pay our suppliers for a month.
| Company | Minutes with Josh | Costs us a month |
|---|---|---|
| Bent Nail Inspections | 1,270 | $81 |
| SEC Inspections | 953 | $61 |
| Quality Home Inspections (Ted) | 890 | $57 |
| Idaho Elite Inspection Team | 638 | $41 |
| Sure Thing Home Inspections | 494 | $32 |
| GC Home Inspection (Chad) | 400 | $26 |
| Rod Inspects | 359 | $23 |
| ACF Home Inspections | 229 | $15 |
| Accu-Spec Inspections | 179 | $11 |
| Be Informed Inspections | 173 | $11 |
| Sure Thing Roofing Contractor | 98 | $6 |
| Detect-It Real Estate | 66 | $4 |
| Average company | 479 | $31 |
What that table settles There is nobody on it we would lose money serving. Even the busiest company in the whole group costs us $81 a month in supplier bills.
So the worry that heavy callers would eat our margin does not hold up. The cost of calls is real, but it is small.
One thing worth noticing, because it shapes any pricing choice. The busiest company uses 33 times more minutes than the quietest. The top three use more than half of all the minutes in the group. That is a very wide spread for a single flat fee to sit on top of.
The conclusion is not the one the question expects.
The question was "what does a minute cost, so we can price it?" The honest answer is that the minute is not what decides the price.
Working out what a client truly costs means adding two things:
The full sum
The table below shows why the first line matters so much more than the second. It shows what one client costs us, at different monthly bills and different client numbers.
| Monthly bills | With 2 clients | With 6 | With 12 | With 30 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | $531 | $197 | $114 | $64 |
| $2,000 | $1,031 | $364 | $197 | $97 |
| $3,000 | $1,531 | $531 | $281 | $131 |
The dollar figures on the left are round numbers chosen to show the shape. They are not our real bills. Nobody knows our real bills yet — that is the missing piece.
Read along any row. The cost falls off a cliff as clients are added. With two clients our bills swamp everything else. With thirty they barely register.
And two clients is where we are today — Chad and Ted. So our cost per client right now is high, and the thing that improves it most is signing more clients, not making calls cheaper.
Two price ideas that had never been compared.
The call records came with a column marked "Cost at 50 cents a minute." Nobody could say what that 50 cents was, and it had been an open question since 11 August. Dil confirmed today that it is a price we are considering charging.
That let us do something simple that nobody had done. We have two price ideas in play. One is 50 cents a minute. The other is a flat $597 a month. They live in different documents, so we put them side by side.
| If we charged | These 12 companies would pay us |
|---|---|
| 50 cents a minute | about $2,875 a month |
| $597 a month each | about $7,164 a month |
Two and a half times apart These are not two versions of the same idea. They describe two very different businesses.
Here is the clearest way to see it. At 50 cents a minute, a company must use 1,194 minutes a month before it pays us $597. Only one of the twelve gets there — Bent Nail, the busiest, at $635.
The other eleven would all pay less. The average company would pay $240 rather than $597.
This report does not argue for either one. Both are ideas and neither is agreed. The point is that choosing between them is a real decision with a large number attached, and it was hidden while the two figures sat in separate files.
Worth one mention, then dropped: answering services often charge a base fee that includes some minutes, plus a small charge for extra minutes. That fits a group with a 33 times spread better than one flat fee. How we charge is Ken's and Beth's call.
Ten minutes of Jordan's time. It could double our cost.
There is a setting that makes Josh's thinking much cheaper. It lets him reuse what he already worked out earlier in the same call, instead of starting fresh on every reply.
We think it may be switched off without anyone knowing. The setting was renamed when the software makers took it out of testing. Our code still uses the old name. The software quietly ignores names it does not recognise — it does not warn anyone.
Why this matters If that setting is off, a minute costs 12 cents instead of 6. Double. Every figure in this report would need revisiting.
It takes about ten minutes to check. It should be done before anyone builds a price on the six cent figure.
Found while re-checking. All fixed.
Checking our own working turned up three errors. None of them was anyone inventing anything. Each was somebody reading a file that had quietly gone out of date.
| What was wrong | What we did |
|---|---|
| The little program that shows our workings gave 5 to 12 cents, not 6. It used an old voice price and worked out the thinking cost the wrong way. | Fixed. It now gives 6 cents and matches our report exactly. |
| A call count read 4,997 when the real total is 5,097. | Fixed. Nothing else was built on it. |
| Two sections of the 11 August report still say the cost is unknown. They were written before we worked it out that evening. | Both now carry a clear note. Kept as history, not deleted. |
The call records that arrived today were also checked against the copy we already held. All forty-eight company months matched exactly. It is the same data Ken sent on 11 August, so nothing in it changed the answer.
So this never has to be worked out by hand again.
| Tab | What is on it |
|---|---|
| Inputs | Every assumption in one place, with a note on where it came from |
| Per Client | Each company: minutes, our cost, and both price ideas side by side |
| Price Build-Up | What a client costs once our fixed bills are added in |
| Source Data | The raw call records, so anyone can check the sums |
Every figure is a live sum. Change one thing on the Inputs tab and the whole spreadsheet updates itself.
There is one yellow box, and it is empty on purpose That box is for Beth's fixed monthly bills figure. Put a number in it and the rest fills itself in.
It was left blank rather than guessed. A made-up number there would produce a made-up price that looks real. That is a mistake this company has paid for before.
Four things, in the order they matter.
Ready now
Waiting on a person
And how to find the ones before it.
Once this is merged, this report will be online at:
https://bookedsolidinspector.com/reports/daily-report-2026-08-16-cost-per-minute.html
Every report follows the same pattern — the date, then what it is about. Here is Thursday's, on Josh's new voice:
One thing to know before sharing the link These pages are hidden from search engines, but anyone with the address can open them. This one names real companies and shows what we pay our suppliers.
It does not go live until someone merges it. That is a person's decision, not something that happens on its own.