Air AI alternatives

Many buyers searching for Air AI — the company that marketed a "conversational AI" cold-calling product, an "Air AI Access Card" service bundle, and reseller licenses — are looking for a service that is no longer offered at its own domain. In August 2025, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona against Air AI Technologies, Inc., five related companies, and their owners, alleging false or unsubstantiated earnings claims, refund guarantees that were rarely honored, and violations of the Telemarketing Sales Rule and the Business Opportunity Rule (FTC press release, 2025-08-25, accessed 2026-08-19). On March 24, 2026, the FTC announced a settlement: a stipulated order with an $18 million monetary judgment — all but $50,000 suspended based on the defendants' stated inability to pay — and a permanent ban on marketing or selling any business opportunity (FTC press release, 2026-03-24 and the stipulated order, accessed 2026-08-19). The defendants neither admitted nor denied the allegations, and the court entered the amended stipulated order on March 31, 2026 (case docket, accessed 2026-08-19).

As of August 19, 2026, the air.ai domain serves an unrelated company: the defense-software firm formerly named Govini, rebranded "Air," marketing an "Enterprise Readiness" platform (air.ai, accessed 2026-08-19). The AI phone-calling product is no longer sold at that address, so the practical question is what to use instead. The platforms below publish their pricing and documentation publicly; each fact here carries its source and access date.

Top alternatives

1. ThunderPhone (this site)

ThunderPhone is listed first transparently because this is ThunderPhone's site; the facts below are the same published facts the rest of this page holds other vendors to.

• Pay as you go with no subscription or seat fee: Spark 2¢/minute, Bolt 5¢/minute, Storm 9¢/minute, all-in engine rates. Premium voice or language paths add up to 3¢/minute, and optional add-ons carry published surcharges; the builder shows the current all-in rate before you commit.
• 47 languages and 123 voices, with automatic mid-call language switching, plus SIP support for bringing your own numbers and warm or cold transfer.
• A built-in testing suite: simulations, reusable graded scenarios, regression suites with pass-rate gates, CI execution, and live-traffic A/B experiments. Simulations are billable real calls, and the interface shows the charge before a run. Public compliance posture: GDPR and HIPAA compliant, with customers responsible for configuring their own workflows, data handling, recordings, and notices for their obligations.

Fits teams that want published per-minute arithmetic they can verify before signing anything, and a test-first path from prototype to production calls.

2. Retell AI

• Component-based pay as you go: voice infrastructure at $0.055/minute with an advertised all-in range of $0.07–$0.31/minute depending on the language model and add-ons; standard telephony $0.015/minute and phone numbers $2/month (Retell pricing, accessed 2026-08-18).
• States SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, HIPAA compliance for PHI after a signed BAA, and GDPR compliance via DPA and standard contractual clauses; it also notes it does not currently operate services within the European Union (Retell compliance docs, accessed 2026-08-18).
• Documents simulation testing and SIP trunking for connecting existing telephony (Retell simulation-testing docs and homepage, accessed 2026-08-18).

Fits teams that want to select and price model, voice, and quality components individually, or whose procurement requires a published SOC 2 posture.

3. Vapi

• Usage-based platform fee of $0.05/minute for call hosting, with speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech billed at provider cost on top — or $0 for those components if you bring your own API keys (Vapi pricing, accessed 2026-08-18). The $0.05 figure is not a complete call price.
• Publishes paid compliance add-ons: HIPAA compliance at $2,000/month and zero data retention at $1,000/month; the homepage states SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI compliance (Vapi pricing and homepage, accessed 2026-08-18).
• Documents bring-your-own SIP trunks (including generic "any SIP provider" setup), Twilio number import (phone-calling docs, accessed 2026-08-18), and test suites in which an AI tester calls your agent on a real phone call and an LLM grades the transcript (Vapi SIP docs and test-suite docs, accessed 2026-08-18).

Fits developer teams that want maximum component control, hold their own model-provider keys, and will assemble the total per-minute cost themselves.

4. Bland AI

• All-inclusive per-minute pricing by tier: Start $0.14/minute talk time with no platform fee, Build $0.12 with a $299/month fee, Scale $0.11 with a $499/month fee, plus per-minute transfer fees ($0.05/$0.04/$0.03) (Bland pricing, accessed 2026-08-18). Tiers carry daily call and concurrency limits (Start: 100 calls/day, 10 concurrent).
• Advertises 40+ languages with real-time translation in 23 of them (Bland homepage, accessed 2026-08-18).
• Trust page details SOC 2 Type II and PCI DSS v4.0 audits by independent third parties, with HIPAA and GDPR self-attested (BAA and DPA available); EU data residency is listed as configurable, with data residency on the Enterprise plan. Self-hosted, customer-VPC, and on-premise deployment options are advertised (Bland trust page and homepage, accessed 2026-08-18).

Fits teams in regulated industries that want an enterprise-positioned vendor with self-hosting and VPC deployment options, and are comfortable with monthly platform fees at higher tiers.

At a glance

Sources and access dates as cited in each platform's section above; the table summarizes published claims and is not a ranking beyond the stated ordering.

How to evaluate a replacement

The FTC's allegations in the Air AI matter centered on claims buyers could not verify. Whatever platform you pick:

1. Price from published numbers. Compute your own workload (calls × minutes) from the vendor's public pricing page, including platform fees, telephony, transfer minutes, and add-ons. If the total cannot be computed from public numbers, treat that as a finding.
2. Get contract and refund terms in writing and read them against the pricing page before paying.
3. Check compliance documents, not badges. Ask which claims are third-party audited versus self-attested, and what you as the customer must configure.
4. Verify telephony portability — can you bring existing numbers via SIP, and can you take them with you if you leave?
5. Test before production. Prefer platforms with simulation or test-call tooling, and confirm whether test calls are billed.
6. Be wary of earnings or resale pitches. A phone-agent platform sells software by the minute; projected income from reselling it is a different product.

FAQs

Is Air AI still operating? The AI phone-calling product is no longer offered at air.ai; as of August 19, 2026 that domain serves an unrelated defense-software company (formerly Govini, rebranded "Air"). Whether the corporate entity still exists in some form is not established from the public sources reviewed — what is established is the FTC settlement described above and the domain's change of use.

What did the FTC settlement actually require? An $18 million monetary judgment (suspended above $50,000 based on stated inability to pay), a permanent ban on creating, marketing, or selling any business opportunity, and prohibitions on misrepresentations and unsubstantiated earnings claims (stipulated order, accessed 2026-08-19). It is a business-opportunity ban, not a ban from the software industry.

Did the FTC find that Air AI's technology was fake? No such finding appears in the reviewed documents. The complaint's allegations concerned earnings claims, refund guarantees, and business-opportunity disclosures, and the defendants neither admitted nor denied the allegations in settling.

I bought an Air AI license or Access Card. What now? The FTC directs consumers to report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and the order's $50,000 payment is designated for consumer relief administered by the Commission. This page cannot advise on individual recovery; the FTC's case page is the primary reference (FTC case page, accessed 2026-08-19).

Can these alternatives make outbound calls like Air AI advertised? Treat outbound calling as something you do to your own customers and consented leads — cold outreach at the scale Air AI advertised is exactly where U.S. telemarketing rules (the Telemarketing Sales Rule and TCPA) apply hardest, whichever platform dials. ThunderPhone supports outbound calling on verified imported numbers; confirm each other vendor's current outbound and campaign support in its own docs rather than assuming it. Obtaining prior consent, honoring do-not-call lists, and making required disclosures remain your responsibility.

Which alternative is cheapest? It depends on configuration. Illustrative arithmetic at 10,000 connected minutes/month: ThunderPhone computes to $200 (Spark), $500 (Bolt), or $900 (Storm); Retell's advertised all-in range implies $700–$3,100; Vapi's total is provider pass-through costs on top of $500 in hosting; Bland's Start tier computes to $1,400 in talk time. Rerun the numbers with your own workload and each vendor's current pages.

Sources and freshness

Air AI facts on this page were checked against ftc.gov press releases, the filed stipulated order, the court docket, and a direct fetch of air.ai on August 19, 2026; other vendors' claims were checked against the pages linked beside them. ThunderPhone pricing and product details reflect its published pricing and documentation as of August 19, 2026. Vendors change pricing often, so confirm against the live vendor pages before relying on them.