Tavus 30-second minimum per conversation: what short calls cost

Tavus's pricing page, read 2026-10-08, says each conversation incurs a 30-second minimum charge. A 5-second call therefore counts as half a minute. On Starter overage at $0.37 a minute that is $0.185 a call, and on Growth overage at $0.32 it is $0.16. Inside the included minutes, it means a 100-minute Starter plan covers at most 200 very short conversations.

If your use is quick answers, kiosk-style prompts or one-line greetings, the billed unit is the conversation, not the second spoken.

The developer plans

The page lists Basic (free, 25 minutes), Starter ($59 a month, 100 minutes, $0.37 overage, 3 concurrent streams), Growth ($397, 1,250 minutes, $0.32 overage, 10 streams) and Enterprise (custom). Overage has no limit. The table applies the 30-second floor.

What this means for a short-call design

A support widget that answers in 8 seconds and ends is billed as 30. A flow that reuses one conversation for several questions pays the floor once. Design for fewer, longer conversations if you are on a minute budget, and check how your session handling ends calls, since a conversation that never closes keeps billing.

The Sume comparison for fixed lines

For a line that never changes, a rendered clip has no per-view meter. Sume's floor is 4 billable seconds: $0.736 on Standard, $0.98 on Plus, $2.20 on Max without a product image. A 5-second clip is $0.92 on Standard. That is more than one 30-second Tavus overage conversation, but it is paid once and played any number of times.

Break-even against Tavus Starter overage is 5 views of a 5-second Standard clip ($0.92 against 5 x $0.185 = $0.925). Beyond that, the clip is cheaper, if a fixed line is acceptable. Tavus also gives the viewer a real conversation, which a clip does not.