What does podcast voicemail really cost?
Free tiers in this category come with caps that quietly break once real messages start arriving. Pick your volume and see what a year actually costs on each tool.
| Tool | Free tier at your volume | Yearly cost | Transcripts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Memo.fm | Only 10 messages stored | $49 | No |
| Call.Show | No free tier | $60 | Yes, plus AI title & summary |
| SpeakPipe | 100MB cap fills in ~8 months | $144-$432 | Not advertised |
| Soundbite | Messages capped at 30s | $150 | Paid plans only |
| telbee | Works: 60 recording minutes per month, 1 user | $162-$576 | Yes |
| Whatayarn | Works: 25 messages total, 60 seconds each | $180 | No |
| Voicecast | No free tier | $180 | Yes |
| Podline | 100MB cap fills in ~8 months | $240-$600 | Yes, plus AI title & summary |
Prices and caps verified 2026-08-18on each vendor’s site. Storage math assumes roughly 0.5MB per recorded minute.
The fine print, from their own pricing pages
- No free tier, on purpose: one price, everything included
- Five team seats included, never billed per seat
- Support is answered by the maker, not a ticket queue
- Email notifications with audio attachments are a paid feature
- Multiple voicemail pages require the $432/yr Premium tier
- Webhooks and integrations are paid-plan features
- The 25 free messages are a lifetime total, not monthly
- Removing Soundbite branding is a Premium feature
- Even Premium caps stored messages at 1,000
- Free plan keeps your messages for 1 month, then they're gone
- Paid "unlimited" carries a 1,000-minutes-per-month fair-use cap
- Extra team seats run $8-$15 per seat per month
- The 10 free messages are a total, not monthly
Every line above was read on the vendor’s own pricing or help pages on 2026-08-18. Nothing is inferred.
Questions
Where do these prices come from?+
Each vendor's own pricing page, checked by hand. The verification date is shown under the table, and anything a vendor doesn't publish is marked as such rather than guessed.
Why do free tiers fail at higher volumes?+
Caps. SpeakPipe's free plan stops at 90-second messages and 100MB of storage, Memo.fm keeps your first 10 messages, Soundbite stores 10 messages at 30 seconds each, and telbee's free plan includes 60 recording minutes a month. A show that asks for voicemails every episode outgrows all of these quickly.
What does Call.Show cost at any volume?+
$60 per year, flat. There are no message caps, storage caps, or per-minute fees, so the answer doesn't change with volume, and every message includes an AI transcript, title, and summary.
What doesn't a pricing table capture?+
Who answers when something breaks. Call.Show is built and supported by one person, Jeff Sarris; the voicemail you leave at call.show/demo goes to him and he replies by email. Also not in the table: listener consent is collected before every message sends, and team access never costs extra per seat.
Want the full feature-by-feature breakdowns? See every comparison.