AI cost estimator

Your AI bill, before you get it.

CansOut plan prices cover the software. The AI model, phone minutes and text messages your agent uses are billed at the providers' own published rates — no markup. Here's what that costs for every step of a rental, on every model, with your numbers.

AI model

Rentals per month

Booked by the AI on the phone

Booked by the AI in web chat

The rest are booked by your staff or the booking widget — no AI cost.

Length of a booking call

Phone bookings paid by keypad on the call

The rest get a texted payment link, or pay a card on file.

AI conversations during the rental

Swaps, extensions, pickups, "where's my dumpster?" — per rental.

Text messages per rental

Confirmation, on-the-way, pickup, receipt link, review request.

Advanced: token assumptions

Cached prompt (tools + persona), tokens

Fresh input per model call, tokens

Output per model call, tokens

Model calls per minute of phone call

Model calls per chat booking

AI + calling + texting, per month

—

— per rental · — of that is the AI model

AI model usage—

Phone minutes, speech-to-text & voice—

Keypad card payments on calls—

Text messages (incl. carrier fees)—

Phone number + texting registration—

Estimates at providers' list prices checked 27 Sep 2026. Your actual bill is the metered usage. Stripe's card fee (2.9% + 30¢) is separate and charged by Stripe at cost.

One rental, start to finish

Where the AI money actually goes.

From the first call to the can getting cleaned and back in the yard. Most of a rental uses no AI at all — dispatch, routing, scale tickets and yard work run on ordinary software.

Step	What happens	Runs on	Cost per rental
Total per rental			—

Model by model

Same rental. Every model.

What one phone booking call and one full rental cost on each model, using the assumptions above. Phone, speech and texting costs are the same whichever model you pick.

Model	Status	Input / output per 1M tokens	AI per booking call	All-in per rental	Per month

Model prices from each provider's pricing page, checked 27 Sep 2026; promotional prices are marked and may rise. Phone: Twilio inbound local + media stream + recording; speech: Deepgram Nova; voice: ElevenLabs. "Supported today" means CansOut runs on it now. Other providers are listed for comparison only.

Straight answers

How AI billing works.

Why isn't AI included in the plan price?

Because it scales with your call volume, and bundling it means either capping you or padding the price. Other vendors cap minutes and charge overage. We bill what you use at the providers' own rates, itemized, with no markup — and this page shows you what that will be before you start.

Which model does CansOut use?

Claude Haiku 4.5 by default: it's fast enough for a live phone call, inexpensive, and it's the model our guardrails are tested against. Other Claude models can be used for more complex conversations.

Can I bring my own OpenAI, Claude or other API key?

Not at the moment. AI runs through CansOut's provider account, and you pay the provider's published rate for what you use, itemized, with no markup.

What isn't AI?

Dispatch and route optimization, demand forecasting, scale-ticket OCR, QA call scoring, review requests and invoicing all run on ordinary software. They're included in your plan and cost nothing extra to run.

What's the Stripe fee?

Card payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe's standard rate (2.9% + 30¢ for US cards). CansOut adds nothing on top.

No surprises

Software at a flat price. AI at cost.

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