ElevenLabs Agents
platform voice-ai telephony hubspot
ElevenLabs’ conversational-agent platform — the natural successor to GoodCall / similar reverse-engineered receptionist services. Real WebSocket + SDK + webhook surface, BYO telephony via Twilio or SIP, native HubSpot integration. Where the ai-receptionist-to-hubspot-bridge pattern can be retired.
Two products, one stack
| Product | Audience | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| ElevenAgents (developer platform) | Engineers building voice apps | Custom agent flows, tool calls, RAG over your docs, programmable voice + chat |
| Reception by ElevenAgents | SMB owners | Turnkey AI receptionist with dedicated US number. Currently free Alpha, paid tier hinted ~$22/mo |
Both are built on the same underlying agent engine; “Reception” is just a packaged config for inbound-call answering with scheduling, FAQ handling, and basic CRM hooks pre-wired.
Why it kills the polling pattern
Compared to ai-receptionist-to-hubspot-bridge’s polling-based GoodCall flow:
| Polling-based bridge | ElevenAgents |
|---|---|
| Reverse-engineered cookie/JWT, ~60d rotation | Standard API keys |
| No webhooks → 5-minute cron + lookback overlap | Post-call webhooks → push, not pull |
| Custom Bun + Hono service on Railway | Just a webhook receiver (~50 LOC) or no service at all if using native HubSpot integration |
| Phone format dedup + 10-variant search | Tool calls fire your endpoints with structured data inline |
| Pagination + 100 calls/run cap | Real-time, no polling cap |
| Tier-restricted scope workaround required (legacy v1 engagements API) | HubSpot integration is native; field mapping is config |
If you’re authoring a new integration and have a choice, start here. The reverse-engineered pattern is for when you’re stuck with a platform that won’t expose webhooks.
Pricing
Per-minute pricing on every paid tier; included minutes scale with the plan:
| Plan | $/mo | Minutes included | Concurrent calls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 15 | 4 |
| Starter | $6 | 75 | 6 |
| Creator | $22 | 275 | 10 |
| Pro | $99 | 1,238 | 20 |
| Scale | $299 | 3,738 | 30 |
| Business | $990 | 12,375 | 40 |
Overage = 0.16/min. LLM tokens billed separately — bring your own OpenAI/Anthropic key, or use ElevenLabs-managed.
For SMB volume — say a master electrician fielding 200 calls/month at ~3 min each = 600 min — that’s 54/mo** plus LLM. Well under the Pro tier; Starter or Creator + small overage is the sweet spot.
Telephony — three paths to a phone number
1. Twilio native (simplest)
Buy a number in Twilio (~2 to validate end-to-end.
2. SIP trunk (port your existing number)
Compatible with Twilio Elastic SIP, Telnyx, Vonage, RingCentral, Plivo, Bandwidth, Sinch, Infobip, Exotel — and most standard SIP providers. Use this when you want to keep an existing business line without porting it to Twilio. Audio is G.711 (8kHz) or G.722 (16kHz). TLS transport + SRTP supported and recommended for prod.
3. Reception by ElevenAgents (turnkey)
Skip Twilio entirely. ElevenLabs assigns a dedicated US number on signup. Less control (no custom telephony events, no SIP), but zero infra. Currently US-only.
Effective per-call cost
Stacked all-in for a typical inbound call:
| Layer | Cost |
|---|---|
| ElevenLabs agent | $0.08/min |
| Twilio number rental | $1.15/mo flat |
| Twilio inbound voice | ~$0.0085/min (US local) |
| LLM tokens | ~$0.001–0.005/min depending on model |
**Effective: ~1.15/mo per number.
Integration surface
Documented
- Documented platform with developer SDKs (JavaScript, React, React Native, Python, iOS/Swift, Kotlin, Flutter)
- WebSocket API + WebRTC connection types (WebRTC = lower latency, recommended for prod)
- Embeddable widget (
<elevenlabs-convai>) for in-page web/voice - Mid-conversation tool calls (agent fires your endpoints with structured args; result returns to the conversation)
- Post-call webhooks (push the conversation_id, transcript, recording URL, collected variables when a call ends)
- Conversation list/export API:
GET /v1/convai/conversations,GET /v1/convai/conversations/{id} - Server-side conversation tokens for low-latency WebRTC (no client-side API key exposure)
Native CRM/automation integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Stripe, Cal.com, n8n. For a HubSpot-centric stack, the agent can be configured to upsert contact + log Call activity natively — no custom service needed for the standard flow.
Compliance
ISO 27001 + ISO 42001 certified. No HIPAA support yet — flag if any client work is medical-adjacent.
Migration path from a polling-based bridge
If you currently run ai-receptionist-to-hubspot-bridge against an upstream like GoodCall, the migration is:
- Spin up an ElevenAgents account and configure the agent with your existing FAQ + form questions as data-collection variables.
- Wire telephony. Either point a new Twilio number at the agent (cleanest) or repoint an existing SIP trunk.
- Configure the post-call webhook to fire at your endpoint. Payload includes
conversation_id,transcript,collected_variables,recording_url. - Replace the polling Bun service with a thin webhook receiver (Hono on Railway, ~50 LOC) that maps the structured payload to your existing HubSpot custom properties (preserves chronological
<platform>_call_loghistory). OR drop the receiver entirely and use the native HubSpot integration if its field mapping is sufficient. - Cut over by forwarding the original business line to the new ElevenLabs number.
End state: no JWT rotation, no Cloudflare 429s, no 60-day token rotations, no scope workarounds, fewer moving parts.
When ElevenAgents is the wrong choice
- HIPAA-required workloads — not yet certified.
- Non-US numbers, day one — Reception is US-only at present, though the dev platform supports BYO international SIP. Verify country coverage before quoting.
- Hyper-domain-specific voice quality requirements — some industries (medical dictation, legal stenography) need specialty providers; ElevenLabs is general-purpose conversational.
Related
- ai-receptionist-to-hubspot-bridge — the polling-based predecessor pattern; use that only when a webhook-based platform isn’t an option
- service-fit-classification — framework for deciding when a client’s needs justify the migration cost