PricingHow much does an AI receptionist cost?
8 minute read
Updated
A receptionist built around your business is a four to five figure build with a monthly amount on top, and the monthly moves with how much time it spends on the phone. That last part is what nobody explains, and it is what actually decides your bill.
Voice is priced differently from everything else in AI. A typed conversation costs almost nothing. A phone call costs real money every minute it runs, because speech has to be turned into text, answered, and turned back into speech while the caller waits.
So the honest way to price this is to work out your minutes first. Below is what the market publishes, and how to turn your own call volume into a number you can actually compare.
Work out your minutes before you look at any price
Take the calls you get in a normal week, and the calls you miss. Multiply by the length of a typical call, which for most small businesses is two to four minutes.
A trades business missing fifteen calls a week at three minutes each is about 180 minutes a month. That is a small amount of call time, and against a single recovered job it is not a number worth agonising over.
A clinic taking 400 calls a month at four minutes is 1,600 minutes, and the same arithmetic gives a very different answer. Same product, same pricing page, ten times the bill. This is why nobody can quote you from a website.
How it compares with a human answering service
Human answering services usually charge a monthly plan with a minute allowance, then bill overage on top, and the per minute rate is far higher than any AI service because a person has to be sitting there.
At low volume the two are closer than people expect, and the human service brings judgment an AI does not have. At higher volume the gap opens quickly, because the AI rate per minute is a fraction of the human one and it does not queue when three calls land together.
The crossover is usually somewhere in the low hundreds of minutes a month. Below it, and especially if your callers are often distressed, buy the human service. Above it the arithmetic stops being close.
What the monthly fee actually buys
The monthly is not the call time. It is the number the phone rings on, the connection to your calendar and your CRM, the place recordings and transcripts live, and the work of keeping the thing answering correctly.
That last part is why a built system costs more than a self serve tool, and why it is worth it for some businesses. A self serve tool answers from a script you write. A built one checks your real availability, holds the slot, writes the appointment back, and knows which calls must reach a human immediately.
- Ask whether the monthly includes any minutes, and what the rate is once they run out.
- Ask what happens when two calls arrive at once, because that is the whole point of buying this.
- Ask how a call reaches a human, how fast, and what the caller hears while it happens.
- Ask whether recordings and transcripts are included or extra, and how long they are kept.
When it pays for itself, and when it does not
This is the easiest thing in AI to justify, because the sum is short. Take the value of one average job or appointment. Divide the monthly cost by it. That is how many recovered calls a month you need before it is free.
For a trades business or a clinic that number is usually one. For a business where the average sale is small and most calls are existing customers asking a question, it can be twenty, and then the honest answer is that a chatbot on your website would serve you better for less.
If you miss almost no calls today, do not buy this. It earns its money on the calls nobody is answering.
A receptionist built around your business
What it costs to have one designed, connected to your calendar and CRM, and kept answering correctly. Reported ranges for small and mid-sized businesses.
| Scope | Typical build | Typical monthly |
|---|---|---|
| One number, straightforward call handling, booking into one calendar | 3,000 to 8,000 dollars | 500 to 1,200 dollars |
| Several call types, CRM writeback, rules for what reaches a human | 8,000 to 15,000 dollars | 1,200 to 2,500 dollars |
| Multiple locations or languages, with heavier compliance | 20,000 dollars and up | 2,500 dollars and up |
Checked . Prices move, so verify before you rely on them.
How we handle it
We size the included minutes on your call using your real volume rather than an average, and anything above that is quoted before it is incurred rather than appearing on an invoice.
If your callers are mostly distressed, or you miss almost nothing today, we will tell you on the call that this is not your best purchase.
Still not sure which applies to you?
Fifteen minutes on a call is usually enough to settle it, and we will tell you if the answer is something we do not sell.
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