AI receptionist pricing: AI receptionist cost per month, per call and per minute

An AI receptionist costs between $29 and $399 a month at the entry tier in 2026, and roughly $0.59 to $1.49 per three minute call once you divide the price by the minutes or conversations included. Live human answering services covering the same job run $5.25 to $15.00 per call. The gap between the two is the whole commercial case for the category.

The reason the monthly numbers mislead is that they are not the same unit. Vendors meter in at least four different ways. Some bill per minute of talk time (Rosie, Dialzara, AnswerConnect, Ruby). Some bill per conversation or per call regardless of length (Jobber, Smith.ai). Goodcall bills per unique caller, so a customer who calls three times in a month counts once. And a few bill flat per location or per seat with no usage meter at all (Slang.ai, PhoneAgent.ai). Two services can quote you $99 and differ by 5x in what you actually pay in March.

The practical method is short. Estimate your monthly call count and your average call length, honestly, from your existing phone records rather than from memory. Multiply to get minutes. Then price each candidate at that exact volume, including overage, and ignore the plan names entirely. Most of the time the ranking you get is not the ranking the pricing pages imply. Our own plans and what each includes are on the PhoneAgent.ai pricing page, and the vendor by vendor writeups sit under best AI receptionist.

One hundred and fifty calls a month at a three minute average, so 450 minutes, is a realistic load for a small practice or a two truck home services business. Priced at that volume rather than at the entry tier, the ordering changes sharply. Every figure below is the entry plan plus published overage, or the cheapest published plan that covers the volume outright.

PhoneAgent.ai is $89, because 150 calls is what the Starter plan includes and there is no minute meter behind it. Dialzara lands at $199 on the plan that covers 500 minutes. My AI Front Desk works out to about $161.50, being $99 for 200 minutes plus 250 minutes of overage at $0.25. Jobber Receptionist reaches about $123.80, being $29 for 30 conversations plus 120 more at $0.79, though it is bundled at no extra cost on Jobber's top plan. AnswerConnect comes to roughly $667.50 on its $575 plan for 400 minutes plus 50 minutes at $1.85. PATLive is about $1,170 at $2.60 a minute. Smith.ai is roughly $1,440, being $810 for 90 calls plus 60 more at $10.50. Ruby needs its $1,725 block for 500 minutes.

So the same month of work is billed anywhere from $89 to $1,725. Note also what happens to the cheap tiers: the two lowest headline prices in the whole category, both $29, do not stay lowest at real volume. That is the single most useful thing to know before you sign anything, and it is why the entry price is the wrong number to shop on.

A per-minute meter prices your calls by how long they take, which sounds fair and creates an awkward incentive. The calls you most want handled properly are the long ones: the anxious patient at 9pm, the homeowner describing a leak, the prospect who wants to understand what you do before booking. Those are the expensive calls on a meter, and the cheap ones are the wrong numbers.

A meter also makes your phone bill a function of your best months. A busy March costs more than a slow February, which is exactly backwards from how most small businesses would like their fixed costs to behave, and it makes forecasting harder than it needs to be. Flat pricing trades away the upside of a quiet month in exchange for a number you can put in a budget.

The honest counterpoint: below a certain volume a meter genuinely is cheaper. Dialzara at $29 for 60 minutes beats our flat $89 until you cross about 185 minutes a month, which is roughly 62 calls at three minutes. If your phone rings 30 times a month, buy the meter. The flat model starts winning at the volume where a receptionist would actually be missing calls, which is the volume at which most businesses start shopping in the first place. There is more on this in virtual receptionist pricing compared and in the best AI answering service roundup.

Four names in the table quote instead of publishing, and it is worth knowing which before you spend a week in demos.

Nexa publishes no price at all. Its three tiers are named for their included voice minutes (Nexa 100, Nexa 300, Nexa 500) with no monthly fee, no setup fee and no overage rate shown; the page says extra minutes bill at "your base rate", which is set in your quote. Numa sells on annual contracts and quotes. Nextiva lists its XBert AI receptionist as an add-on on its own pricing page with the price field simply left blank. Podium sells AI as an add-on layered on a platform subscription that itself starts in the hundreds.

None of that is disqualifying, and quote-only pricing is normal at the enterprise end. It does have one practical consequence: you cannot compare those four against anything in this table without booking a call, and the quote you get is usually shaped by the volume you disclose on that call. If you want a like for like comparison, ask specifically for the per-minute or per-call rate and the included allowance rather than the monthly total, then run it through the same division everything else here went through. Detailed breakdowns live on the Nexa alternative, Numa alternative and Podium alternative pages.

On direct cost, yes, and by a wide margin. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual wage for receptionists at $37,230 in May 2024, which is roughly $3,100 a month in wages alone before payroll taxes, benefits, equipment or paid time off. An AI receptionist at $89 to $399 a month is one to twelve percent of that.

The comparison is not clean, though, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favors. A human receptionist greets people at the door, handles the walk-in who is upset, chases the vendor who did not deliver, and absorbs the twenty small tasks that never appear in a job description. Software does none of that. What it does do is answer every call, including the fourth simultaneous one and the one at 2am, which a single person cannot.

The framing that actually holds up for most buyers is coverage rather than replacement. One receptionist covers roughly forty hours of a 168 hour week and takes one call at a time. The realistic question is what happens to the other 128 hours and to the calls that arrive while the first one is still going. For most small businesses that is where the missed revenue sits, and it is a cheaper problem to solve than a salary. Sector specific versions of this math are on answering service for small business and AI receptionist for small business.