Moneypenny (formerly VoiceNation) vs Ruby vs Abby Connect: what each live answering service charges per minute and per call

All three publish their rates, which already puts them ahead of most of the category, and at the entry tier two of them are priced identically. Moneypenny and Abby Connect both start at $165 for 50 minutes. Ruby starts at $250 for the same 50 minutes. The plans diverge sharply as volume rises: at 200 minutes a month Moneypenny is $422, Abby Connect is $599 and Ruby is $720, a spread of $298 for what is broadly the same service. Here is every published tier, the effective per-minute rate at each, and the cases where the most expensive option is still the right buy.

One thing to clear up first, because it sends a lot of people in circles. VoiceNation no longer exists as a separate brand. Moneypenny acquired VoiceNation and Ninja Number in March 2020, and has since completed the transition, so voicenation.com now redirects to Moneypenny and existing VoiceNation accounts sit with Moneypenny. If you are comparing quotes you collected a while ago, the VoiceNation one is a Moneypenny quote now.

Moneypenny vs Ruby vs Abby Connect: published pricing

Every figure below comes from each provider's own pricing page, checked between August 11 and August 23 2026. None of it is estimated, and where a provider does not publish something the table says so rather than guessing.

Read down the per-minute column rather than across the price column, because that is where the real difference lives. Moneypenny's rate improves steadily as you buy more, from $3.30 to $1.97 a minute, which is normal volume pricing. Ruby's barely improves at all: $5.00 at the bottom, $3.45 at 500 minutes. You are paying roughly 75 percent more than Moneypenny for the same 500 minutes.

Abby Connect sits between them with one wrinkle worth knowing. Abby counts a human minute as one Abby Minute and an AI minute as half of one, so a plan that mixes AI handling with human handling stretches further than the headline number suggests. Whether that helps you depends entirely on how much of your volume the AI layer actually handles, which is not something you can know before you start.

What does one call actually cost on each?

Minutes are the wrong unit for a purchasing decision, because you do not buy minutes, you take calls. A message-taking call runs about two minutes. A real intake call, where somebody captures a name, a number, a service address, the reason for the call and a booked time, runs three to five.

Two hundred minutes sounds generous until you convert it. It is about 66 three minute calls, which is roughly three calls a business day. Most businesses that are shopping for an answering service at all are taking more than three calls a day, so the honest planning assumption is that you will be in overage, and the overage rate matters more than the plan price.

That is where Ruby's missing overage rate becomes a real problem rather than a paperwork detail. Moneypenny publishes $2.28 a minute at the bottom tier falling to $1.67 at the top. Abby bills overage at your plan's own rate, which you can work out from the table. Ruby publishes nothing, so you are agreeing to a price you have not seen for what is likely to be a meaningful share of your usage. Ask for it in writing before signing, and get it as a number rather than a description.

Which one should I pick?

On price alone Moneypenny wins at every published tier, and it is not close at the top end. If the decision is purely about cost per minute for human answering, that is the answer and you can stop reading.

Ruby earns its premium in one specific way, and it is worth being fair about it: it is the most established brand in the category with the deepest bench of trained receptionists, and businesses that buy it are usually buying consistency of tone rather than minutes. For a law firm where the first thirty seconds of a call decides whether a distressed caller stays on the line, paying $10.80 instead of $6.33 for that call is defensible. For a plumbing company taking booking requests, it is not.

Abby Connect's case is the AI blend. If a large share of your calls are routine and the AI layer handles them at half a minute each, the effective rate drops below the table above. If your calls are mostly non-routine, it does not, and you are paying more than Moneypenny for human handling. Ask what proportion of calls their AI layer handled for businesses like yours before you weight this heavily.

One caution that applies to all three. Tier names in this category are not stable. Ruby in particular has renamed and repackaged its plans more than once, so quote the included minutes and the price rather than the plan name when you are comparing offers or checking a renewal.

What none of these three fix

All three are metered human services, and that shapes the bill in ways that have nothing to do with which one you pick.

The meter runs on calls you would not choose to pay for. A wrong number, a supplier confirming a delivery, an aggressive sales call about extended warranties: all billable minutes. Hold time is usually billable too, and most services round up to the whole minute, which turns a 65 second message into two minutes. None of that is dishonest, it is just how metered human labor is sold, and it means the effective rate you pay is always somewhat worse than the rate card.

The other structural limit is capacity. A bureau runs a shared operator pool, so when something makes everyone in your area call at once, a cold snap for a heating company, a storm for a roofer, a system outage for an IT provider, your spike arrives at the same moment as every other client's spike. Callers queue. Software does not have this problem, because forty simultaneous calls are forty simultaneous conversations.

Both of those are the argument for putting routine volume on a flat plan and keeping human answering for the calls that genuinely need it. At 200 three minute calls a month, human answering at these rates costs $1,266 to $2,160 while a flat AI plan covering that volume is $199. We set out the full category, including where each competitor beats us, on best answering service, and the human-only rate cards on live answering service.

How do I switch without a gap in coverage?

Forwarding is instant and porting is not, and confusing the two is what creates gaps. Conditional call forwarding from your existing carrier takes effect as soon as you set it, so you can run a new provider in parallel for a week before committing anything. Porting the number outright is governed by FCC rules: under 47 CFR 52.35(a) a simple port must complete within one business day once an accurate service request is submitted, and the request has to arrive between 8am and 1pm local time to count for that day.

Run the overlap deliberately. Keep the outgoing service live for a full billing cycle, forward a share of calls to the new one, and read the written summaries from both. What you are checking is not whether the greeting is correct, it is whether the information you actually need to act on the call arrived. The sequence that avoids the common mistakes is on switching answering services.

While you are auditing where inbound leads leak, the phone is rarely the only place it happens. If people are reaching your site and leaving before they ever dial, a conversion audit of the landing page copy and calls to action usually pays back faster than buying more traffic, and it costs nothing to find out which of the two problems you actually have.

Frequently asked questions

Is VoiceNation the same company as Moneypenny?

Yes. Moneypenny acquired VoiceNation in March 2020 and has since fully retired the VoiceNation brand, so voicenation.com redirects to Moneypenny and accounts have moved across. If you are comparing an older VoiceNation quote against a current one, you are comparing the same provider under two names. The current published US rate card is $165 for 50 minutes, $265 for 100, $422 for 200 and $985 for 500.

Which is cheaper, Moneypenny or Ruby?

Moneypenny, at every published tier. At 50 minutes it is $165 against Ruby's $250. At 200 minutes it is $422 against $720. At 500 minutes it is $985 against $1,725, so Ruby costs about 75 percent more for the same allowance. Ruby also does not publish an overage rate, while Moneypenny publishes $2.28 a minute falling to $1.67 at higher tiers.

Does Abby Connect charge a setup fee?

No. Abby Connect's published pricing states explicitly that there is no setup fee, which is a change from what the company charged previously and worth knowing if you are working from an older comparison. Its plans are $165 for 50 minutes, $329 for 100, $599 for 200 and $1,380 for 500, with overage billed at your plan's own Abby Minute rate.

How many calls do 200 minutes cover?

About 66 calls if your average call runs three minutes, which is roughly three calls a business day. Message-taking calls of two minutes stretch it to about 100. Full intake calls of five minutes cut it to 40. Before comparing plans, time ten of your own recent calls, because call length changes the ranking of these providers more than the headline price does.

Do any of them charge extra for appointment booking?

None of these three publishes a separate per-booking charge, which distinguishes them from Smith.ai, where appointment booking is a published $1.50 per booking add-on that adds $300 to a bill at 200 bookings a month. Confirm the scope in writing anyway, because booking into your specific calendar system is the feature most often quoted as included and delivered as a message instead.

Is an AI answering service cheaper than these?

By roughly a factor of ten at normal volumes. Two hundred three minute calls a month costs $1,266 on Moneypenny's 200 minute tier plus overage, and considerably more on Ruby, against $199 on a flat AI plan sized for that volume. The trade is judgment rather than accuracy: a person reads a distressed or ambiguous caller better than software does, so the arrangement most businesses should want is AI handling routine volume with a written rule that escalates the rest to a human.