Smith.ai vs My AI Front Desk: Cost Per Call

Smith.ai and My AI Front Desk both answer your business phone, and that is roughly where the similarity ends. Smith.ai puts trained human receptionists on the call and charges $300 a month for 30 calls, which is $10.00 each before add-ons. My AI Front Desk answers with software and charges $99 a month for 200 voice minutes, which is about $1.49 per three minute call, then $0.25 a minute after that. At 100 calls a month the realistic bills are roughly $1,005 and $124. That is an eight-fold gap, and it is not a value judgment: you are choosing between a person and a program, and the right answer depends entirely on how much judgment your calls require.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Both companies change their rates and their plan structures, so confirm at the source before you sign anything.

These two names end up on the same shortlist more often than they should, because they sit at opposite ends of the category. One is the premium human service that law firms buy. The other is the budget software platform that solo operators and agencies buy. Comparing them properly means separating the price difference from the product difference, because most of the price difference is the product difference.

How much does Smith.ai cost per month?

Smith.ai bills per call. The published plans are $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 calls and $2,100 for 300 calls, with an enterprise tier by quote. Overage is published, which is a genuine point in its favor: $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per extra call as you move up the tiers. Divide each plan by its allowance and the base rate is $10.00, $9.00 and $7.00 a call.

The part that catches people out is the add-on menu. Things that other services fold into the base price are billed per event here. Appointment booking is $1.50 per booking. Conflict checks are $0.50. Call recording with transcription is $0.25. A dedicated Spanish line is $1.00 per call. Complex call routing is $1.50, extended intake is $1.50, and custom extended intake adds $0.25 per question. There are per-month add-ons too, including $15.00 for additional transfer destinations and $10.00 for outbound business caller ID.

None of those are large in isolation. Together, on a firm that books most of its callers and runs a Spanish line, they add two to three dollars to every call. So the honest number to budget at Smith.ai is $7.00 to $11.50 for the call itself, plus your add-on profile. If you book appointments on most calls, model $8.50 to $13.00 and you will not be surprised.

How much does My AI Front Desk cost?

My AI Front Desk bills voice minutes out of a credit pool. The main plan is $99 a month, or $79 on annual billing, and it includes 200 voice minutes along with 100 chatbot conversations, 400 SMS, 500 email drafts and 20 outbound calls a day. Voice minutes are metered at 25 credits each, which works out to $0.25 a minute once you buy credits at the published $10 per 1,000. There is a 7 day free trial and no contract.

There is also a $20 plan, and it deserves a warning rather than a recommendation. It includes zero voice minutes. It buys chatbot conversations, SMS and email drafts, so if you are shopping specifically for something to answer your phone, the entry price on the pricing page is not a phone plan at all. Every voice minute on it is metered from the first second. Read that tier carefully before you treat $20 as this vendor's starting price for phone answering.

At the $99 plan, 200 minutes is about 67 calls at a three minute average, so $1.49 a call. Past the allowance a three minute call costs $0.75. On annual billing the included minutes work out to $1.19 a call. There is also a partner and enterprise tier with custom pricing, API access and volume rates described as low as 7 credits a minute, which is aimed at agencies reselling the product rather than at a single business.

Smith.ai vs My AI Front Desk: which is cheaper?

Unlike a comparison between two services billed in the same unit, this one does not have an interesting crossover point. Software is cheaper at every volume, by roughly an order of magnitude, and no realistic call length changes that. What is worth modeling is the actual monthly bill at your own volume, including the add-ons and the overage.

The arithmetic is simple, but the conclusion people draw from it is often wrong. Smith.ai is not overpriced software. It is a human service, priced like a human service, and the comparison that matters for Smith.ai is against hiring somebody rather than against a program. A receptionist earning the US median wage of $37,230 a year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics figure for May 2024, costs about $3,100 a month before payroll taxes and covers 40 of the 168 hours in a week, one call at a time. Against that, $1,005 for round-the-clock coverage is a reasonable trade.

Which one should you actually choose?

Pick the human service when the first sixty seconds of a call need judgment. Personal injury intake, family law, anything where a distressed caller needs to feel heard, anything where a misread question costs you a client worth thousands. Software is bad at exactly this and honest vendors say so.

Pick software when your calls are routine and booking-shaped, which describes most of the phone traffic at a dental practice, a salon, a veterinary clinic, an HVAC company or a property manager. Hours, location, services, pricing, and moving a Thursday appointment to Friday. These are the calls that make up the bulk of the volume, and paying $10 each for a human to handle them is poor allocation.

The third option, and the one most people miss, is not choosing at all. Plenty of businesses forward only the calls that currently ring out to software, keep their existing front desk on the main line during business hours, and escalate the genuinely difficult calls to a person. That captures most of the missed revenue at a fraction of the cost of full human coverage.

What to check before you sign with either

Model the bill on your real numbers rather than the vendor's example. That means knowing your actual monthly call count and average call length, which you already have: it is on your phone bill. If yours only arrives as a PDF, it takes a couple of minutes to pull the call counts off your last three phone invoices into a spreadsheet and get a real average instead of a guess.

Then check four things. Get the overage rate in writing, since it is where both models get expensive. Confirm which calendar systems the product writes to and test a double booking, because a service that answers well but cannot see your schedule is an expensive voicemail. Ask what happens when the system cannot handle the call and make sure the fallback is a transfer or a text back rather than a dead end. And ask about AI disclosure and call recording consent, since several US states now require callers to be told they are speaking with an AI and recording rules differ between one-party and two-party consent states.

Our fuller writeups of both services are on the Smith.ai alternative and My AI Front Desk alternative pages, and every published price in the category is normalized into a single table on AI receptionist pricing. If you have decided software is the right shape and want to see what one actually does on a call, start with AI phone receptionist.

Frequently asked questions

Is Smith.ai AI or human?

Smith.ai is primarily a human virtual receptionist service, and its per-call pricing reflects that. The company has added AI products alongside the human service, but the plans compared here, at $300 for 30 calls and up, buy trained human receptionists in North America. That is what the price difference against software is mostly paying for.

What is the difference between Smith.ai and My AI Front Desk?

Smith.ai answers with people and bills per call, at $7.00 to $11.50 each plus per-event add-ons like $1.50 for booking an appointment. My AI Front Desk answers with software and bills voice minutes from a credit pool, at $99 for 200 minutes then $0.25 a minute. The practical difference is judgment: humans read an unusual or emotional caller well, and software handles routine, repetitive, booking-shaped calls at roughly a tenth of the cost.

Does My AI Front Desk have a free trial?

Yes, the pricing page advertises a 7 day free trial with no contract. Note that the $20 entry plan includes zero voice minutes, so if you are evaluating it as a phone answering product specifically, make sure the trial you start is on a plan that actually includes voice, or every minute you test will meter from the credit pool.

Can either one book appointments into my calendar?

Both can, but they charge for it differently, and this is the single most common budgeting surprise in the category. My AI Front Desk includes booking in the plan. Smith.ai bills $1.50 per booking on top of the per-call rate, so a firm that books 60 of its 100 monthly callers adds $90 to the bill. Always confirm booking is included in the specific tier you are quoted rather than in the product generally.

Is there a cheaper alternative to both?

Flat-rate software is cheaper than either at any meaningful volume, because it removes the meter entirely. PhoneAgent.ai is $89, $199 or $399 a month for roughly 150, 500 and 1,500 calls, with appointment booking included on every tier and no per-minute charge behind it. That works out to about $0.59 per three minute call at the entry tier. The trade is the same one described above: software should escalate the calls that need a person, not attempt them.