How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost in 2026? Real Pricing vs a Human

Subscription AI receptionists start at $29 a month, per-minute platforms run $0.07 to $0.35 a minute, and a custom build sits in between. Here is what each one actually buys you, and where a human still wins.

An AI receptionist costs $29 to $300 a month on a subscription, $0.07 to $0.35 a minute on a per-minute platform, or a one-off build plus roughly $0.10 to $0.25 a minute if you have one made for your business. A full-time human receptionist costs $42,000 to $61,000 a year in the US and £42,000 to £48,000 in the UK once you count everything beyond salary. Those are the headline numbers. The rest of this post explains what each price actually buys, because the cheapest option and the right option are rarely the same thing.

The five ways to get your phone answered, priced

Every figure here comes from public pricing pages as of September 2026. Vendors change plans often, so treat them as a snapshot and check the page before you sign anything.

What you're paying for when a machine answers a call

A voice agent call has four cost components stacked on top of each other. It helps to know them before you compare vendors, because it explains why the prices vary so much.

• Telephony. The carrier minutes. Twilio charges $0.0085 a minute for inbound calls to a US local number and $0.022 a minute for toll-free. UK numbers cost more per minute, but it's still pennies.
• Speech to text. Turning the caller's words into text while they're still speaking.
• The language model. The part that works out what the caller wants and decides what to say. Used raw, OpenAI's Realtime API works out at about $0.30 a minute. With prompt caching it drops a long way.
• Text to speech. The voice the caller hears.

Add those up and most production deployments land at $0.12 to $0.25 a minute all-in. Anyone quoting far below that is either subsidising you or cutting a corner you'll hear on the call.

Option 1: Subscription AI receptionists ($29 to $300 a month)

This is the off-the-shelf tier. Sign up, pick a voice, paste in your opening hours and FAQs, forward your number.

• Dialzara starts at $29 a month for 60 minutes. Call transfers, a basic receptionist job, need the $99 plan.
• Goodcall is $59 a month.
• My AI Front Desk is $65 a month, and its deeper integrations sit on the $124.99 plan.
• Smith.ai, which mixes software with human agents, starts at $292 a month.

The trade-off is depth. These products answer questions and take messages well. Most can push a booking into a calendar. Very few can look at your live inventory, quote a price that depends on what's actually available, and take a card payment on the call. If your business is "book me a slot and tell me the address", this tier is fine and it's cheap.

Watch the minute allowance. 60 minutes sounds like plenty until you realise a typical enquiry runs two to three minutes, so the $29 plan is about 25 calls a month.

Option 2: Per-minute voice AI platforms ($0.07 to $0.35 a minute)

Retell, Vapi and Bland sell the engine, not the receptionist. You, or a developer, build the agent on top.

• Retell starts at $0.07 a minute pay-as-you-go.
• Vapi charges a $0.05 a minute platform fee, and you pay the model, voice and telephony vendors separately, so the real cost lands at $0.10 to $0.30.
• Bland runs $0.11 to $0.14 a minute depending on plan.

At 1,000 minutes a month that's $70 to $350. The number that matters more is the build. Someone has to design the conversation, connect the booking system, handle payments and test it against real calls. That's the work the subscription products hide from you, and it's the reason they can't do the hard parts.

Option 3: A human answering service ($250 to $1,725 a month)

Ruby is the reference point here. Its public plans run from $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes to $1,725 for 500. That's $5.00 a minute at the bottom and $3.45 at the top, with overage billed at $3.30 to $5.40 a minute.

You get a real person, which some callers genuinely prefer. You also get someone reading from your script who can't see your booking system, so most calls end in a message and a callback. For 200 minutes a month Ruby is $720. A per-minute AI platform covering the same minutes is under $60. That gap is the whole argument, and it widens as call volume grows.

Option 4: A full-time receptionist ($42,000 to $61,000 a year)

The average US receptionist salary is $33,960 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Once you add payroll taxes, health insurance, paid time off, a desk and management time, the true cost is 1.25 to 1.8 times salary: $42,500 to $61,200 a year.

In the UK the average salary is around £25,600. A corporate front-of-house role costs £42,000 to £48,000 a year all-in once employer National Insurance, pension, holiday cover and turnover are counted. A small office pays less, but rarely under 1.25 times salary.

The bigger issue isn't the cost. It's the coverage. One person works about 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Every call outside those hours, and every call that comes in while they're already on one, goes to voicemail. If your customers ring in the evening or at weekends, you're paying full price for a receptionist who misses most of them.

Option 5: A custom-built AI receptionist (a one-off build, then pence per minute)

This is what we build, so read this section knowing that. A custom agent runs on the same per-minute engines as option 2, but it's wired into your actual systems. It checks live availability, writes the booking straight into your software, takes the deposit through Stripe before the caller hangs up, and texts the confirmation or gate code. When a call needs a human it warm-transfers, or takes a proper message and texts you straight away.

Pricing has two parts:

• The build. A fixed project fee that depends on how many systems it has to talk to. A booking calendar and a payment link is a small job. Live inventory, tiered pricing, several locations and an existing CRM is a bigger one. For a focused use case we usually have it live in a couple of weeks.
• Running cost. $0.10 to $0.25 a minute for the engine and telephony, plus about a dollar a month for the phone number. A business taking 600 calls a month at two minutes each pays roughly $120 to $300 a month to run it. No minute bundles, no overage rates.

We run one of these inside SmartStorageSoftware, our self-storage platform, where it answers after-hours calls, reserves units and takes the first month's payment. In self-storage, one overnight move-in covers a month of running cost. The economics are similar in any business where a missed call is a lost booking: clinics, trades, salons, property, hire companies.

The math for a 10-person business

A worked example, with the assumptions stated so you can swap in your own numbers.

• Your office misses 3 calls a day (after hours, engaged line, lunch). That's about 90 a month.
• One in five of those callers would have booked. That's 18 bookings.
• Your average booking is worth $120.

Lost revenue: about $2,160 a month. The most expensive AI option on this page, a custom build handling every one of those calls, costs a fraction of that to run. A subscription product costs less than one recovered booking. The only scenario where the maths fails is when your missed calls don't convert, and you can check that in a week by listening to your voicemail.

Hidden costs to ask about before you sign

• Minute bundles and overage. The $29 plan is the advertised price. The overage rate is the real one.
• Per-call vs per-minute billing. Per-call is cheaper if your calls are long, per-minute if they're short. Know your average.
• Setup and integration fees. "Integrates with your CRM" often means "for an extra fee, on the top plan".
• Transfers. Some plans can't hand a call to a human at all. Check before you find out at 9am on a Monday.
• Recording and transcription. Usually add-ons. They're how you improve the agent, so budget for them.
• Payments. Taking a card on the call needs a PCI-safe flow. If a vendor is vague about how, it doesn't do it.
• Contract length. Monthly rolling is normal for the subscription tier. Anything longer needs a good reason.

When an AI receptionist isn't worth it

Under about 50 calls a month, your phone probably isn't the bottleneck, and a shared mobile with a good voicemail greeting does the job. If most of your calls are complex, regulated conversations (legal advice, clinical triage), the agent's job becomes routing rather than resolving, and the value is smaller. And if you need someone physically at the front desk for visitors anyway, the AI replaces the phone part of their day, not the person.

Three questions that sort the real ones from the demos

1. Does it write the booking into my system, or send me a message telling me to do it?
2. Can it take a payment on the call, and how?
3. What exactly happens when it doesn't know the answer?

A product that answers all three clearly is worth paying for. A product that answers with "our AI handles that intelligently" isn't.

If you want these numbers run against your own call log, see how our AI call answering works and book a 30-minute call. We'll show you what an AI receptionist would have booked last month, using your real numbers. And if the phone is only one of the things eating your team's day, the same approach applies to email, orders and support: that's AI automation.

Questions people ask before switching

Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a human?

On cost per call, by a wide margin. A custom agent runs at 20 to 75 cents a call, a subscription plan works out at roughly $1 to $2 a call, and a human answering service is $3.30 to $5.40 a minute. A salaried receptionist is cheaper per call only if they're busy on the phone all day, and even then they only cover about a quarter of the week.

How much does an AI receptionist cost per call?

Take the per-minute rate and multiply by your average call length. At $0.10 to $0.25 a minute and a two to three minute call, that's 20 to 75 cents. For subscription plans, divide the monthly fee by the included minutes, then multiply by your average call length.

Can an AI receptionist take payments over the phone?

Some can, most can't. The ones that do use a PCI-safe flow through a processor like Stripe, so the card details never sit in the transcript. Ask the vendor exactly how a payment is taken. A vague answer means it isn't.

Will callers know they're talking to AI?

It should introduce itself honestly, and a good one sounds natural enough that most callers stop thinking about it after the first sentence. What callers care about is getting an answer and a booking on the first call, not who gave it to them.

How long does it take to set up?

A subscription product takes an afternoon. A custom agent that connects to your booking system and takes payments usually goes live in a couple of weeks for a focused use case. Extra systems, locations and edge cases add time, mostly in testing against real call recordings.

What happens to calls it can't handle?

A properly built agent recognises when a human is needed, then either warm-transfers the call or takes a detailed message and texts it to you immediately. Check that the plan you're buying includes transfers. On some subscription tiers it doesn't.

Do I need a new phone number?

No. You forward your existing number to the agent, or port it across. Callers ring the same number they always have.