How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost per Month?

Between $49 and $599 a month on published pricing pages read October 1, 2026, with most plans aimed at service businesses landing between $49 and $299. The spread is not a quality ladder. It is three different meters: minutes, calls, or unique callers, and until you know which one a plan counts, two prices are not comparable.

This post uses only prices printed on vendors' own pricing pages, with the date they were read, plus federal wage data for the payroll comparison. No quotes, no negotiated rates, and none of our own pricing.

How much does an AI receptionist cost per month?

Published monthly list prices run from $0 to $599. The band that matters for a service company is $49 to $299 a month, and what separates the ends of it is volume, not capability.

Read on October 1, 2026: Rosie publishes $49 a month for 250 included minutes, $149 for 1,000 minutes, and $299 for 2,000 minutes. GoodCall publishes $79, $129 and $249 a month, with unlimited minutes but caps of 100, 250 and 500 unique customers per month and $0.50 per additional customer; billed annually, the same three tiers display at $66, $108 and $208 a month. Smith.ai publishes a free AI tier covering 25 calls a month at $3.00 per call beyond that, a $150 tier for 75 calls, and a $500 tier for 300 calls, printing its own per-call rates of $2.00 and $1.67. Slang.ai, a hospitality product built around reservations, publishes $399 and $599 a month, or $379 and $539 billed annually.

Two honest caveats about that chart. Prices on pages like these change without notice, which is why each figure above carries the date it was read. And the cheapest row is not the cheapest outcome: a plan that cannot transfer a live call or write to your calendar sends the caller somewhere, just not to a booked job.

Why do two plans at the same price buy different things?

Because they meter different units. One counts minutes, one counts calls, one counts unique callers, and the same month of phone traffic produces three different bills.

A minute meter rewards short calls and punishes the caller who needs five minutes of intake. A call meter is indifferent to length but counts the wrong number as a call. A unique-caller meter, like GoodCall’s 100, 250 and 500 caps, is generous with repeat customers and expensive with a one-time rush. Before comparing two prices, convert both to the unit your own business generates: inbound calls per month, and average length.

The same logic exposes the unlimited claim. GoodCall’s plans include unlimited minutes and tokens, which is real, and cap unique customers, which is also real. Nothing is unlimited in both directions at once. Find the limit, then check it against your own last twelve months.

What does a live answering service cost for the same month?

Four to twenty times more per unit, on the same kind of published page. Ruby lists $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, $395 for 100, $720 for 200, and $1,725 for 500.

Divide those and the included minute costs $5.00 at the entry plan and $3.45 at the 500-minute plan. Do the same on Rosie’s AI plans and the included minute costs about $0.20 and $0.15. That division is ours; the prices and the minute counts are printed on both pages, so the arithmetic is yours to redo.

Per call, the cleanest comparison comes from one provider publishing both price lists. Smith.ai’s live receptionist plans are $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90, and $2,100 for 300, with overage at $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per call. Its AI tiers for comparable volumes are $150 for 75 calls and $500 for 300.

The gap is roughly four to five times at matched volume. What the live minute buys is a person who can hear that something is wrong and act outside the script. Whether that is worth four times the rate depends entirely on how many of your calls are routine, which you can only answer by listening to a week of them.

What would the same coverage cost as a payroll line?

More than any of the above, and for a fraction of the hours. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median hourly wage for receptionists at $18.27 in May 2025, or $38,010 a year, across an occupation of 947,500 jobs.

Wages are not the employer’s cost. The Bureau’s Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 found that for private industry workers, wages and salaries averaged $32.82 per hour worked and accounted for 70.0 percent of employer costs, while benefits averaged $14.07 and accounted for the remaining 30.0 percent. For full-time private industry workers, benefits were 31.5 percent.

Our model, so you can argue with it: apply that 70 percent wage share to the $18.27 median and a loaded hour costs about $26.10. At 2,080 hours a year that is roughly $54,300, or about $4,520 a month. That multiplication is ours, not the Bureau’s; the two inputs are cited above. It also buys about 40 of the 168 hours in a week, and it is the figure to compare against, because the answering line and the AI line are both priced against a payroll line you may already have.

None of this is a headcount argument. A front desk that greets customers, takes payments and runs the room is not a phone plan. The useful comparison is narrower: what does it cost to make sure the phone is answered at 7 p.m. on a Thursday.

What is not in the monthly price?

Three things: overage, add-ons priced per call, and your own setup hours. The first two are printed; the third never is.

Overage is explicit on most pages. Smith.ai lists $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per call above plan on its live tiers and $3.00 per call above the free AI tier. GoodCall lists $0.50 per unique customer above the cap. A plan chosen for an average month gets expensive in a busy one, which is usually the month you most wanted calls answered.

Add-ons are where a per-call price list stops being one number. On Smith.ai’s live receptionist page, booking an appointment is $1.50 per call, a dedicated Spanish line is $1.00 per call, call recording and transcription is $0.25 per call, accepting payments is $1.00 per call, and extended intake is $1.50 per call. Stack appointment booking and a Spanish line onto a 90-call month and the $810 plan behaves like a $1,035 plan. Not every provider prices this way, which is exactly why you read the add-on table before the headline.

Setup is the line nobody bills and everybody pays. Ruby’s pricing page states there are no additional or hidden fees for activation, onboarding, setup, customization, or coverage during certain periods; Smith.ai lists dedicated onboarding setup inside its paid AI tiers. Neither covers your hours writing the call flows and correcting them, which is the work described in what an AI receptionist actually does on a call. The Federal Reserve Banks' Small Business Credit Survey (2026 Report on Employer Firms, 6,525 responses from small employer firms, fielded September 3 to November 14, 2025) found 46% of firms said the business or its employees currently use AI, and among those users about half were still experimenting, 44% had it partially integrated, and just 7% called it fully integrated. The same survey found the top two challenges for AI users were accuracy, at 46%, and adapting tools to meet business needs, at 43%. Adapting the tool is the unbilled line item.

How do you work out your own monthly number?

Three inputs, all of which come from your phone bill rather than a vendor’s example page.

Those three numbers turn every price list above into one comparable figure. The arithmetic is ours and transparent; the inputs are yours, and nobody else’s benchmark can substitute for them.

When is the monthly price the wrong question?

When the phone is not where your revenue enters. If most of your work arrives by referral, standing contract, or an inbox, a call-answering subscription is a solution to somebody else’s problem.

When the phone is where revenue enters, the comparison that decides it is not price against price but price against the value of what currently goes unanswered. One booked job a month covers most of the plans above several times over in a lot of trades, and in others it does not. That is a number from your own average ticket, not from a vendor’s homepage.

If you are weighing the three structural options rather than the price tags, we wrote that comparison separately: AI receptionist vs. answering service vs. hiring. And before you price the coverage, it is worth knowing what actually happens on your line today, which is what a site check and one test call to your own number will tell you in ten minutes.