How much does an answering service cost?

A live answering service or virtual receptionist costs $99 to $250 a month for 50 minutes on the price lists we checked on 26 October 2026, and $649 to $1,725 for 500 minutes. That is roughly $1.30 to $5.00 per included minute. Per-call plans run from about $1.55 to $11.50 a call, and Smith.ai's AI receptionist charges $1.60 to $3.00 a call.

Those are the numbers people search for, and they are the wrong ones to stop at if you run appointments. A salon, clinic or studio does not sell minutes. It sells visits on a calendar. The useful figure is what each option costs per appointment that actually gets booked, and that figure depends on whether the service books the visit on the call or writes a message for your desk to chase in the morning.

LLDTEK wrote this guide. We sell AI agents for appointment businesses and do not publish a price, so we are not in the table. Every competitor price below links to the provider's own page, checked on 2026-10-26. Our companion guide, How much does an AI receptionist cost?, covers the AI-only vendors in more depth.

Three products that get called the same thing

An answering service puts a trained person from a shared call centre on your line to take a message, follow a script, and sometimes page someone on call. Most bill by the minute of operator time.

A virtual receptionist is the same staffing model with more front-desk work attached, such as warm transfers, intake questions and, on some plans, scheduling. Ruby and Posh use this label on their pricing pages.

An AI front desk is software that answers the phone itself and, on good setups, books the visit in the calendar you already use before handing harder calls to a person. With no operator on the clock, it often costs less per call than a person does.

Published prices for live answering and virtual receptionists

Per included minute, the cheapest small bundles are MAP's 125-minute plan at about $1.43 and PATLive's 50-minute plan at $1.98, while Ruby's 50-minute plan is the most expensive at $5.00. Per call, Moneypenny's 50-call plan works out to $1.98 and Smith.ai's human Starter plan to $10.00. The spread is wide because these companies sell different amounts of work inside a "minute" or a "call", which is the next thing to pin down.

What counts as a billable minute?

Two providers can quote the same per-minute price and send very different bills, because they disagree about which seconds count and how they round.

Talk time only. PATLive says you "only pay for the time receptionists are live on your calls" and that it does not charge for after-call notes, message entry or wrap-up.

Talk time plus after-call work. AnswerConnect's help centre says it bills "the total time required to handle each call, including any after-call work" (answerconnect.com help centre, checked 2026-10-26). Posh counts time on the phone or "completing an activity for your account". Nexa describes receptionist work time as talk time plus follow-up, email and post-call scheduling.

Rounding. AnswerConnect bills calls over 30 seconds in whole minutes rounded up, so a call of 1 minute 25 seconds is billed as 2 minutes. It also waives the first 30 calls under 30 seconds in each billing cycle. Ambs Call Center says work time is "calculated in 30-second increments and rounded up to the next increment" (ambscallcenter.com, checked 2026-10-26). Most of the pricing pages in the table above do not state an increment at all.

What is excluded. Ambs does not bill ring time or hold time. AnswerConnect does not bill the queue before a receptionist picks up.

Rounding hits appointment lines hard because booking calls are short and similar. Suppose your average call runs 2 minutes 10 seconds of talk. Billed to the second, 120 calls is 260 minutes. In 30-second increments it is 300 minutes. Rounded up to whole minutes it is 360 minutes. That is a 38 percent swing on identical calls, before after-call work is added. Ask every provider for the increment, and whether wrap-up counts, in writing.

Costs that do not appear on the plan card

Setup. Ambs lists a flat $85 one-time setup fee, plus $85 for each added location. Nexa's FAQ says a setup fee covers programming, onboarding and training but does not give the amount. Smith.ai and Abby list no setup fee, and Ruby says it charges nothing for activation, onboarding or setup.

Overage. Ruby and Davinci do not publish an overage rate. Abby bills overage at "your plan's Abby Minute rate" without stating it as a dollar figure. On published rate cards, smaller plans carry the highest overage: PATLive charges $2.29 a minute over its 50-minute plan and $1.79 over its 500-minute plan. Price each plan against your busiest month as well as your average one.

Holidays. None of the rate cards in our table lists a holiday surcharge, but they do exist: ReceptionHQ says "an after-hours surcharge applies to calls outside 5am-7pm Monday to Friday or on a US Federal Holiday" (receptionhq.com, checked 2026-10-26). Ruby and PATLive describe holiday coverage as part of their 24/7 service. Third-party guides often quote holiday premiums, but we could not trace one to a published rate card, so ask the provider for a sample invoice from a December.

Bilingual answering. Smith.ai charges $1.00 a call for a dedicated Spanish line. PATLive, Posh, Abby and MAP list Spanish or bilingual answering at no extra cost, and Moneypenny includes bilingual answering on its minute plans but does not list it on its call plans.

Patching and transfers. Ambs bills "direct connect call patching" at 6 cents a minute. Smith.ai includes one to ten free transfer destinations depending on plan, charges $15 a month for each extra destination, and $0.50 a call for transfer notifications by text, Slack or Teams.

Booking itself. Smith.ai's human plans list "Book appointments" as a $1.50 add-on per call, with custom calendaring at $1.00, and our worked example of how Smith.ai's per-call add-ons add up prices a month at a brow and lash studio. MAP says custom scripts and workflows "come with additional fees". If you need the receptionist to place the visit rather than take a message, find out which line item that is.

Notice and taxes. Moneypenny asks for 30 days' notice to cancel. PATLive prices exclude government taxes and fees.

Your desk's callback time. No provider bills this, and you pay it anyway. Every message the service takes becomes a call your team returns, often the next morning. That time comes out of the same desk the service was meant to relieve.

Cost per booked appointment is the number to use

A minute of operator time and a booked visit are different units, and only one of them pays the rent.

When a caller wants a Thursday cut or a 60-minute massage and the service can only take a message, the appointment does not exist until someone on your team reaches the caller and finds a slot. Some callers pick up, and some have already booked elsewhere. The bill arrives either way, so divide it by bookings rather than calls:

1. Take the full monthly bill, including overage, add-ons and setup spread over twelve months.
2. Count the appointments that came out of the calls the service handled, not the calls themselves.
3. Divide the bill by that count.

If you do not know what an unbooked caller is worth to you, the missed-call revenue calculator does that arithmetic with your average ticket and your own assumptions. Put that number next to cost per booked appointment and the trade-off is easy to see.

A worked example on one month of calls

This is an example built to show the method. The studio is a composite, not a named LLDTEK customer, and every volume and booking figure below is an assumption you should replace with your own.

A three-room massage studio sends overflow and after-hours calls to an outside service: 120 calls a month, averaging 2 minutes 10 seconds of talk. We assume 30-second billing increments, so 300 billed minutes. Of the 120 calls, 50 are people trying to book. We price two outcomes: 30 of those 50 become appointments, or 40 do. Think of the first as messages that the desk calls back the next day, and the second as visits booked during the call. Neither is a measured rate, and the point is how far the result moves.

Rates come from the provider pages in the first table, checked 2026-10-26. We left out Davinci and Abby because their overage rates are not published as dollar figures, and AnswerConnect and Nexa because their prices are quote only.

Four things fall out of this example.

First, the billing unit reorders the list. Moneypenny sells both minute and call plans. On its minute plans the same month would be $661 (200 minutes plus 100 at $2.39). On its call plans it is $242.80. Short booking calls favour per-call billing.

Second, rounding is real money. If the same calls were rounded up to whole minutes, 360 billed minutes, PATLive's bill would rise from $479 to $592.40 ($479 + 60 × $1.89).

Third, the per-booking column moves more than the monthly column. Ten more appointments out of the same 50 booking calls cuts each option's cost per booking by about a quarter. That is the case for an option that books the visit on the call, whether it is a human add-on or an AI front desk, and also the case for testing that it books correctly. A wrong booking costs more than a message.

Fourth, a scared caller, a clinical after-hours line or a client in a dispute needs a person, and a human service is the honest buy for those calls. An answering service takes a message. A clinic needs a booked room. walks through where that line sits.

Where LLDTEK fits on price

LLDTEK does not publish a price. Our agents handle front desk, no-show recovery, rebooking, reviews and the live floor, and they sit beside the booking system or POS you already run, such as Vagaro, Square, Booksy, Zenoti or Mindbody. We quote after a 30-minute demo against your real book, once we know your hours, languages, call volume, and which calls should go to a person. If we are not the right fit, you hear that before any number.

That means you cannot price us from this page, and a provider with a public rate card lets you do that today. If a published plan books your services correctly at a cost per appointment you are happy with, it is a reasonable choice.