How much does an AI receptionist cost?

An AI receptionist for one small business location costs between $29 and $500 a month on most plans vendors publish, as checked on 26 October 2026. Do-it-yourself voice platforms can run under 15 cents a minute before anyone pays for the build. A live human answering service starts at $250 a month for 50 minutes and passes $1,700 a month at 450 minutes or 180 calls.

The headline price matters less than the billing unit. Vendors charge by the minute, by the call, by the unique caller, or by each component of the conversation. In the worked example below, the same month of phone traffic costs $118.50 on one plan and $339 on another. This guide shows the published prices, explains each billing model, lists the costs outside the plan card, and walks through an estimate you can redo with your own call log.

LLDTEK wrote this guide. We sell AI agents for appointment businesses and do not publish a price, so we are not in the price table. Every competitor price links to the vendor's own pricing page, checked on 2026-10-26. Prices change often, so open the link before you budget.

The prices vendors publish

Two patterns stand out. The entry and mid tiers of the AI products sit between $29 and $350, while the two human services start near the top of that range and climb fast. The POS add-ons do not publish a phone receptionist price at all, so if you already run Zenoti or Booksy, ask your account rep before you shop elsewhere. Whether a built-in assistant actually answers the phone and books is a separate question, covered in Vagaro AI vs a dedicated AI receptionist.

Five ways vendors count your calls

Before you compare two numbers, check that they measure the same thing.

Per minute. Dialzara, Rosie, My AI Front Desk and Ruby sell a bundle of minutes. A caller asking whether you take walk-ins costs seconds. A caller rebooking a colour appointment and asking about aftercare costs several minutes. If your calls run long, per-minute plans fill quickly.

Per call. Smith.ai bills each answered call as one unit, on both its AI and human plans, so a short hang-up and a twelve-minute consult cost the same. It lets customers remove up to 10 percent of calls from each bill as spam (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-26). Per-call billing suits long, detailed calls such as clinic intake.

Per unique caller. Goodcall counts each phone number once a month, no matter how many times it calls, and does not count spam or wrong numbers (goodcall.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). This model rewards a business where regulars call back several times about one appointment, which is common on a salon line.

Per component. Vapi charges a hosting fee per minute and passes through the cost of transcription, the language model, the synthetic voice and the phone carrier. Twilio telephony, for example, is listed at $0.008 a minute inbound (vapi.ai/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). The per-minute total is low. The bill does not include the person who builds the agent, connects it to your booking system, and fixes it when it breaks.

Quote only. Zenoti, Dialzara's Done for You tier and the enterprise tiers at Goodcall and Smith.ai ask you to talk to sales, which usually means onboarding work or multi-location terms.

Per-seat pricing did not appear on any AI receptionist page we checked. It shows up on the booking side instead: Vagaro charges $10 for each bookable calendar license added to a location, up to seven (vagaro.com/pro/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). That sits on the POS bill, but it decides how many staff calendars a receptionist can book into.

Costs that sit outside the plan card

The monthly figure is the start of the bill. These are the lines that change it.

Overage you cannot see. Rosie's FAQ asks what happens when you go over your minutes, but the page gives no answer. Ruby lists minute allowances with no overage price (ruby.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). Get the overage rate in writing before you sign.

Features gated by tier. On Rosie, the $49 Professional plan sends callers a booking link by text. Booking directly on your calendar starts on the $149 Scale plan (heyrosie.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). For an appointment business, the real entry price is the cheapest tier that writes the appointment into your calendar. Check this for every vendor on your list.

Text messages. Dialzara passes through carrier fees of $0.0083 per SMS segment, though its SMS agent is free with an inbound voice plan (dialzara.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). My AI Front Desk deducts credits for each SMS (myaifrontdesk.com/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). If the receptionist confirms every booking by text, those messages add up.

Setup and onboarding. Smith.ai lists "No setup fees" on its human plans, Dialzara says it has none, and Ruby says it charges nothing for activation, onboarding or setup. The real setup cost is your own time: writing out the service menu with durations, which staff do each service, your policies, and the questions the desk answers every day. Expect that work even when the vendor does the configuration.

Build and maintenance on DIY platforms. Vapi's Pro plan carries a $999 monthly minimum (vapi.ai/pricing, checked 2026-10-26). On pay-as-you-go the bill is small and the engineering is yours, so price the developer's hours before you call it the cheap option.

Wrong bookings. No pricing page lists this one. An agent that puts a 90-minute service into a 45-minute gap, or books a stylist who is off that day, costs you the appointment and the client's trust. A cheap plan that books wrongly ends up costing more than a dearer one that books correctly. What to test on an AI receptionist demo covers how to catch that before you pay.

How to estimate your own monthly cost

You can build a credible estimate in an afternoon with data you already have.

1. Pull two weeks of call logs from your phone carrier or VoIP provider. Count total inbound calls, calls missed during opening hours, and calls after close.
2. Decide what the receptionist will take: every call, only the ones the desk misses, or only after-hours calls. Routing choice changes the volume more than any vendor choice.
3. Time a sample of 20 real calls to get an average length. Write down how many came from the same number more than once.
4. Convert that volume into each vendor's unit: minutes, calls, or unique callers.
5. Price two plans per vendor, the one that fits and the next tier up, and include overage. Discard any plan that cannot book into your calendar.

A worked example for a six-chair salon

This salon is a composite example built from common setups, not a named LLDTEK customer, and every volume figure below is an assumption chosen to show the method.

The salon gets about 22 calls a day and opens 26 days a month, which is roughly 570 calls. The desk answers most of them. The AI receptionist takes the overflow while the desk is busy at checkout, plus calls after close. That comes to 180 calls a month. Timed calls average two and a half minutes, so the agent handles about 450 minutes. Because regulars call back, those 180 calls come from about 150 different numbers.

Smith.ai shows per-call rates for its 150-call tier rather than a monthly total, so that line is our arithmetic. The Vapi range adds the published hosting, transcription, model, voice and Twilio rates and excludes phone number fees. Each vendor's rates come from the pricing pages in the table above, checked 2026-10-26.

The example teaches three things. First, the managed AI options span roughly $120 to $340 for the same month, and the order depends on the billing unit. Second, the routing decision reorders the list. If this salon sent only after-hours calls to the agent, say 200 minutes a month, Dialzara's $99 tier (220 minutes) would cover it, while Rosie's cheapest plan that books into the calendar would still cost $149. Third, AI costs far less than human answering at this volume, but a person is still the right answer for some calls. A clinic's on-call line or a caller in distress needs one, as covered in An answering service takes a message. A clinic needs a booked room.

Most operators skip the routing step and go straight to comparing vendors. Decide which calls should reach the agent first, and the vendor comparison gets much shorter.

Where LLDTEK fits on price

LLDTEK does not publish a price. We run agents for front desk, no-show recovery, rebooking, reviews and the live floor beside the booking system or POS you already use, and we quote after a 30-minute demo against your real book. That call covers your hours, languages, call volume and which calls should go to a person. If the fit is not there, we say so before any price comes up. We also watch a live day with you before anyone is billed. The steps from connecting your calendar to going live are on How it works.

That model costs you a call before you see a number. A self-serve plan from the table above shows the number first. If one of those plans books your services correctly into your calendar at the price you estimated, it is a sound buy.