My AI Front Desk (now Frontdesk) vs LLDTEK for salons

My AI Front Desk, which now calls itself Frontdesk, is a self-serve AI receptionist. Its Business-in-a-Box plan costs $99 a month, or $79 billed annually. That covers 200 voice minutes, 400 texts and 100 website chats, and each extra minute costs $0.25 in credits. It suits a salon that wants phone, text and chat working today, or one with no booking system yet. LLDTEK suits a salon that already runs Vagaro or another booking system and wants agents set up for it there. LLDTEK has no public price.

So the choice comes down to two questions. How many minutes does your line really talk for in a month? And which book does the appointment end up in, the one your stylists check or a second one? The rest of this page works through both for a five-chair salon.

LLDTEK publishes this page. It makes AI agents for salons and other appointment businesses, so it competes with Frontdesk. Frontdesk's details below come from its own pricing, product and help pages as of November 2026. They are not the result of test calls, so read feature claims as the vendor's description and confirm prices before you sign.

What is My AI Front Desk now?

The product people search for as My AI Front Desk runs under the name Frontdesk. Frontdesk's homepage carries the Frontdesk logo, "A Bevado Company", and a footer for AI Front Desk, Inc. The domain has not changed.

Frontdesk sells more than a phone answerer. The homepage lists an AI phone receptionist, a website chatbot, an SMS texting agent, email, WhatsApp, a built-in CRM, an AI calendar, outbound calls and automation sequences. Its pricing page says it replaces a "typical tech stack", and lists Calendly, Acuity and Square as the booking tools it stands in for. That matters for a salon. Frontdesk can be your booking calendar, not just a layer in front of one.

Setup is self-serve. Frontdesk says you can be live in under five minutes. Its phone receptionist page says you can forward your existing number with *72 or port it in full, that SMS confirmations go out automatically, and that a caller can be live-transferred "with a spoken context summary before the handoff."

What does My AI Front Desk cost?

The Frontdesk pricing page lists two plans. Business-in-a-Box costs $99 a month, or $79 a month billed annually, which it describes as 20% off. Partner / Enterprise is custom-priced for 25 or more interactions a day. There is a 7-day free trial, and the FAQ says there is no permanently free plan. Frontdesk's trial terms say usage fees still apply during the trial, the subscription is charged automatically when it ends, and refunds are generally not given. A small sample of reviews on its Trustpilot profile includes complaints about charges after a trial and refused refunds.

Everything on Business-in-a-Box is metered in credits worth one cent each:

When the pool is used up, auto-reload adds 1,000 credits for $10, and purchased credits never expire. Frontdesk's FAQ says the pool "covers about 40 more minutes", so a line that uses nothing else can talk for 240 minutes before the bill rises above $99. Neither the pricing page nor the credits article says what happens to calls if the balance reaches zero with auto-reload switched off.

The same plan has limits that a busy salon should read. It includes 20 knowledge base pages, 2 editor seats, 3 notification recipients and "Last 200 logs" of data retention. Agent actions are listed as "2 of each", which appears to mean two set-up actions of each type, such as two transfer destinations; ask before you plan transfers to several stylists. The page defines an action as something like transferring a call, sending a text, looking something up or pushing data to another app.

Frontdesk's own pages do not all agree. Its Smith.ai comparison page still describes Frontdesk as "free to start" with "unlimited calls included on most plans", which the pricing page does not offer. Hold the vendor to the pricing page, and keep a copy of it with your sign-up date.

A month of Frontdesk at a five-chair colour salon

Take a five-chair salon that does a lot of colour and books in Vagaro. Colour calls run long, because callers ask about patch tests, timing and price ranges. The salon sends overflow and after-hours calls to the AI. Swap in your own phone records as you read.

In an ordinary month the agent takes 150 calls averaging 2.4 minutes, which is 360 minutes. Texts sent and received come to 450, since Frontdesk's credits article counts texts "sent or received". The website chat handles 80 conversations. In a peak month before the holidays, those figures rise to 260 calls (624 minutes), 700 texts and 100 chats.

The rates are Frontdesk's. The call counts are assumptions to replace with your own. If auto-reload buys 1,000-credit blocks, the ordinary month's card charge is $139, with 800 credits carried into the next month. Frontdesk also sizes Business-in-a-Box for 1 to 10 interactions a day, and the peak month here runs about 12 calls and chats a day, so ask whether that moves you to custom pricing.

Three things come out of the table.

1. Voice drives the bill. Texts added $2 in the ordinary month. Minutes added $30. A salon that wants to forecast cost should time its calls, not count them.
2. Annual billing saves a flat $20 a month, but is paid upfront, $948 for the year. The overage is the same either way.
3. Ask how a minute is counted. The credits article says voice credits are "used per call", and neither page says whether a 2-minute-10-second call bills as two minutes or three. If partial minutes round up, 150 calls could bill closer to 450 minutes than 360.

Now look at it per booking. Suppose 60 of the 150 ordinary-month calls end in a booked visit. On monthly billing that is $131 ÷ 60, or about $2.18 per booking taken. That only holds if the booking lands where your stylists work. If it lands in Frontdesk's calendar and someone copies it into Vagaro, add the desk's time. Two minutes per booking is two hours a month of re-keying, done between clients.

For per-call and per-caller plans from other vendors on the same footing, see the AI receptionist cost guide.

Where does a salon booking land on each product?

Here is one call, followed from ring to rebook. It is 5:40 on a Saturday. A regular rings to book a full head of highlights with Dana, her usual stylist, next Thursday evening. Every chair is busy and the desk is checking someone out.

The LLDTEK column is based on its Vagaro integration page and the agent descriptions on its site. Both columns describe what each vendor says its product does.

Two rows decide the comparison for most salons. One is where the booking is written. The other is what happens when the slot empties. Frontdesk's calendar can reopen a cancelled slot. Frontdesk's refill works from the waitlist in its own CRM and books into its own calendar, so for a Vagaro salon, ask how a cancellation made in Vagaro would ever reach it.

Does My AI Front Desk book into Vagaro, Square or Booksy?

Frontdesk's pages give two answers.

Its salon and spa answering page says "Frontdesk integrates natively with Vagaro, Mindbody, Booker, Square Appointments, Glossgenius" and that the AI "books live". Booksy and Fresha are not on the list. The same page says English and Spanish are standard.

Its product and help pages are narrower. The AI calendar page names Google Calendar, Outlook and Calendly. The integrations section of its help centre covers Zapier, Google Calendar, webhooks, API workflows, Gmail, Shopify, AppFolio, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, Claude and ChatGPT, and an overview. None covers a salon booking system, and Frontdesk's integrations page lists Google Calendar, Outlook and Cal.com as its calendars and names no salon booking system either. The pricing FAQ says every plan connects to calendars "through Zapier", and that direct API access belongs to Partner and Enterprise.

That does not prove the Vagaro sync is missing. It means you cannot tell from the public pages which plan includes it, what it reads and writes, or what it needs switched on in your Vagaro account. So ask Frontdesk for it in writing, then test it during the trial. If the honest answer is Frontdesk's own calendar plus Google, then for a Vagaro salon you are running two books, and somebody has to keep them in step.

LLDTEK makes the same kind of claim. Its integrations page lists Vagaro, Square Appointments, Booksy and Zenoti for salons and spas, and says the agents book in those systems. Hold LLDTEK to the same test. Watch a booking land in your own account before you pay. The checklist further down applies to both.

What LLDTEK does differently

LLDTEK is an AI agent platform for appointment businesses. It runs five agents: Front Desk, Recovery, Rebooking, Reviews and Live Floor. They work beside the booking system the salon already uses, so Vagaro stays the calendar, the till and the staff schedule. Voice, SMS and web chat share one thread. The agents reply in the language the client used, and on a VIP, a dispute or an off-menu request they hand the conversation to a person instead of guessing.

The setup model is the other difference. LLDTEK connects the book, sets the rules with you, tests real scenarios against your calendar and then goes live beside your team, as laid out on How it works. Billing starts after you have watched a live day with the agents running. Frontdesk's Business plan is self-serve: you set up and tune the agent yourself with guided onboarding, and white-glove onboarding is listed under Partner / Enterprise.

The trade-off is plain. LLDTEK publishes no price, quotes only after a thirty-minute demo, and turns some businesses down. You cannot have it answering tonight for $99. If your book is small and your calls are simple, that matters more than anything in the table above.

Where Frontdesk is the better choice

You have no booking system, or you book in Google Calendar. Frontdesk gives you a calendar with services, durations, stylists, a public booking page and reminders inside the $99 plan. LLDTEK works beside an existing book and is not a replacement for one.

You want to hear it on your own number today. A 7-day trial and five-minute setup let you forward your line tonight and listen to real calls before deciding.

Your line is quiet. A solo stylist or a two-chair studio that talks for less than 240 minutes a month pays a flat $79 to $99 for phone, text and chat together, and the price is published.

You want one tool for marketing as well as answering. Frontdesk bundles a CRM, email drafts, website forms, outbound calls and automation sequences. LLDTEK's agents are built around the appointment book, not campaigns.

Five tests to run before you pay either one

Use the Frontdesk trial week, or the LLDTEK demo and live day, to run the same five checks. The list of what to test on an AI receptionist demo has more.

1. Book a long service with a named stylist. Ask for a 3-hour colour with one person, then open your booking system. The visit should show the right stylist, service and length, not a placeholder.
2. Move it by text. Reply to the confirmation asking for another time. Check that the original booking changed, rather than a second one appearing.
3. Book online at the same time. Have a colleague book that stylist's next slot through your normal online booking, then call and ask for the same slot. The agent should not offer it.
4. Trigger a handoff. Ask about a colour correction or a complaint. Note who gets the call or thread, what they are told, and what the caller hears if nobody picks up. The guide on when the agent should hand off covers what a good handover carries.
5. Read the bill. For Frontdesk, check how a 2-minute-10-second call was charged. For LLDTEK, get the quote and what it covers in writing before the live day ends.

Which one should a salon choose?

Frontdesk is a capable, inexpensive way to get phone, text and chat answered this week. Its published price makes it easy to forecast if you know your talk minutes. Its strongest fit is a salon without a booking system, or one that can live with Google Calendar as the book.

The harder case is the salon that already runs Vagaro, Square or Booksy, with stylists who work from that screen. There, the question is whether the AI writes into that book, with the right stylist and service length, and keeps it current when clients text to move. LLDTEK is built around that job and adds cancellation refills and rebooking, but it costs a demo and a quote to find out what you would pay.

For some salons, Vagaro's own AI features and online booking may be enough without either vendor.

Decide on the book first, then the price. If your bookings can live in Frontdesk's calendar, start the trial. If they cannot, make both vendors put a real booking into your own system before you compare prices.