Smith.ai pricing explained, and how LLDTEK compares

Smith.ai charges per call, not per minute. Its Human-first receptionist plans cost $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300, with $11.50, $10.50 or $8.50 for each call over. Its AI Receptionist is free for 25 calls, then Pro starts at $150 for 75 calls and Enterprise at $500 for 300. A Hybrid option starts at about $2.50 a call. Booking on the Human-first plans adds $1.50 a call, and a Spanish line adds $1.00.

For an appointment business, the billing unit matters more than the sticker. A caller booking a 90-minute colour and a caller ringing to say they are ten minutes late each use up one call. This guide shows how to count those calls, what the add-ons and exit terms are, and when Smith.ai or LLDTEK is the better fit.

LLDTEK wrote this comparison. We sell AI agents for appointment businesses and do not publish a price, so read it knowing that. Every Smith.ai claim below links to Smith.ai's own pricing pages, checked on 2026-10-27. Prices change, so open the links before you sign.

How does Smith.ai pricing work?

Smith.ai sells three products, and each has its own pricing page. A selector headed "Choose how your calls get handled" moves between them: AI-first goes to smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, Hybrid to smith.ai/pricing/hybrid-ai-human-receptionists and Human-first to smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, all checked 2026-10-27. All three bill by the call.

The Human-first plans put a person on your line. The plan cards on the Human-first page carry the $300, $810 and $2,100 prices, so those are Human-first prices. Smith.ai describes the service as "Live-staffed with expert agents 24/7" and lists "No overseas agents", "No setup fees" and month-to-month terms. Lead qualification, an intake of five short-answer questions and your first CRM integration are included (smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27).

The same page offers 10 percent off a 12-month subscription.

The AI Receptionist answers with software. Smith.ai says a complex call "can be transferred to a live North America-based receptionist" and describes a 24/7 live agent network behind it (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27).

The AI tiers differ in who does the setup as much as in volume. Dedicated onboarding is marked as not included on Free. Pro reads "Set it up yourself with dedicated support" and comes with an account manager. Enterprise reads "We build and run a custom solution for you."

The Hybrid option sits between them. AI answers every call, and a live agent takes the calls that match a preset you choose. The page says "starting at ~$2.50/call", and its FAQ prices the three presets from $2.50 a call (New Client Priority), $3.10 (Highest Touch) and $3.70 (After Hours Only). It also says "A call that starts with AI and is handed to a live agent counts as one call." The Hybrid page lists no included-call bundles, and cancelling takes 30 days' notice (smith.ai/pricing/hybrid-ai-human-receptionists, checked 2026-10-27). The rest of this guide prices the Human-first and AI-first plans, because those are the ones with bundles you can run a month through.

What counts as a call?

On all three products the unit is an answered call, whatever its length. That suits a clinic running ten-minute new-patient intakes. It suits a salon or studio less well, because so many of its calls are short housekeeping: confirming a time, moving a visit, asking about parking.

Spam is handled differently on each page.

On the Human-first plans, Smith.ai says "you won't be charged for spam or unsolicited sales calls" as long as the lines you forward "pass Caller ID" (smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27). If your forwarding setup strips caller ID, check that before the first bill.

On the AI plans, the default runs the other way: "Every call answered by your AI Receptionist counts toward your call quota by default." Smith.ai says it blocks "over 20 million spam and robocalls" before they are answered, and gives customers "an allowance to remove up to 10% of their calls from their bill each billing cycle" (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27). So someone on your team reviews the log each month and marks the junk. Nuisance calls beyond a tenth of the total are billed.

The pages leave two questions open, so put them to Smith.ai in writing: does a wrong number or an instant hang-up count as an answered call on the AI plans, and is an AI-plan call that transfers to a live receptionist billed once, twice, or at the live rate? The Hybrid page settles that for Hybrid, where a handed-off call counts once. The AI page does not say.

Which add-ons does an appointment business need?

The Human-first plans keep the base price down by putting booking itself on the add-on list. These per-call add-ons are the ones a salon, clinic, spa or studio is most likely to switch on (smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27):

• Book appointments, $1.50. "We'll schedule meetings directly on your calendar," naming Calendly, Acuity, Appointy and Harmonizely "and many more."
• Custom calendaring, $1.00, listed separately from booking.
• Dedicated Spanish line, $1.00. Calls are "routed to a fully bilingual receptionist."
• SMS or Slack notifications, $0.50, plus $0.25 for each extra ping.
• Text and email follow-up, $0.50.

Extra transfer destinations cost $15 a month each. The page does not say whether a per-call add-on is charged on every call once it is switched on or only on calls that use it, so ask. That answer can move a monthly bill by hundreds of dollars.

The AI page lists no priced add-ons. Every tier names "AI Scheduling (Calendly & more)". The tier cards and the feature guide on that page say nothing about languages. "Bilingual answering" shows up only as a link in the sitewide footer (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27). If some of your callers prefer Spanish or another language, ask which ones the AI Receptionist handles and on which tier.

Notice which systems are missing. Square appears on the Human-first page only as a payment tool. Neither the Human-first nor the AI pricing page names Vagaro, Booksy, Mindbody, Zenoti or OpenTable as a booking integration. If your book lives in one of those, have Smith.ai book a real service into it during setup. Then open the appointment in your own system and check that the duration and the assigned stylist or practitioner came through. Do that before the $1.50 add-on starts appearing on the bill.

What are the cancellation terms?

The Human-first plans are month-to-month. Smith.ai says "If you ever cancel, we bill for and through the end of the current monthly billing cycle, and then you're done." New clients get a money-back guarantee on the plan and add-ons up to $1,000, excluding calls over quota. The page calls it a "30-day money-back guarantee" in one sentence and mentions "the first two weeks" in the next (smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27). Ask Smith.ai which window applies and get the answer in writing.

The AI Receptionist is also month-to-month but asks for notice: "If you ever cancel, we need 30 days' notice." We found no money-back guarantee on that page (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27). Put the notice date in your calendar the day you sign.

A worked example at a brow and lash studio

This is an example to show the arithmetic. The studio is a composite built from common setups, not a named LLDTEK or Smith.ai customer, and every volume is an assumption to replace with your own call log.

A three-bed brow and lash studio forwards overflow and after-hours calls. In a month, 110 arrive. Twelve are robocalls or sales pitches. We assume all twelve cost nothing: on the AI plans, Smith.ai's filter blocks them before anyone answers, and on the Human-first plans the studio's forwarded line passes caller ID, so they are not charged. That leaves 98 billable calls: 40 book a visit, 22 move or cancel one, 14 are running late or need directions, and 22 ask about prices, aftercare or patch tests. If some spam did get answered on an AI plan, the 10 percent allowance would cover at most 11 of the 110 calls. About a third of callers prefer Spanish, so the studio would add the Spanish line on a Human-first plan.

Rates come from Smith.ai's Human-first and AI-first pricing pages, checked 2026-10-27. We assume the booking add-on applies only to the 40 calls that book, and the Spanish line to every call because the page says all calls route to the bilingual receptionist. Both assumptions are ours.

Three things come out of this.

The lower sticker is not the cheaper plan. Starter is $510 below Basic on paper and $188 above it this month, because 68 overage calls at $11.50 overtake the bigger bundle. On the AI side, Free costs $11.50 more than Pro here, and Pro adds onboarding and an account manager.

Housekeeping is a large share of the bill. Thirty-six of the 98 calls are moves, cancellations, late arrivals and directions, and on Basic every call past the 90th costs $10.50 regardless of length. Count your own housekeeping share before choosing any per-call plan, and ask whether a text thread could take some of it off the phone.

Add-ons rival overage. Booking and Spanish add $158 to the Human-first Basic month, nearly double its overage. Our answering service cost guide turns a bill like this into a cost per booked appointment, and the AI receptionist cost guide sets per-call billing against per-minute and per-caller plans from other vendors.

What do Smith.ai virtual receptionist reviews tell you?

Smith.ai puts review-site scores on its own pricing pages, and the numbers we saw on 2026-10-27 were not the same on every page.

• The Hybrid page reads "Review scores: Clutch 4.8, G2 4.9, Capterra 4.8, Trustpilot 4.3" (smith.ai/pricing/hybrid-ai-human-receptionists, checked 2026-10-27).
• The AI-first page shows four scores without site names, 4.8, 4.9, 4.8 and 4.2, and the last one links to Trustpilot (smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27).
• The Human-first page, as we loaded it, showed no scores (smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27).

So the Trustpilot figure is 4.3 on one page and 4.2 on another. Treat both as a snapshot Smith.ai chose to display, and open the directories for the current score and the dates of the newest reviews.

The testimonials change by page too. The Human-first page quotes Breslow Home Design Center, Armor Electric and the Colorado Snoring and Sleep Apnea Center. The AI-first page quotes five customers: two law firms, a tax practice, SummitPoint LLC and Native Physical Therapy. The Hybrid page quotes three law firms and Ministry Ideaz. The Human-first and AI-first pages both say Smith.ai is "trusted by 5,000+ businesses." The sleep apnea center and Native Physical Therapy are the only quotes we found from businesses that book patient visits, and none came from a salon, spa or studio.

When you read reviews elsewhere, filter for your kind of call. A law firm praising intake quality says little about booking a 45-minute lash fill with the right technician. Look for comments on booking errors, on calls billed that the business considered spam, and on cancelling. Those map to the parts of the pricing above that can surprise you.

How LLDTEK is different

Smith.ai sells answered calls. LLDTEK sells a set of AI agents for businesses that run on appointments, and answering is one of five jobs they do. The others are recovering no-shows, booking the next visit, asking for reviews and keeping watch on the live floor. A client can ring, then text, then use your web chat, and the agents see it as one conversation. Whatever holds your appointments today, be it Vagaro, Square, Booksy, Zenoti, Mindbody or OpenTable, stays in place, and the agents read and write that book directly. The person at your desk and the till they check out on both stay too.

The handoff goes to your own team. For a VIP, a dispute or an off-menu request, the agent stops and passes the full thread to your staff. Smith.ai's fallback is its own 24/7 live staff, which is a real advantage when nobody at your business can pick up.

Our team does the configuration alongside yours, and we stay through a live day before the first invoice. In Smith.ai's terms that sits nearer to its done-for-you Enterprise tier than to Free or Pro. There is no public price. You get one at the end of a thirty-minute demo, after we have seen your opening hours, the languages your clients speak, your monthly call count and the calls you want a person to keep. That means you cannot drop LLDTEK into the worked example above today, which counts against us.

Side by side

Choose Smith.ai if…

You want a person on the line at 3am. Smith.ai's live receptionists are staffed around the clock, and its AI plans can pass a hard call to a North America-based receptionist at any hour. LLDTEK does not offer live receptionist staff.

Your calls are long and involved. Per-call billing rewards ten-minute intake calls, and the CRMs Smith.ai names, HubSpot, Salesforce and Clio, point to professional services.

Your book already lives in Calendly, Acuity or another scheduler Smith.ai names, so the booking add-on writes into the calendar you use.

You take fewer than 25 calls a month, which the free AI plan may cover.

You want to see the price before you talk to anyone. Smith.ai publishes it, and we do not.

Choose LLDTEK if…

Your appointments live in Vagaro, Square, Booksy, Zenoti, Mindbody or OpenTable, and you want the agent writing into that book itself rather than into a scheduler that sits beside it.

Many of your calls are moves, cancellations and late arrivals that a text thread could handle.

You want more than an answered phone. Our agents also fill no-show slots, book the next visit and send one review request, none of which appear on Smith.ai's pricing pages.

You would rather your own staff took the hard calls, with the full thread in front of them.

Sources

Smith.ai's Human-first plans, overage, add-ons, spam terms, guarantee, cancellation, customer count and testimonials: smith.ai/pricing/receptionists, checked 2026-10-27. The old address, smith.ai/pricing, now lands on this page.

Smith.ai's AI Receptionist tiers, call counting, spam allowance, live transfer, onboarding, notice period, review scores and testimonials: smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist, checked 2026-10-27.

Smith.ai's Hybrid presets, per-call pricing, handoff billing, notice period, review scores and testimonials: smith.ai/pricing/hybrid-ai-human-receptionists, checked 2026-10-27.