AI receptionist or answering service?

Ruby is the clearest example of the human model: $250 a month for 50 minutes at entry, rising to $1,725 for 500 minutes, with the overage rate not published.

Smith.ai sits in between and sells per call rather than per minute, with an AI tier at $150 a month and human agents behind it.

AnswerConnect gates its pricing behind a form. Third-party reports put it around $350 for 200 minutes with a setup fee, which is itself worth knowing: a vendor who will not publish a price will not publish an overage rate either.

Concurrency. A human service has a finite number of agents, so a rush puts callers in a queue. An assistant answers every line at once, which matters most on exactly the days you are busiest.

Consistency versus judgment. An agent reading your script for the first time gets the tone right and the details approximately right. An assistant gets the details exactly right and the tone the same every call. Which you want depends on what your callers need.

Cost shape. Human services bill by the minute, so your worst month is expensive in a way you cannot predict. Per-call billing with a published overage rate makes the bad month calculable in advance.

There is a real case for paying more. If your calls are legal intake, or grief, or anything where a person misreading the room costs you the client, a trained human is worth the money.

Take two businesses. The first is a pest control company with 400 calls a month at about three minutes each, so 1,200 minutes. Ruby's largest published plan, as of September 2026, is 500 minutes for $1,725, which works out to $3.45 a minute, and this company would need more than double that allowance. On GreetKeeper the same 400 calls cost $139 on Starter with overage, or a flat $149 on Professional. The calls are mostly the same five questions about ants, quotes and scheduling.

The second is a funeral home with 60 calls a month averaging six minutes. Volume is low and the price gap is a few hundred dollars. Nearly every caller is having one of the worst weeks of their life, and what they need from the first voice they hear is patience and judgment. A trained person earns that fee. We'd tell this owner to pay for the human service.

For a human service, the number that matters is answer time in your own peak hour, not the daily average. Ask for it. Then test it: call your trial line at 12:15 on a Monday, three weeks running, and count the rings.

Ask how many accounts each agent covers and how script changes reach them. Will a Tuesday change to your emergency policy reach agents that afternoon, or after the next training cycle? Get the overage rate and any holiday or after-hours surcharge in writing, since a minute on Thanksgiving may not cost what a minute in March costs.

For an AI vendor, us included, the questions are different. What does it do with a question outside its brief? Who gets the call when it hands over, and what do they see? What does a busy month cost, worked through with your own numbers?

One test applies to both. Give each a genuinely awkward call, such as an upset customer with a vague complaint, and then read or listen to what comes back.

GreetKeeper is AI only. We do not staff a room of agents, and transfers go to your own team rather than to ours.

The pricing is per answered call with the overage published: $49 for 200 at $0.45 over, $149 for 750 at $0.35, $349 for 2,000 at $0.25.

Where a human service is the better fit we would rather say so on this page than sell you something that annoys your callers.