Part-time receptionist or AI receptionist: what does each cost?

The BLS puts the median receptionist wage at $18.27 an hour in its May 2025 figures, which is $38,010 in annual pay. Twenty hours a week at that rate comes to about $19,000 in annual wages before payroll taxes, paid leave or a sick day.

Hours are the real gap. A part-timer covers your busiest stretch of the day. The calls that come before opening, over lunch, after closing and on Sunday still ring out.

A receptionist also does work that isn't the phone: greeting walk-ins, paperwork, the patient standing at the counter. Only the phone share of the job is what an AI receptionist replaces.

Keep a one-week tally of every call your front desk takes. Split it into routine calls (booking, rescheduling, directions, hours, a price) and calls that needed that person's judgment.

Pull your carrier's log for the same week and count the calls that arrived outside staffed hours. Those are calls no daytime hire would have answered anyway.

Price the routine and out-of-hours calls on a per-call plan, then set that beside the phone share of the wage. At two phone hours a day, that share is about a quarter of a full-time salary.

Many owners land on both. The person handles the counter and the calls that need judgment, and GreetKeeper answers the overflow, the lunch hour and every evening.

Say you own a physical therapy clinic. Your front-desk coordinator earns $18 an hour and handles about 45 calls a day at roughly two and a half minutes each. That's close to two hours of her eight on the phone. Add around 20% for employer costs and the phone portion of her job runs near $900 across a month of 21 working days.

Sending all 945 monthly calls to GreetKeeper would cost $149 on Professional plus 195 overage calls at $0.35, so $217.25. But you weren't going to cut her hours, so that isn't a saving. It's two hours a day she gets back for check-ins, insurance paperwork and the patient standing in front of her.

The more common setup is smaller. If she keeps answering and only the calls she can't reach get forwarded, say 12 a day including evenings, that's 252 calls: Starter at $49 plus 52 at $0.45, or $72.40 in total.

Before deciding anything, have whoever answers your phone keep a tally for five working days. Two columns will do. The first counts calls that followed a pattern: booking, rescheduling, directions, hours, a price. In the second go the calls that needed her in particular, because she knew the patient, smoothed over a complaint or made a judgment nobody had written down.

Pull the carrier log for the same week and count the calls that arrived before opening, over lunch and after closing. Those are calls no daytime hire would have answered anyway.

A long second column means your receptionist's judgment is the job, and GreetKeeper takes the overflow and the evenings off her plate. A long first column means the phone is mostly routine, so price those calls against the numbers above before you hire a second coordinator for phones.

GreetKeeper starts at $49 a month for 200 answered calls, then $0.45 a call. Professional is $149 for 750 and Scale is $349 for 2,000, with no setup fee.

Forward on busy and no answer, and your receptionist keeps picking up while GreetKeeper catches every call they can't reach. Calls that need a person transfer to your team with the caller's details.

GreetKeeper answers calls that arrive together at the same time and books straight into Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. Try it for 14 days free, with no card needed.