How do I cancel an AI receptionist service?

The risk in leaving is never the software. It is the phone line pointing somewhere that no longer answers.

Cancel the forward first and confirm calls ring your own phone again. Then close the account.

Export anything you want to keep before the account closes, because transcripts and caller details are business records you may want later.

Ask about the notice period and the billing cycle. Monthly terms are common at the small end; annual plans usually run to the end of the term.

Ask what happens to your data. Whether you can export it, how long it is kept afterwards, and whether deletion is something you request or something that happens.

Ask whether any numbers are tied to the vendor. If you took a number from them rather than forwarding your own, leaving means porting it out, which takes days.

Those three questions take two minutes at the start and save two weeks at the end. Vendors who answer them plainly are telling you something useful.

Say you run a tutoring center and you've decided to stop. On Friday at 3pm you export the transcripts and caller details first, since the account still exists and the data is still there.

Next, turn off the forward. On a plan that uses GSM codes you dial ##61# for the no-answer forward, or *73 on Verizon and most landlines. Then borrow a phone, call your number, and let it ring past the point where it used to divert. Your desk phone should keep ringing.

Now the step people forget. At setup you probably switched off your carrier's voicemail so it wouldn't compete with the forward. Turn it back on and record a greeting, or unanswered calls will ring forever.

Tidy the connections after that. Remove the assistant's access to your calendar from your Google or Microsoft account's connected-apps page, and switch off any Zapier flows that were fed by calls. Only then close the account. The whole exit takes about twenty minutes.

Annual billing at two months free sounds like an easy choice, so run the numbers before you take it. Starter costs $588 across twelve monthly payments, or $490 paid annually. The discount is $98.

Suppose you leave after five months. On monthly billing you've paid $245. Go annual and you've paid $490, since annual plans typically run to the end of the term. That price only comes out ahead if you stay ten months or longer.

For a product you haven't lived with, the sensible order is monthly for the first two or three months, then annual once you know it's staying. You give up perhaps $25 of discount and gain the ability to walk away.

Before you sign with any vendor, read two clauses. One covers what happens to unused months on an annual plan if you cancel early. The other is how a plan downgrade works mid-term, since a seasonal business may want Professional in summer and Starter in winter. Ask us both questions directly and get the answers in writing.

You keep your own number and forward it, which means undoing the arrangement is a setting on your phone rather than a negotiation.

Plans are monthly at $49, $149 and $349, with annual billing offered at two months free, which is the category norm rather than a lock-in we invented.

Retention of call records is a setting you control, and you can ask us to remove them.