How much does an AI receptionist cost per month?

Entry plans cluster low. Dialzara opens at $29 for 60 minutes, Rosie at $49 for 250 minutes, and Goodcall at $79 for 100 unique customers. Slang.ai sits at the top, from $399 a location on Core and $599 on Premium. Each figure was read on the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026.

Human answering services cost far more for the same phone. Ruby's cheapest plan is $250 for 50 minutes, and Smith.ai's AI Pro tier is $150. You're buying different things, so the gap makes sense.

Your second number matters more than your first. Go past the allowance on a per-minute plan and one twelve-minute call can cost more than a whole morning of short ones.

Vendors bill by minute, by call, by unique caller, by location, and in one case by booked appointment. Two plans at the same monthly price behave very differently once your phone gets busy.

Per-minute pricing punishes the calls you most want to go well. A caller who needs the whole problem understood takes eight minutes, and eight minutes is what you pay for.

The overage rate decides a busy month, and most of the category leaves it off the pricing page. Rosie, Ruby and Slang.ai publish no overage rate. Dialzara and Goodcall do, and so does GreetKeeper.

Work out your own number before you compare anything. Count last month's inbound calls from your carrier's log, guess an average length, and price the month both ways.

Say you run a garage door repair company and last month's phone log shows 310 inbound calls. On GreetKeeper's Starter plan, 200 of those are included and the other 110 bill at $0.45 each. That's $49 plus $49.50, so the month costs $98.50. Professional would have been a flat $149 for the same calls, which means Starter wins even though you blew through its allowance by more than half.

The crossover sits at 422 calls. Below that, Starter plus overage is cheaper. From 423 calls upward, Professional is, and the gap widens by 45 cents with every extra call until Professional's own allowance runs out at 750. Run the same sum between Professional and Scale and the line falls at about 1,321 calls a month.

Most owners guess their volume and guess high. Your carrier's call log will give you the real count in two minutes, and it's usually lower than the number in your head because you remember the frantic days and forget the quiet ones.

A published monthly price tells you what a quiet month costs. Your busy month is the one to price, so pull the log for your peak season as well. A pool company's July looks nothing like its February, and a plan sized on the average will be wrong in both directions.

Then ask any vendor, us included, the same short list. What is the overage rate, in writing? Does a per-minute plan round each call up to the next full minute? Is there a setup fee that isn't on the pricing page? Can you move down a plan as easily as up? Does an annual contract lock the rate or only the term?

Pay attention to how fast the answers arrive. A vendor who can quote the overage rate from memory has thought about your second month, and one who needs to check with sales probably hasn't published it for a reason.

GreetKeeper charges per answered call, not per minute, and prints the overage rate beside every plan. Starter is $49 for 200 calls at $0.45 over, Professional is $149 for 750 at $0.35, and Scale is $349 for 2,000 at $0.25.

Appointment booking is on every tier, including the $49 one. Rosie keeps booking and live transfer on its $149 plan, which is worth knowing before you read two entry prices side by side.

Robocalls and spam calls are screened out and never count toward your plan. Multi-location businesses start from $299 a location, and annual billing gives you two months free.