How much does an AI receptionist cost?

Entry plans cluster low. Dialzara opens at $29 for 60 minutes, Rosie at $49 for 250 minutes, Goodcall at $79 for 100 unique customers. Those were read from each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026.

Human answering services sit an order of magnitude higher. Ruby's cheapest plan is $250 for 50 minutes. Smith.ai's AI Pro tier is $150. You are buying different things, so the gap makes sense.

The number that surprises people is the second one. Go past your allowance on a per-minute plan and a single twelve-minute call can cost more than a whole day 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 completely differently once your phone gets busy.

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

Per-call pricing charges the same for that call as for a thirty-second wrong number. Goodcall's unique-caller model goes further and stops charging when the same person rings twice in a month.

Work out your own number before you compare anything. Count last month's inbound calls, guess an average length, and run both models. You will usually find one of them is 30% cheaper for the way your phone actually rings.

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 publishes the overage rate next to every plan. Starter is $49 for 200 calls at $0.45 over, Professional is $149 for 750 at $0.35, 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 behind its $149 plan, which is worth knowing before you read the two entry prices side by side.

Annual billing is two months free, which is the category norm rather than a discount we invented.