What are typical overage fees for AI answering services?

An overage fee is what each unit costs once your monthly bundle runs out. It's the second price on every plan, and for a busy business it often matters more than the first.

Three units dominate this market. Per-minute plans charge for talk time. Per-call plans charge once for each call answered. Goodcall counts unique callers, so a customer who rings three times in a month is counted once.

Those units make the rates hard to compare side by side. A $0.48 minute and a $0.45 call look alike on paper. On a four-minute booking call, the first costs you four times as much.

Human answering services sit on a different scale. PATLive publishes $2.29 a minute on its $99 plan, falling to $1.49 on its largest tier. Posh publishes $2.30 a minute, falling to $1.90. You're paying for a person's time, so the rate reflects wages rather than software.

GreetKeeper: $0.45 a call on Starter ($49 for 200 calls), $0.35 on Professional ($149 for 750) and $0.25 on Scale ($349 for 2,000). Robocalls, spam calls and very short calls don't count toward the allowance.

Dialzara: published on every tier, from $0.48 a minute on the smaller plans down to $0.35 on the larger ones. Its entry plan is $29 for 60 minutes.

Goodcall: $0.50 for each unique customer past the bundle. Plans start at $79 for 100 unique customers, and each phone number is priced as its own agent.

Rosie, Abby Connect and Slang.ai publish no overage rate on their pricing pages. Rosie's entry plan is $49 for 250 minutes, Abby Connect's $165 for 50 Abby Minutes and Slang.ai's $399 per location. Ask each one in writing what the next minute costs.

Where the rate is per minute, ask how each call rounds. A 40-second call rounded up to a whole minute bills as a full minute. Over a month of quick questions and wrong numbers, you pay for more talk time than your callers used.

Ask one more thing: does the overage rate change when you move up a plan? On most published rate cards it falls as the bundle grows. That means the cheapest fix for a steady overage is often the next tier, not a bigger bill on the current one.

GreetKeeper prints the overage rate beside every plan: $0.45, $0.35 and $0.25 a call. You know what a busy month costs before it happens.

Every call is billed the same, however long it runs. A twelve-minute call from a new customer explaining a leak costs you what a one-minute reschedule does.

GreetKeeper screens out robocalls and spam calls before the greeting, and they never touch your allowance. If you keep going over, moving up a plan drops your rate. Annual billing gives you two months free on any plan.