Unlimited call plans hide the price of your busiest month

A service with an unlimited plan still has a point where a customer stops being profitable. It deals with that point through a fair-use clause, a sales call, a forced upgrade or a quiet non-renewal. None of that is wrong in itself. The trouble is that the threshold is almost never published, so you can't tell whether you're near it.

That makes the plan predictable right up until it isn't. A business whose volume doubles finds the limit at exactly the moment the service became most valuable, which is the worst time to renegotiate.

So ask the question in writing before you sign: at what volume does fair use apply, and what happens then? A vendor with a clear answer will give you one.

Take the plan price, divide it by the calls you expect to answer, and add the overage rate for everything past the allowance. That's your cost per call, and it's the only number that lets you compare plans built on different units.

On GreetKeeper the sums are short. Starter is $49 for 200 answered calls, about 25 cents each. Professional is $149 for 750, about 20 cents. Scale is $349 for 2,000, about 17 cents. Annual billing gives you two months free on top.

Now run a busy month. Say you answer 900 calls. On Starter that's $49 plus 700 calls at $0.45, or $364. On Professional it's $149 plus 150 calls at $0.35, or $201.50. You can see that before the month starts, and move up a tier while it's still cheaper to do so.

Robocalls, spam calls and very short calls that GreetKeeper screens out don't count toward your plan. The calls you divide by are the ones a person actually made.

An unlimited price has to cover the heaviest customer out of everyone's subscription. If your volume is modest, you're paying for someone else's busy phone. That makes unlimited the most expensive way to buy a small amount of answering.

A flat fee also hides your own numbers. A metered bill tells you how many calls you took and what each one cost. A flat fee tells you nothing, so a change in your call volume stays invisible until something else surfaces it.

Simplicity is the fair case for unlimited, and it has real value to an owner who doesn't want to watch a meter. A published rate gives you the same calm with the arithmetic on your side of the table.

As of September 2026, a handful of vendors in this category print what the next unit costs. Goodcall counts unique customers: $79 a month for 100 on its Starter plan and $0.50 for each one after, with uncapped minutes. Dialzara prints a per-minute overage on every tier, from $0.48 down to $0.35.

Smith.ai bills per call too. Its Pro plan is $150 a month for 75 to 300 calls, at $2.00 to $2.17 a call. Rosie sells minutes, 250 for $49, and doesn't publish what the next minute costs. Ruby's pricing page leaves its overage rate off as well.

GreetKeeper's rates sit on the pricing page next to the plan prices. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial, every feature on and no card. You can count your real calls for two weeks, then pick the plan your own numbers point to.

Pull the last three months of call logs from your carrier and take the busiest month, not the average. Size the plan to that month, and let the published overage rate absorb the odd spike.

Forward on busy and no-answer first if you only want the calls you miss. The ring count is set where the forwarding is set, and GreetKeeper answers the moment the call arrives.