Two numbers decide your bill and neither is on the page
The headline price is the number vendors compete on. The overage rate and the definition of a billable unit are the numbers that determine what you are charged, and most pricing pages carry neither.
The short version
- Number one: the rate after the allowance. Rosie, Ruby, Slang.ai and AnswerConnect do not publish it.
- Number two: what counts as a billable call, minute or caller. Almost nobody defines this publicly.
- A call that rings out, a hang-up during the greeting and a straight transfer may each be billable or not, and vendors differ.
- Per-minute billing that rounds up to the whole minute makes a fifteen-second wrong number cost a full minute.
The overage rate, and who publishes it
Dialzara publishes on every tier, from $0.48 a minute down to $0.35. Goodcall publishes $0.50 per additional unique customer. Smith.ai's per-call rates are published and fall as the tier rises. Ours are $0.45, $0.35 and $0.25 a call.
Rosie, Ruby and Slang.ai publish a monthly price and no overage rate. AnswerConnect publishes no pricing at all. That is four of the eight vendors we track where a busy month cannot be estimated from public information.
Slang.ai is the extreme case: no call or minute volume is published at any tier, so there is nothing to compare consumption against in either direction. Their entry price is $399 per location and what that buys is not stated.
The second number, which nobody asks about
What is a billable call? If a robocall rings for four seconds and hangs up, did you pay for it? If a caller reaches the greeting and hangs up before saying anything, is that a call? If the assistant transfers immediately to your team without handling anything, do you pay for both the call and the transfer?
These sound like edge cases until you look at a month of logs and find that spam and hang-ups are a meaningful share of inbound volume. On a per-call meter that share is the difference between the bill you expected and the one you got.
Per-minute billing has its own version. AnswerConnect is reported to round each call up to the whole minute, which means a twelve-second wrong number costs sixty seconds. Across a few hundred such calls that is real money, and it is invisible in a comparison of headline rates.
How to get both numbers before you sign
Ask for the overage rate in writing, per unit, at the tier you intend to buy. If it varies by tier, get all of them, because the rate is part of what you are choosing between.
Ask for the billable-unit definition in writing too, with the edge cases named: ring-outs, hang-ups in the greeting, immediate transfers, and calls the assistant could not handle at all. A vendor confident in their answer will give it quickly.
Then take last month's call log and compute the bad case yourself. If a vendor will not give you the inputs to do that, you have learned something useful about how they intend the relationship to go.
Hear it handle one of your own calls
Your scenario, your greeting, a couple of minutes.