A per-minute meter punishes the calls you want
Most of this category bills by the minute. That means the four-minute conversation that ends in a booking costs four times the one-minute call that ends in a hang-up, which is backwards.
The short version
- Rosie, Dialzara, Ruby, Abby Connect and AnswerConnect all bill by the minute. Smith.ai bills per call. Goodcall bills per unique caller.
- A per-minute meter makes your best calls your most expensive ones, because a booking takes longer than a wrong number.
- It also gives a vendor a quiet incentive that points the wrong way: a slower assistant bills more.
- Very short calls, robocalls and screened calls don't count toward a GreetKeeper plan, so a per-call meter never bills you for junk.
The arithmetic, with real published rates
Take a caller who rings a dental practice, describes a chipped tooth, gets offered three slots, picks one, gives a date of birth and hangs up. That is a four-minute call and it is the single most valuable thing the phone did all day.
On Dialzara's Business Lite plan, published at $29 for 60 minutes with $0.48 a minute after that, four minutes of overage costs $1.92. A one-minute wrong number costs $0.48. The good call costs four times the bad one.
On our Starter plan the same four-minute call costs $0.45 once the 200 included calls are used, and a ten-minute call costs the same. The meter charges for the conversation, not for the time it took to get the booking right.
Rosie's Professional plan is $49 for 250 minutes. If your average call runs four minutes, that is roughly 62 conversations. Our $49 covers 200 answered calls with booking included, while Rosie keeps booking behind its $149 tier as of September 2026.
The incentive problem nobody mentions
A per-minute meter means the vendor earns more when the assistant is slower. Nobody is going to build a deliberately sluggish product to inflate a bill, but incentives do not have to be acted on cynically to shape a roadmap. If a change makes calls thirty seconds longer and slightly more thorough, a per-minute vendor has no reason to resist it and a per-call vendor does.
A per-call meter puts us on the side of that trade where a shorter, cleaner call costs us nothing. The vendor's incentive and the caller's interest point the same way.
Goodcall also steps away from the minute: unique-caller pricing with uncapped minutes, published at $79 for 100 unique customers. Goodcall prices per agent, and each phone number is an agent, as of September 2026. A GreetKeeper allowance covers every number on the account.
What happens to the short calls
The usual case for per-minute billing is a line full of short calls: hours questions, quick confirmations, wrong numbers. On a simple per-call meter, each of those would cost a whole call.
GreetKeeper's meter leaves the junk out. Very short calls, robocalls and calls the assistant screens out don't count toward your plan, and the pricing page carries the table of what counts.
What we would push back on is buying a per-minute plan without knowing the overage rate, and four of the vendors we track do not publish theirs. A meter you cannot compute is not a price, it is a promise.
Run the comparison on your own bill
Take last month's phone bill, work out your average call length, and run both meters. The arithmetic uses published vendor rates you can check yourself, and our rates sit on the pricing page next to every plan.
Price your busiest month as well as your average one. The bad month on a per-minute plan and the bad month on a per-call plan can differ by more than the headline prices do.
Hear it handle one of your own calls
Your scenario, your greeting, a couple of minutes.