How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost? Real 2026 Prices, From $29 Apps to DIY Builds

How much does an AI receptionist cost?

A plumbing shop that misses a dozen calls a week usually asks one question first: what will this cost me per month? The honest answer is somewhere between $29 and $500 for an AI receptionist, and $300 to $2,100 for a human answering service, depending almost entirely on how the vendor counts usage and how many calls you get.

That spread is why most price comparisons are useless. One vendor bills per minute, one per call, one per unique caller, and one per "conversation". This guide prices every major option at the same volume, 300 calls a month at about 3 minutes each, so you can see what you would actually pay. All prices are from the vendors' own pricing pages as of October 2026.

The three ways to get an AI receptionist

You can rent a finished product, build your own on a voice platform, or pay a person. Each one moves cost to a different place.

Off-the-shelf AI receptionists such as Goodcall, Rosie, Dialzara, My AI Front Desk and Smith.ai's AI Receptionist are monthly subscriptions. You fill in your business details, forward your phone line, and it starts answering. Setup takes an afternoon. You pay for convenience and you live with their feature set.

Do-it-yourself builds run on developer voice platforms such as Vapi and Retell AI. You pay a few cents a minute and wire up the calendar, CRM and call flow yourself, usually with n8n or Make. The per-minute cost is the lowest of any option. The build time is not free, and when it breaks at 9pm on a Saturday, it is your problem.

Human answering services such as Ruby and Smith.ai's Virtual Receptionists put a real person on the line. They cost five to twenty times more per call, and for some businesses they are still the right answer.

Off-the-shelf AI receptionist prices

Goodcall bills per unique customer rather than per minute or per call, which is unusual and works in your favor if the same people call repeatedly. Its Starter plan is $79 a month for 100 customers, Growth is $129 for 500 customers and Scale is $299 for 2,000 customers, as of October 2026. Minutes are not metered.

Rosie bills per minute. Professional is $49 a month for 250 minutes but only takes messages: no booking and no transfers. Scale is $149 for 1,000 minutes and Growth is $299 for 2,000 minutes. Rosie's pricing page does not state an overage rate, so ask before you sign.

Dialzara also bills per minute: Business Lite is $29 for 60 minutes, Business Pro $99 for 220 minutes, Business Plus $199 for 500 minutes and Business Elite $349 for 1,000 minutes, with overage from $0.48 down to $0.35 a minute depending on tier.

My AI Front Desk lists Business-in-a-Box at $99 a month, or $79 billed annually, with 200 minutes included and roughly $0.25 a minute after that.

Smith.ai's AI Receptionist bills per call. There is a free tier with 25 calls, then Pro starts at $150 a month for 75 calls. At the 300-call tier its pricing page lists $1.67 per call, which works out to about $501 a month.

If you run on Jobber, its AI Receptionist is a $29 monthly add-on with 30 conversations included and $0.79 per extra conversation, and it is included with unlimited use on Jobber's Plus plan. Housecall Pro sells a similar add-on but does not publish a price; you have to book a demo.

Do-it-yourself on Vapi or Retell

Retell AI publishes its components. As of October 2026 the voice engine is $0.055 a minute, a standard voice is $0.015, the AI model ranges from about $0.003 to $0.08 depending on which one you pick, and US telephony is $0.015. Retell's own worked example lands at about $0.11 a minute. Phone numbers are $2 a month, new accounts get $10 in credit, and 20 simultaneous calls are included.

Vapi charges a $0.05 per minute platform fee and passes through the rest at cost: speech-to-text at about $0.01, an OpenAI model from under $0.01 to about $0.045, and an ElevenLabs voice at $0.015 to $0.024 a minute. Telephony through Twilio adds $0.0085 a minute inbound. With a small model, that is roughly $0.10 a minute. One thing to watch: Vapi's pay-as-you-go tier allows only 4 calls at once, and extra lines are $10 a month each.

The catch is everything around the voice. Someone has to write the prompt, connect the calendar, handle transfers, test edge cases and fix it when a provider changes an API. Several builders documented on this site show the full stack, including a plumbing receptionist on Vapi, Make and Cal.com (builtwithagents.ai/strategy/plumbing-ai-receptionist-vapi-make-calcom). Budget a weekend for a basic version and several weeks of tuning for a good one.

Human answering services for comparison

Smith.ai's human Virtual Receptionists start at $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 calls and $2,100 for 300 calls, with overage from $11.50 down to $8.50 per call. Ruby charges by the minute: $250 for 50 minutes, $395 for 100, $720 for 200 and $1,725 for 500, as of October 2026.

An in-house receptionist costs more again. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median receptionist wage at $38,010 a year, or $18.27 an hour, from May 2025 data. That is about $3,168 a month before payroll taxes, benefits and the cover you need when they are sick or at lunch.

What 300 calls a month costs on each option

Here is the same workload, 300 calls averaging 3 minutes (about 900 minutes), priced on each option's published rates.

Goodcall Growth comes in at $129 as long as fewer than 500 different people call you. Rosie Scale is $149 because 900 minutes fits inside its 1,000. Dialzara Elite is $349 for the same reason. My AI Front Desk is about $274 once you add 700 overage minutes to the $99 base. Jobber's add-on is about $242 on top of your Jobber subscription. Smith.ai's AI Receptionist is about $501. A DIY build is about $92 on Vapi and $101 on Retell, before you count your own time.

The human side: Smith.ai's 300-call human plan is $2,100, and an in-house receptionist is about $3,168 in wages alone.

The pattern is clear. Below about 100 calls a month, the cheapest subscription wins and DIY is not worth the effort. Between 200 and 1,000 calls, the subscriptions bunch together between roughly $130 and $500, and the right pick depends on features, not price. Above that, per-minute DIY builds pull ahead, which is why agencies build on Vapi and Retell and resell.

Paying an agency to build it

Many small businesses do not buy a subscription or build one. They hire someone who builds on Vapi, Retell or GoHighLevel and charges a setup fee plus a monthly retainer. The prices builders report on this site give a realistic range.

One builder closed a truck and trailer repair shop at $1,800 for setup plus $400 a month on a Retell and Make build (builtwithagents.ai/strategy/truck-repair-voice-agent-1800-retell-make). A salon-focused builder sells a Vapi receptionist as a $3,000 package. At the low end, a freelancer reports charging $497 per build using only free tiers. A plumbing automation template on GoHighLevel is pitched at $2,000 to $5,000 for setup plus several hundred dollars a month. These are self-reported prices from the builders, not audited numbers, but they line up with each other.

So an agency build typically costs $500 to $5,000 up front and $200 to $500 a month, while the underlying minutes cost them about $100. You are paying for the build, the tuning and someone to call when it breaks. That can be worth it. Just know what the margin is before you negotiate.

How to work out your own number this week

Step 1: Pull 30 days of call data

Log into your phone provider, whether that is RingCentral, Google Voice, Grasshopper or your carrier's business portal, and export the call log for the last 30 days. Count four numbers: total inbound calls, average call length, how many were missed or went to voicemail, and how many came in after hours. If you use call tracking such as CallRail, the same report is there. Without these four numbers, every quote you get is a guess.

Step 2: Decide what the receptionist has to do

Write one line for each job: take a message, book into a calendar, transfer urgent calls to your cell, answer pricing questions. Message-taking is cheap and every product does it. Booking into your actual scheduling software is where products differ, and it is where Rosie's entry plan, for example, stops. Transfers matter if you get emergencies.

Step 3: Price three options at your volume

Take your monthly calls and minutes from Step 1 and price three options on their own billing unit: one per-minute product, one per-call or per-customer product, and either a DIY quote or an agency quote. Use the rates in this guide as a starting point and confirm on the vendor's page the day you buy. Add the overage cost for a busy month at one and a half times your normal volume, because that is the month that matters.

Step 4: Run a two-week trial on after-hours calls only

Most products have a free tier, a trial or free credit. Set your phone to forward to the AI only after hours or on no answer, so your normal daytime handling is untouched. Call it yourself ten times with real scenarios: a new customer, an angry customer, an emergency, a wrong number, someone asking for a price you do not publish.

Step 5: Count booked jobs, not answered calls

At the end of two weeks, read every transcript. Count calls answered, jobs or appointments booked, and mistakes such as wrong times, wrong addresses or a caller who hung up angry. If it booked even two jobs you would otherwise have lost, it has almost certainly paid for itself at these prices. If it made mistakes you would not accept from a new hire, fix the prompt or try a different product before you roll it out to daytime calls.

When an AI receptionist is not worth it

If you miss fewer than five calls a week and most callers are existing customers who will leave a voicemail and wait, an AI receptionist mostly adds a monthly bill. Fix the voicemail greeting and call people back faster.

If your calls are long, sensitive or high-stakes, such as legal intake for an injury case or a patient describing symptoms, a human answering service or a hybrid that hands off to a person quickly is safer. Smith.ai sells both AI and human plans, which makes it easy to price the two side by side.

And watch spam. Per-minute and per-call products may bill you for robocalls and wrong numbers. Jobber says spam and calls with no conversation do not count toward its limit; most others do not say. Ask.

The case for doing it is strongest when missed calls are new business. One three-person plumbing company documented on this site went from responding to 30 percent of its leads to 94 percent with the same ad spend, running on a stack that cost $8 to $40 a month (builtwithagents.ai/strategy/19-openclaw-agents-local-service-businesses-8-dollars-month). At that point the question is not the monthly fee, it is how fast you can switch it on.

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