What Does an AI Receptionist Cost? $49 to $599

Disclosure before anything else. This page sells nothing and takes no commission from any tool named on it. Every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 12 August 2026 and is dated where it appears. Nothing here is a measurement. We have not run these products, not counted their answer rates, and not tested their transcription against any accent. Where a question can only be settled by using the thing, this page says so and tells you what to measure.

What does an AI receptionist cost, in 30 seconds?

$49 to $598.80 a month, from the nine vendors that publish a price. Thirty-three of the forty-two tools we track in this category publish nothing and route you to a sales call.

Buy the cheapest tier that covers your call volume. The unit economics are identical at every price point in this category, which we show below, so the extra money buys a higher ceiling rather than a better rate. If you take fewer than about 260 four-minute calls a month, the $49 tier is the whole answer.

Do not buy one at all if your callers need someone who can see the shop. The clearest statement of that boundary came from a practitioner rather than a vendor, and it is quoted in full further down.

What is actually being sold here?

Four terms get used for overlapping products and the overlap is not an accident. An AI receptionist answers your main number, handles a scripted set of intents and books into a calendar. An AI answering service is the same product sold to buyers who previously bought a human answering service. An AI voice agent is the underlying capability sold to someone who will build the receptionist themselves. A vertical AI receptionist is the first thing with one industry's vocabulary and integrations pre-loaded.

The distinction that matters commercially is the last one. A general tool at $49 and a dental-specific tool at an unpublished price are not competing on capability; they are competing on how much integration work you are willing to do yourself. We priced that gap separately in the vertical premium.

Who publishes a price, and what is it?

Two of those nine are in the table because people compare them here and should not. Chatbase and Landbot do not answer telephones. They are chat tools, they are good ones, and their pricing pages describe answering customer questions around the clock in language indistinguishable from the voice products. If the job is a ringing phone, the list is seven, not nine.

How does the pricing actually work?

Almost every tool here charges a flat monthly fee with a minute or call allowance behind it, and the allowance is what you are really buying. The underlying cost to the vendor is per minute: speech recognition, a model, speech synthesis and telephony, which we cost at a floor of $0.0465 a minute from four published component rates.

That floor is computed from vendors' list prices, not measured from an invoice, and it assumes one clean turn per exchange with no committed-use discount. Real costs run higher. It is still the right number for this purpose, because it tells you the point at which a flat monthly fee stops being profitable for the seller.

Why the vendor's break-even is your best available signal

Divide a monthly price by that floor and you get the number of minutes at which the vendor starts losing money on you. No vendor publishes an allowance in these terms, and several advertise unlimited minutes, so this is the closest thing to a usage ceiling a buyer can compute before signing.

The important column is the last one. Rosie at $49 stops being profitable for Rosie at about twelve four-minute calls a working day. If you take thirty, an unlimited plan at that price is a promise somebody eventually has to renegotiate, and the renegotiation will be at your renewal rather than theirs.

The finding that surprised us

Cost per call at break-even is $0.19 at every single price point in the table. Rosie at $49 and Slang.ai at $399 have identical unit economics, because break-even is price divided by the same floor.

Which means the money does not buy a better rate. It buys a higher volume ceiling and whatever features sit on top. Anyone selling you a dearer tier on the grounds of efficiency is describing something other than the arithmetic.

What does the human alternative cost?

This is where the eight pages this one replaces were weakest: they compared AI against an in-house hire and stopped. There are three alternatives, not two, and the middle one is the one buyers actually use.

The outsourced row comes from a practitioner on Hacker News describing a business he knows: "I have a friend who runs a trade with an outsourced reception. They employ 3 full time people and the reception is about £150/mo for 9-5 manning of calls." That is one person's figure for one business in one market, not a market rate, and we have not verified it against any published tariff. It is here because it is the only concrete number for that option anywhere in our research, and because none of our previous eight pages mentioned the option existed.

Another commenter in the same thread described how those services bill: "you pay a monthly fee with a set amount of work time and then pay overage fees for any usage in excess." Structurally identical to the AI tools above, which is worth knowing before treating the AI option as a new category of thing.

What is the number that actually decides this?

Calls per month, and how many you currently miss. Every vendor page in this category talks about never missing a call and none of them asks how many you are missing, because the answer determines whether any of this is worth doing and they would rather you did not check.

The clearest framing of the economics came from the same thread, describing a mechanic: "he's losing thousands of dollars per month because he misses hundreds of calls per week... That's a lost job, sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair." Treat those as one operator's figures, not an industry benchmark.

Run them against the prices anyway, because the ratio is the point. One recovered $450 job pays for 9.2 months of Rosie. One recovered $2,000 job pays for 40 months of it, or 5 months of Slang.ai. At those ratios the monthly price is close to irrelevant and the only question worth arguing about is whether the thing actually converts a call you were losing.

How do you test one before you buy?

There is one measurement that settles this and you can run it in a fortnight on a free tier. It was proposed, not by a vendor, but by a commenter on that thread asking the question the vendors avoid: "how many people hang up on the AI chatbot vs how many people hang up on the voice message prompt."

That is the whole test. Your current baseline is not a human receptionist, it is whatever happens now when nobody picks up, and for most small businesses that is voicemail. So measure against voicemail.

The two-week hang-up test

• Week one, change nothing. Count inbound calls that reach voicemail, and how many leave a message. Most phone systems report both. The ratio is your baseline conversion, and it is usually far worse than people expect.
• Week two, route unanswered calls to a free tier. Rosie and Goodcall both have one. Count calls that reach the AI, and how many complete the intent you set it, whether that is a booking, a message or a transfer.
• Compare completion rates, not satisfaction. If the AI completes more intents than voicemail captured messages, it pays for itself at these prices almost immediately. If it completes fewer, no discount fixes that.
• Listen to ten recordings from the failures. Not the successes. The failures tell you whether the problem is the product or your script, and those are different purchases.
• Threshold: we would want the AI completing at least as many intents as voicemail captured messages before paying for anything above the entry tier. That threshold is our judgement from the arithmetic above, not a measured benchmark.

What breaks after you buy?

Four failure modes, three of them documented in public by people who hit them.

It cannot understand some of your callers

This is not hypothetical and it is current. On 20 August 2026 the Guardian reported that patients at a Rotherham GP surgery were hanging up because an AI receptionist could not understand Yorkshire accents. That is a live deployment, at scale, on a population that cannot simply take their business elsewhere.

No vendor in this category publishes word error rates by accent or dialect, and we have not tested any of them. If your customers do not speak the accent the model was trained on, this is the risk that matters most and the one you can only find by listening to recordings.

Some customers will hold it against you

From the same practitioner thread, unprompted and strongly put: "The day my dealership starts answering me with AI they lose a customer 100%." Another argued the inverse, that reduced costs produce consumer surplus. Both are opinions on a public forum rather than survey data, and the disagreement is the finding: this is a brand decision as much as an operational one, and it is reversible only slowly.

It cannot answer anything that requires looking

The sharpest boundary anyone drew, again from that thread: "'Hey can you look out and see if Joe's almost done with the blue Chrysler?' is an easy ask for the phone answerer." If a meaningful share of your calls need somebody to physically check something, that share is not addressable by any product on this page at any price.

The unlimited plan is renegotiated at your renewal

See the break-even table. A vendor selling unlimited minutes at $49 is profitable up to about 1,054 minutes and not beyond. Heavy users on unlimited plans are the accounts that get moved to a new tier, and the move happens when the contract renews.

Why won't 33 of them tell you the price?

Because most of the thirty-three are vertical products sold to practices and dealerships rather than to individuals, and vertical products price against the value of the vertical rather than the cost of the minutes.

That is a legitimate model and it produces an illegitimate search experience: a query like dental AI receptionist software returns a page of vendors none of whom will quote you. If you are in one of those verticals, the practical move is to price the general tools first, then treat any vertical quote as the general price plus the integration work you would otherwise do yourself.

Is any of this legal to run?

For inbound calls that a customer places to you, the answer is straightforward and the compliance questions people raise about AI calling mostly do not apply. The FCC's February 2024 declaratory ruling, adopted 2 February and released 8 February as FCC 24-17 in docket 23-362, brought AI-generated voices under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices, which govern calls you make rather than calls you receive.

Recording is the live question instead, and it depends where your callers are. No federal litigation specific to AI receptionists is on record, against 356 dockets matching artificial intelligence and the TCPA generally. Absence of cases is not a safety finding; this is a young product category and most disputes would not surface as federal litigation.

What this page does not know

The one number that would settle this page is the comparative call-completion rate of each tool against voicemail, on the same business, with the same script. That needs a controlled test: one phone line, alternating weeks, identical intent definitions, and enough call volume to survive the variance in a small sample. No vendor publishes it. No independent party we could find has run it. This page has not run it either. Until somebody does, run the two-week test above on your own line and trust that number over any published one, including ours.

We also do not know accent and dialect performance, which the Rotherham case suggests is the highest-consequence unknown in the category. No vendor publishes word error rates by accent. Testing it properly would need recorded calls from your actual customer base scored by a human, which is a day of work and worth more than everything else on this page if your callers have a strong regional accent.

Two prices here are not current. Parakeet and Retell for Healthcare carry no verification date. The practitioner figures are anecdotes: the £150 outsourced reception, the $450 and $2,000 jobs, and the missed-call volume are one person's account of businesses we cannot inspect. They are quoted because no better figure exists in public, and they should move your thinking about ratios rather than your forecast.

So what should you actually buy?

• Under about 260 four-minute calls a month, and callers who mostly want to book something: Rosie at $49, or Goodcall at $79 if you want the larger ceiling. Both have free tiers, so run the hang-up test before paying anything.
• Above that, or with real integration needs: Slang.ai at $399 or Sameday AI at $449. Remember that the extra money buys ceiling and features, not better unit economics.
• If a meaningful share of calls need somebody to look at something: an outsourced human answering service, which is the option this site previously failed to mention and which one practitioner puts at around £150 a month.
• If your callers are wealthy, or your brand is the product: think hard, and read the objections quoted above before deciding. The cost saving is real and so is the customer who hangs up.
• Never on the strength of this page alone. Two weeks on a free tier, measured against your voicemail baseline, beats every number here including ours.

The answer to the question in the title is $49 to $598.80 among the nine that will tell you, and unknowable among the thirty-three that will not. The more useful answer is that at these prices the monthly figure is not the decision. One recovered job pays for most of a year, and whether it recovers one is a question about your callers that only your own phone line can answer.