Five of the 42 inbound tools in this directory carry a free tier. That is the short answer, and it is also where every other page on this query stops.
| Tool | Free tier | Answers a phone? | Paid entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goodcall | Yes | Yes | $79/mo |
| Rosie | Yes | Yes | $49/mo |
| Retell for Healthcare | Yes | Yes | $0 + $0.07/min |
| Landbot | Yes | No, chat | $45/mo |
| Chatbase | Yes | No, chat | $40/mo |
Two of the five are not receptionists
Landbot and Chatbase are chatbot builders. They are genuinely free to start, they are genuinely good at qualifying an inbound web lead, and they will not answer your telephone.
They appear on free-AI-receptionist lists constantly, because a list assembled from pricing pages cannot tell the difference between a product that handles inbound conversations and a product that handles inbound calls. Both categories describe themselves as answering questions from customers around the clock.
So the useful count is three, not five. If the job you are hiring for is a ringing phone, your free options are Goodcall, Rosie and Retell for Healthcare.
What a free tier is actually for here
It is a way to hear the thing. Voice products are unusually hard to evaluate from a page, because the two properties that decide whether you keep one are latency and what happens when the caller says something unexpected, and neither is describable in a feature list.
Call your own free tier from your own phone and interrupt it. Talk over it. Ask it something adjacent to what it was configured for. Ask for a human. That five-minute test tells you more than the entire comparison table above, and it is the only part of this evaluation nobody can do for you.
The one thing a free tier will not show you is the bill. Free tiers in this category are capped by minutes or by calls, and the cap is usually low enough that you never reach the volume where the pricing model starts to matter.
Free at the door is not free at the volume
Retell for Healthcare is the clearest case. Its entry price is $0 and it bills $0.07 a minute on top, so the free number on the pricing page is real and the monthly cost is entirely a function of how busy your phone is.
At 300 calls a month averaging four minutes, that is 1,200 minutes and about $84. Rosie's $49 flat plan is cheaper at that volume and Goodcall's $79 is line-ball, which inverts the order the free tier implies. A $0 entry is a pricing model, not a discount.
Who ranks for this question
We bought the search result on 16 August 2026. Eight results: five vendors selling their own free tier, one build-it-yourself tutorial, one Reddit post promoting a product, and one AI-tool directory.
Not one independent publisher appears. Every page answering "is there a free AI receptionist" is written by somebody whose own free tier is the answer, which is exactly why the count of five, and the correction down to three, is not available anywhere else. A vendor cannot publish the denominator, because the denominator includes its competitors.