AI receptionists are priced in at least four different ways, and the headline number tells you almost nothing about what you will pay. A service quoting fifty dollars a month can cost more than one quoting two hundred, depending entirely on how busy you are.
Here is how the models work, and how to find out what each one would actually cost your business before you commit to it.
The four pricing models
Per minute. Inherited from human answering services. You buy a bundle of minutes and pay an overage rate past it. The rate looks small. The bill is not small in a busy month, because your talk time roughly tracks your demand.
Per call. You pay for each conversation regardless of length. Cleaner arithmetic, but it penalises exactly the calls you most want — a caller who rings back to change something costs you twice.
Per booking. Occasionally framed as pay-for-performance, which sounds fair. Watch the definition: does a cancellation count? A reschedule? A booking the caller never turns up for?
Flat, by the size of the business. A fixed monthly price with usage uncapped. The bill does not move when December does. This is what we do — priced by team size, from ninety-nine dollars a month for up to five staff, with calls and texts uncapped. The pricing page has the tiers.
The question that decides which model suits you
It comes down to one thing: is your call volume steady or seasonal?
If it is steady, per-minute and flat pricing land in roughly the same place and you can pick on other grounds.
If it is seasonal — and salons and restaurants almost always are — usage-based pricing means your largest bill arrives in your most expensive month. December, wedding season, the fortnight before a holiday. A flat price moves that risk off your side of the table, and that is worth something separate from the average cost.
Working out your number
Two figures, and you can get both this week.
How many calls a month? Your carrier or phone system can usually tell you. If not, count for a week and multiply by four and a third. Most people guess low, often by half.
How long does a call run? A booking conversation — greeting, request, offering times, confirming — runs longer than people expect. Two minutes is a fair working figure. Message-taking calls are shorter.
Multiply, then run it twice: once for a normal month, once for your busiest. The gap between those two numbers is the thing usage-based pricing exposes you to.
The costs that are not in the headline number
Setup and onboarding. Some charge for it. Ask. Ours is included, and migration of your services, staff and prices is part of it.
Per-number fees. If you have more than one location or line.
Text messages. Reminders and confirmations are often billed separately, per message. For a business sending reminders to every booking, this is not a rounding error. Ours are uncapped.
Integration tiers. The ability to write into your actual calendar is sometimes an upgrade rather than a base feature. Which is close to selling the product without the part that makes it work.
Overage rates. Ask what happens past the bundle, and what the rate is. It is frequently higher than the blended rate you were quoted.
What you are comparing it against
The number that matters is not what a competitor charges. It is what the alternatives cost.
Voicemail is free and loses bookings. Put your own figure on it: if six people a month would have booked and instead called somewhere else, at your average ticket, that is what voicemail costs.
A human answering service bills per minute for messages rather than bookings — the arithmetic is in what an answering service costs.
A part-time receptionist is the honest comparison for a larger business, and at any real wage it is several times the cost of any software on this page. That comparison flatters AI enough that vendors lean on it too hard; a receptionist also does a dozen things software does not.
A note on "free"
Free tiers exist and are usually one of three things: a trial with a time limit, a usage cap low enough that a real business passes it in a fortnight, or a version that cannot write into your calendar. The third is the one to watch, because it looks fully functional until you notice nothing is being booked.
A free trial is a different matter and worth taking. Ours runs thirty days without a card, which is long enough to see a normal month rather than a good week.
What to actually do
Get your two numbers. Model a busy month, not an average one. Ask each vendor for the all-in figure at that volume including texts, setup and any integration tier — and ask them to put it in writing, because the difference between the quoted rate and the all-in figure is where the unpleasant surprises live.
Then ask the only question that determines whether any of it is worth paying for: can it see the live calendar and complete a booking, or does it take a message?