The honest answer is that an answering service costs somewhere between forty dollars and several hundred a month, and that the range is so wide because the quoted rate is not what determines the bill. The number of minutes does, and nobody can tell you your minutes but you.
So rather than another table of vendor prices that will be stale in a month, here is how to work out what it will actually cost you, before you sign.
The three pricing models
Per minute. The most common. You buy a bundle of minutes and pay an overage rate beyond it. Quoted rates tend to sit somewhere around a dollar to two dollars a minute, with the cheaper rates attached to larger bundles you may not use.
Per call. Simpler to reason about, and it punishes short calls. A fifteen-second "are you open today?" costs the same as a four-minute booking.
Flat monthly. Usually AI rather than human. The bill does not move with volume, which matters more than it sounds — see the December problem below.
The arithmetic nobody does before signing
Take your own numbers. You need two: how many calls go unanswered in a month, and how long a typical one runs.
Most businesses do not know the first number and guess it low. Your phone system or carrier can usually tell you. If you cannot get it, count for one week and multiply — an afternoon of effort that will change what you buy.
Then the second. A call that gets answered, greeted, handled and wrapped up runs longer than people expect. Ninety seconds is a reasonable working figure for a message-taking call; a genuine booking conversation runs longer.
Now multiply. Forty calls at ninety seconds is sixty billed minutes. At a dollar fifty, that is ninety dollars. Not alarming.
But run it again at a hundred and twenty calls — a busy month, a holiday period, a marketing push that worked — and you are at a hundred and eighty minutes, or two hundred and seventy dollars. Same service, same contract, three times the bill.
The four things that make the real bill higher than the estimate
Rounding. Almost every per-minute service rounds up to the next whole minute. If your average call is fifty seconds, you are billed for sixty. That is a twenty percent markup that never appears in the quoted rate.
Wrap-up time. Some services bill the seconds after the caller hangs up while the operator types the message. Ask directly whether talk time or handle time is billed, and get the answer in writing.
Spam and wrong numbers. They are calls. They get answered. They get billed. Ask how they are treated.
The December problem. Your busiest month is your most expensive month. This is the structural flaw in per-minute pricing for a seasonal business: the cost peaks exactly when cash is already stretched, and it peaks hardest in the month you can least afford a surprise.
What you get for it, which is the part that matters
Here is the thing that should decide this, and it is not the price.
A traditional answering service takes a message. The person is real, they are polite, they are genuinely good at sounding like your business. They are also not inside your calendar. They cannot tell a caller whether Thursday at four is free, they cannot hold it, and they cannot book it. What you receive is a list of people to ring back.
So the real comparison is not ninety dollars against a hundred and fifty. It is ninety dollars for a list of callbacks against a flat price for appointments that are already in the book.
Put a number on the difference. If a message-taking service hands you twenty callbacks a month and you convert twelve of them — optimistic, since people book elsewhere while waiting — you have lost eight appointments. At an average ticket of sixty dollars, that is four hundred and eighty dollars of work that walked, every month, on top of what you paid for the service.
That figure swamps the price difference between any two vendors, which is why arguing about per-minute rates is usually the wrong argument.
The questions to ask on the sales call
- Is it talk time or handle time that gets billed?
- What is the rounding increment?
- How are spam calls and wrong numbers treated?
- What happens when I exceed the bundle — what is the overage rate?
- Is there a minimum term, and what is the notice period?
- Can the operator see my live availability and make a booking, or only take a message?
That last one is the only question whose answer changes what you are buying rather than what you are paying.
Where we land
We price flat, by team size, with calls and texts uncapped, which means there is no minute count to model and December costs what June costs. That is a genuine advantage of the model rather than of us specifically — any flat-priced service has it.
The full comparison of a human answering service against an AI one puts the two side by side, including where a human service is still the better choice. There are cases where it is: if most of your calls need judgement, empathy or a decision nobody has written down, a person is worth paying for. If most of your calls are people trying to book an appointment, paying by the minute for someone to write their name down is a strange way to spend money.