Ask five suppliers what an AI receptionist costs and you will get five answers that don’t compare, because at least two of them are selling a different product.
There is no single number to publish. There is a structure, and once you can see the structure you can work out your own number in about twenty minutes.
Why nobody publishes one figure
The phrase covers two products that share a name and nothing else.
The first answers the phone, holds a sensible conversation, and takes a message. It is a subscription. You configure it yourself in an afternoon.
The second checks your actual calendar, books the job into it, writes the customer into your records, sends the confirmation, and tells you about it. That is a build. Somebody has to connect it to the systems you already run, and those systems all behave differently.
Both get advertised as an AI receptionist. The gap between them is most of the price.
The three lines every quote should have
Ask for these separately. A supplier who won’t split them is hiding the one that varies.
The monthly platform fee. Quoted prominently, usually modest, and the number people remember. It is rarely the largest line.
Per-minute usage. Quoted less prominently. Voice is billed by call time on almost every product, because the underlying speech and language services bill that way too.
Setup. Anything that needs connecting to your diary, your customer records or your phone system is work, and this is where quotes diverge most. A proposal with no setup line is describing a system that answers and takes messages. That may be exactly what you want, but it is not the product that books jobs.
The per-minute line is the one that surprises people
Two things get underestimated here.
The first is that the meter runs on every answered call, not every useful one. Wrong numbers get answered. Sales calls get answered. The person who rings three times in ten minutes gets answered three times. If a third of your inbound is noise, you are paying for that third.
The second is that call length goes up when the system is doing something useful. A message-taker is done in forty seconds. Something that checks availability, offers three slots, confirms a booking and reads back an address takes longer. The better product costs more per call by design.
So don’t estimate from your enquiry count. Get your actual call minutes for a month from your phone provider, including the rubbish, and multiply by the quoted rate.
The fork that decides the number
Everything above is arithmetic. This is the actual decision.
Subscribe when your callers mostly want to know whether you’re available, what you do, and how to reach you, and when a message landing in your inbox promptly is a real improvement on what happens now. This is a monthly fee and an afternoon of setup. For a lot of businesses it is the right answer and the cheapest thing that works.
Build when the value is in what happens after the call. When the booking has to land in a diary that other people are also writing to, when a deposit needs taking, when the customer record has to be right because six other things read from it. That is integration work, and integration is priced as a project rather than a subscription.
The honest test is this: if the system took a perfect message every single time, would that solve your problem? If yes, subscribe. If the problem is really that messages still need someone to act on them, you are looking at a build, and a subscription will disappoint you at a lower price.
What a build actually costs
I publish mine, because almost nobody in this field does and it makes budgeting impossible.
One agent in production, including connecting it to the systems it needs and testing it against your real calls, sits in a defined range, and each additional connected system is priced separately because each one has its own set of edge cases. The full rates are on the pricing page, in Australian dollars, and the wider piece on what this work costs explains what moves the number in either direction.
A proof of concept is a fraction of that, and worth roughly what you would expect a proof of concept to be worth.
The cost nobody quotes
Your time keeping it current.
Your prices change. You add a service. Your hours shift over Christmas. Something has to update the material the system answers from, and if nothing does, it will keep confidently quoting last year’s rates in a convincing voice. That is worse than not having it.
Budget a few hours a year and decide now whose hours they are. If the answer is nobody’s, factor a support arrangement into the running cost rather than discovering the gap in March.
Working out your ceiling
Price is only half the question. The other half is what the alternative is costing you already, and that number is invisible unless you go and count it.
Missed calls leave no trace. The caller rang the next business on the list and you never learned they existed, which is precisely why people underestimate the figure, often badly. Count genuine missed enquiries for a fortnight, apply your own conversion rate, multiply by an ordinary job value, and annualise it. That gives you the ceiling. Anything below it is arguably worth spending; anything above it isn’t.
The full working is here, including the four situations where the answer comes out as a clear no.
The short version
Three lines: monthly, per-minute, setup. Get them separately.
Estimate the per-minute line from real call minutes, not enquiries. Decide whether a perfect message solves your problem, because that decides subscription or build. Add a few hours a year for maintenance that nobody will quote you.
Then compare the total against what unanswered calls already cost, which is the only number that makes any of it meaningful.
If you’d like the specific version rather than the general one, tell me roughly what your call volume looks like and I’ll tell you which side of that fork you’re on. Sometimes it’s the subscription, and I’ll say so.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an AI receptionist cost?
There is no single number, because two different products go by the same name. An off-the-shelf product you configure yourself is a monthly subscription plus per-minute usage. A system properly wired into your diary, your customer records and your payments is a build, priced as a project. Ask any supplier to separate the monthly fee, the usage charge and the setup, because a quote that merges them hides the line that varies most.
Why do AI receptionist quotes vary so much?
Because the word covers two different things. One answers the phone and takes a message. The other checks your calendar, books the job, updates your customer record and sends the confirmation. The second involves integration work, and integration is where quotes diverge. A proposal with no setup line is almost always describing the first product.
What is the per-minute charge on an AI receptionist?
Most voice products charge a usage rate on top of the monthly fee, billed by the minute of call time. It is the line people underestimate, because it applies to every answered call including wrong numbers, sales calls and hang-ups. Ask what a typical call costs, then multiply by your real monthly call volume rather than your enquiry count.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than an answering service?
Usually on a per-call basis, though the comparison only matters if you were actually paying for an answering service. Most small businesses were not: they were using voicemail and hoping. Against that baseline the right comparison is not cost per call but what you currently lose to enquiries that go unanswered.
What does an AI receptionist cost to run each year?
Take the monthly fee times twelve, add the per-minute charge times your real annual call minutes, add any setup amortised over the period you expect to keep it, then add a few hours a year of someone updating what it says. That last line is never quoted and is the one that gets forgotten.
Wondering what this would look like in your business? A short chat is usually enough to tell.
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