AI receptionist cost: what you'll actually pay

You've probably got three tabs open. One vendor charges by the minute, one by the call, and one by something called a "unique customer". One headline price includes a phone number and another doesn't. Somewhere at the bottom of each page is a line about overage that you'll only think about when the first big bill arrives.

This guide is about AI receptionist cost in practice: how the different pricing models work, what they come to for a real business, which costs sit outside the headline price, and how the whole thing compares with paying a person to answer the phone. We sell an AI receptionist, Klugon, so we've held our own pricing to the same standard as everyone else's, including the parts that don't flatter us.

All competitor prices below were taken from each vendor's own pricing page as of October 2026. Prices change, so check the linked page before you decide.

AI receptionist cost at a glance

Here are the entry-level plans of six services, with the unit each one bills by. Five are AI receptionists. Ruby is a live, human virtual receptionist service, included because it's what many small businesses compare an AI against.

Two things jump out. First, entry prices sit between about $30 and $250 a month, which is a narrow band compared with how different the plans are underneath. Second, the units are all different, so the cheapest headline price is often not the cheapest bill. The rest of this guide is about turning these into numbers you can compare.

Smith.ai also lists a free plan with 25 calls a month and $3.00 a call after that. Most of the others offer a free trial instead: Dialzara and My AI Front Desk list 7 days, and Klugon's trial is 7 days with a card required.

The main AI receptionist pricing models

Every AI receptionist price is built on one of a handful of models. Knowing which one you're looking at tells you where the risk sits.

Per-minute bundles

You pay a monthly fee for a block of minutes, and extra minutes cost a set rate. Dialzara, My AI Front Desk and Klugon's voice agent all work this way, and so does Ruby on the human side.

Who it suits: businesses with short, predictable calls. A salon whose calls are mostly "can I book a cut on Thursday" uses few minutes per call.

Where it bites: long calls. If your callers describe a problem before they book, such as a leaking boiler or a car that won't start, minutes per call go up and so does the bill. Also watch how overage is counted. Some vendors bill extra minutes one at a time; Klugon bills them in started blocks of 100, which means 101 extra minutes cost the same as 200.

What to ask: how a minute is measured, whether calls are rounded up, and whether minutes on hold or in a voicemail count.

Per-call pricing

You pay a fixed amount per answered call, regardless of length. Smith.ai's AI receptionist is priced this way: $2.00 a call on its smallest Pro option, falling to $1.67 at 300 calls a month, with extra calls between $2.10 and $2.50 depending on the plan.

Who it suits: businesses with long calls, where a per-minute plan would add up. A three-minute intake call and a thirty-second "are you open?" call cost the same.

Where it bites: lots of short calls. If half your calls are opening-hours questions, you're paying the same for those as for a full booking.

What to ask: what counts as a call. Smith.ai's page talks about "real calls", so ask how spam, wrong numbers and hang-ups are treated by any per-call vendor.

Per-customer pricing

You pay per distinct caller per month. Goodcall uses this model: Starter is $79 for 100 unique customers, Growth $129 for 500 and Scale $299 for 2,000. Its page says a unique customer is one phone number counted once a month, repeat callers in the same month count once, and spam and wrong numbers don't count. Minutes aren't metered.

Who it suits: businesses whose customers ring several times about the same job. A builder whose client calls four times in a week about a kitchen fit pays for one customer, not four calls.

Where it bites: businesses with many one-off callers, such as a takeaway or a busy shop, where nearly every call is a new number.

What to ask: how the vendor treats withheld numbers, and what happens to calls once the monthly customer count is used.

Flat fees with credits

Some plans charge a fixed monthly fee and then draw extras from a pool of credits. My AI Front Desk's Business-in-a-Box plan is $99 a month with 200 voice minutes; extra minutes are 25 credits each, where 1,000 credits cost $10 on auto-reload, so 25 cents a minute. Its page also lists a monthly pool of 1,000 overage credits that expires each month, plus separate credit costs for texts, chatbot conversations and form submissions.

Who it suits: businesses using several features of one platform, where a shared pool is simpler than separate bills.

Where it bites: working out the real cost. Credits make it harder to compare with anyone else, and purchased credits are a cash outlay before you use them.

What to ask: the cash value of a credit, what each action costs in credits, and whether unused credits expire.

Per-conversation pricing for messaging

When an AI answers WhatsApp, Instagram or website chat rather than the phone, pricing usually moves from minutes to conversations. Klugon's social agent and chatbot both bill by conversation, where one conversation is one customer thread however many messages it contains. Ruby sells human chat by the chat.

Where it bites: a hard cap. On Klugon's social and chatbot plans, new conversations stop at 110% of the allowance until the next month or a bigger tier. That protects your bill, but in a busy month it means unanswered enquiries. Ask every vendor what happens when the allowance runs out: overage, a hard stop, or an automatic upgrade.

How to compare AI receptionist cost per call

Headline prices don't compare. Your bill for your call pattern does. The method is simple:

1. Take your monthly answered calls plus the calls you currently miss.
2. Multiply by your average call length to get minutes.
3. Estimate how many distinct callers that is, for per-customer pricing.
4. For each vendor, find the cheapest plan that covers the month, including overage.
5. Divide by the number of calls to get a cost per call.

Here's that worked through for two made-up businesses. These are assumptions, not data from any real business. Swap in your own.

A small practice: 300 calls a month

Assumptions: 300 calls a month, averaging 2.5 minutes, so 750 minutes. About 70% come from distinct numbers, so 210 unique callers.

The range for My AI Front Desk is there because its page lists a monthly pool of 1,000 overage credits, worth about $10, and how that is applied affects the total. For Goodcall, Starter plus 110 extra customers would be about $166, so Growth is cheaper.

A busy firm: 1,000 calls a month

Assumptions: 1,000 calls a month at 2.5 minutes, so 2,500 minutes, from about 700 distinct callers.

On Klugon, the Starter plan with overage would have been $333 (15 started blocks of extra minutes at $15, plus the plan and number), so Business is the cheaper choice at this volume.

What these tables don't tell you

Cost per call is a starting point, not a verdict.

• Repeat callers change everything for per-customer pricing. If 90% of your callers are new each month, Goodcall's numbers rise; if 40% are, they fall a long way.
• Call length changes everything for per-minute pricing. Double the average call to five minutes and every per-minute row roughly doubles in overage, while Smith.ai's per-call price stays where it is.
• Features differ. These are prices, not product comparisons. Whether a service books appointments into your calendar, answers WhatsApp, or can put a caller through to a person matters more than a few cents a call. Our comparison pages for Smith.ai, Goodcall, My AI Front Desk, Dialzara and Ruby go through each one feature by feature.
• The cheapest at your volume today may not be at next year's. Run the numbers for your busiest month and for a month 50% busier.

How call patterns change the cost by trade

The same vendor can be the cheapest option for one business and the most expensive for the next, purely because of how its customers call. A few patterns we see across trades, with the pricing model each one favours.

Salons, barbers and beauty studios

Calls are short and mostly about booking: a service, a day, a stylist. Many are from regulars. Per-minute bundles usually work well, because a booking call rarely runs past two minutes. Per-call pricing tends to be poor value here, since you pay the same for a thirty-second "are you open on Monday?" as for a full booking. Busy periods are predictable, such as the run-up to Christmas and the weeks before school proms, so size the plan for those months.

Plumbers, electricians and other trades

Calls run longer, because the caller describes the problem: where the leak is, what the boiler display says, whether there's water coming through the ceiling. The same customer often rings back about the same job. Per-call and per-customer pricing both look better here than for a salon, and a per-minute plan needs a bigger allowance. Winter is the busy season for heating engineers, and an overage bill in January is worth planning for.

There's also a call type the AI shouldn't own: a real emergency. Whatever the price, check how the vendor gets an urgent call to a person. On Klugon, that's a flag in the inbox and, on the Business tier and up, a Slack or Zapier alert, not a transfer, which is fine for "my tap drips" and not fine for "I can smell gas".

Clinics and practices

Call lengths are moderate, but a share of calls must go to a person: clinical questions, test results, anything that sounds urgent. The AI's job is to book, answer the practical questions (parking, prices, what to bring) and pass the rest on. Price matters less than how that handover works, so weigh call transfer and handover heavily against cost.

Restaurants and takeaways

High volumes of short calls with sharp peaks around service times and in December. Many callers are one-off, so per-customer pricing loses much of its advantage. Messaging matters too: for many restaurants, bookings also arrive on WhatsApp and Instagram, which per-minute voice plans don't cover. If most of your enquiries are messages, price the messaging side first and the phone second.

Professional services

Fewer calls, longer ones, and each caller is potentially worth a lot. A law firm or an accountant may take 150 calls a month, but an intake call can run five minutes. At low volumes like this, the difference between vendors is small in absolute terms, and the features (intake questions, conflict checks done by a person, a clean hand-off) matter far more than the per-minute rate.

Hidden costs to ask about

The headline price is the part vendors want you to compare. These are the parts that land on the bill or in your diary later.

Phone numbers and call forwarding

Some plans include a number and some don't. Klugon charges $9 a month for each phone number, on top of the plan, and Starter allows one. Ask every vendor directly whether a number is included and how many.

If you keep your existing number and forward it, two more costs can appear. Your own phone provider may charge for forwarded calls. And if the AI's number is in another country, forwarding can be billed as an international call. Klugon's number search defaults to US numbers, so if you're elsewhere, check what's available first. Our call forwarding guide covers the set-up.

Number porting is another one to ask about. Klugon doesn't support porting, so keeping your number means forwarding it or connecting your own phone system over SIP, which needs our Business tier.

Overage blocks and rounding

Overage is where the cheapest-looking plan often stops being cheapest. Three questions:

• What's the unit? One minute, one call, or a block. Klugon bills extra voice minutes in started blocks of 100 at $15, so 15 cents a minute, but 30 extra minutes still cost $15.
• Is there a cap? Some services keep answering and bill you; some stop. Klugon's voice agent keeps answering and bills the overage. Klugon's messaging plans stop starting new conversations at 110% of the allowance.
• How are calls rounded? If a 61-second call is billed as two minutes, a business with many short calls pays noticeably more than the headline rate.

Features that sit on a higher tier

A plan can look cheap until the feature you need turns out to be one tier up. On Klugon, the calendar connections (Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar and Calendly), the CRM connections (HubSpot, Zoho and Pipedrive) and the Slack and Zapier alerts all need the voice or social agent on Business, at $299 or $249 a month. Salesforce needs Scale. Bringing your own number over SIP needs voice Business. If you can't work without Slack alerts or Google Calendar, compare Business prices, not Starter.

Make the same check with every vendor: list the three features you can't do without and find the cheapest plan that has all three.

Set-up, onboarding and commitment

Several vendors say plainly that they don't charge set-up fees: Dialzara's page says it has none, and Ruby's says there are no fees for "activation, onboarding, setup, customization". Klugon has no set-up fee either. Ask anyone who doesn't say so.

Annual billing is the other commitment to watch. It's cheaper per month: My AI Front Desk is $79 a month billed annually against $99 monthly, and Klugon's yearly prices are roughly 20% off. Paying yearly before you know your volume can lock you into the wrong tier. Run monthly for a month or two first.

Messaging channel fees

If the AI also answers WhatsApp, there are two bills. The AI vendor charges for its part: Klugon adds $19 a month for each connected WhatsApp number. Meta also charges for some WhatsApp Business Platform messages under its own price list, billed to your WhatsApp Business account. Check Meta's current rates for your country; the Klugon pricing page links to them.

Your own time

No AI receptionist runs itself. Budget time for:

• Set-up. Writing your services, prices, opening hours, booking rules and FAQs. Connecting WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger takes extra work on Meta's side.
• Testing. Ringing it yourself with the awkward questions your customers really ask.
• Upkeep. Updating prices, holiday hours and new services. An AI that quotes last year's prices costs you more than it saves.
• Follow-up. Calls the AI hands over still need a person to ring back. On Klugon, the AI can't put a caller through to you; it flags the conversation for your team, and someone has to act on it.

Currency

Most AI receptionist prices are in US dollars, Klugon's included. If you're paying in pounds or euros, your bank converts each charge at its own rate, and the monthly cost moves with the exchange rate.

What the cheapest AI receptionist won't do

The cheapest plan is only cheap if it does the job. Before comparing prices, write down which calls you need the AI to handle and which you need a person for. Then check what each vendor actually does.

For Klugon, here's what you don't get on any plan today, so you can weigh it against the price:

• No live call transfer. The AI hands the conversation to your team by flagging it in the inbox and, on Business and up, alerting Slack or Zapier. It can't put the caller through.
• No outbound calls, so no reminder calls or callbacks.
• No SMS, so no text confirmations, reminders or missed-call text-backs.
• No automatic confirmations or reminders by email or WhatsApp after a booking. The customer gets a booking reference in the conversation.
• No call recordings, and no email alerts to you.
• Phone numbers only after the free trial. During the trial you test the voice agent in your browser.

Ask every other vendor the same questions. Several of these, call transfer especially, matter more for some trades than others. A dental practice needs clinical questions to reach a person; a takeaway mostly doesn't. If transfer is essential to you, a cheaper plan without it isn't cheaper. If you're still working out what an AI receptionist covers at all, what is an AI receptionist is the place to start.

AI receptionist cost vs a human receptionist

The comparison most owners actually make is with a person. It's worth doing properly, because wages are only part of the cost of employing someone.

In the US

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wage for receptionists was $18.27 an hour in May 2025, or $38,010 a year.

Wages aren't the whole cost. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 found that, across private industry, wages and salaries made up 70.0% of employers' compensation costs and benefits the other 30.0%. Applying that average to a median receptionist gives a total cost of roughly $54,300 a year, or about $4,525 a month. That's an average across all private-sector jobs, so treat it as a rough loading, not a quote for your business.

That buys about 40 hours of cover a week. There are 168 hours in a week, so a single full-time receptionist covers about a quarter of them, minus holidays, sick days and lunch breaks.

In the UK

The National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over from April 2026. Take that as the floor and work it through for a 37.5-hour week:

The National Insurance rate and threshold are from HMRC's rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027. The same page sets the Employment Allowance at £10,500, which many small employers can use to reduce their National Insurance bill, so your figure may be lower. The pension figure uses the statutory 3% employer minimum on the qualifying earnings band.

That's a minimum-wage floor. Plenty of receptionists earn more. For context, the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings put median full-time gross annual pay across all jobs at £39,039 in April 2025. That's every occupation, not receptionists specifically. Recruitment, training, holiday cover and equipment come on top of all of this. For the full breakdown, see our guide to how much a receptionist costs.

Human answering services

A live answering service sits in between. On Ruby's published plans, as of October 2026, $250 buys 50 receptionist minutes a month, which is $5 a minute, and the 500-minute plan is $1,725, or $3.45 a minute. A real person answers, and that's what you're paying for. At the 750 minutes a month in our small-practice example, you'd be past Ruby's largest published plan.

Putting the numbers side by side

The gap is large, but it isn't a like-for-like swap, and anyone who tells you it is wants to sell you something. A receptionist does far more than answer the phone. They greet people, take payments at the desk, calm an upset customer, notice a double booking, and transfer a call to the right person. An AI receptionist answers calls and messages, books and takes details around the clock, and hands the rest to your team.

For most small businesses, the realistic choice isn't AI or a person. It's whether to keep losing the calls nobody is free to answer, at lunch, after hours and while everyone is with a customer. We set out the trade-offs in more depth in AI receptionist vs human receptionist.

What missed calls cost against the price

The other side of the sum is what you lose today. You'll need your own numbers for this, but here's the method.

Say you miss 5 calls a week, and 1 in 4 of those callers would have booked a $60 appointment. That's 260 missed calls a year and 65 lost bookings, or $3,900 in lost revenue. Klugon's voice Starter plan with one number costs $1,296 a year on monthly billing. Change the assumptions and the answer changes: a plumber whose average job is several hundred dollars needs to win back far fewer calls; a café whose calls are mostly "are you open?" may not need a phone AI at all.

Two cautions. Not every missed caller is lost; some ring back. And an AI won't convert every call it answers. Use conservative numbers. Our guide to missed calls and lost revenue goes through how to measure what you're missing from your phone provider's logs.

Klugon's AI receptionist cost, on the same terms

Here's our own pricing, set out the way we've set out everyone else's. The Klugon pricing page has the full detail, and the plan cards are at the top of that page.

Three products, billed separately. The AI voice agent answers your phone and voice calls from your website. The AI social agent answers WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, with Telegram in a limited form. The AI chatbot answers on your website.

Add-ons: $9 a month per phone number; $19 a month per connected WhatsApp number (social Starter allows one, Business up to 3, Scale up to 10); extra voice minutes at $15 per started 100.

Yearly billing: roughly 20% off the plan price, paid in one charge. Add-ons aren't discounted.

The trial: 7 days, one per product. A card is required at the start and charged when the trial ends unless you cancel. You can't add a phone number during the trial; you test voice in the browser, and real calls start once the plan is paid.

Where we're good value: businesses with moderate call volumes and short-to-medium calls, because the included minutes are generous for the price, and businesses that want the same assistant on the phone, WhatsApp and the website.

Where others may suit you better: at very low volumes, a $29 plan with 60 minutes costs less than our $108 minimum for phone calls. If most of your callers ring several times a month, per-customer pricing like Goodcall's can come out lower, as it did in our 1,000-call example. And if you need live transfer to a person, we don't offer it today, so a service that does will be worth more to you than our price suggests.

If you're comparing several tools on features as well as price, the best AI receptionist for small business roundup scores them on the same criteria, Klugon included.

When an AI receptionist isn't worth the money

There are businesses where the honest answer is "not yet", and it's cheaper to hear that before the trial than after a year of billing.

• You rarely miss calls. If someone is always free to answer and your phone log shows almost no missed calls, an AI adds cost without adding much.
• Your calls need judgement on almost every call. If nearly every caller needs a decision only you can make, the AI will spend its time handing calls over, and you'll still be ringing everyone back.
• Your calls must be transferred live. If callers expect to be put through to a named person, and a call-back isn't acceptable, a service without live transfer is the wrong product, however cheap.
• Your information changes daily and nobody will keep it updated. An AI answers from what you've given it. If prices, stock or availability change constantly and no one updates them, it will give out wrong answers.

None of these is a reason to rule it out for good. They're reasons to fix the underlying issue first, or to use the AI only for the hours and channels where it clearly helps, such as evenings and weekends.

Measuring whether it pays for itself

Once it's live, give it a full month before you judge the cost. Then look at four numbers.

1. Calls and conversations answered, compared with the calls you were missing before. On Klugon, the analytics page shows conversations, phone calls with minutes talked, and the busiest hours.
2. Bookings and leads it created. Klugon's analytics page counts bookings and leads, so you can set them against the monthly bill.
3. How much it handed over. A high share of conversations handed to a person means either the AI is missing information, or the calls really do need a person. Klugon shows the percentage handled without handover, and the insights page lists questions it couldn't answer well.
4. Cost per booked customer. Divide the monthly bill by the bookings and leads that came through the AI. Compare that with what a new customer is worth to you.

If the cost per booked customer is a small fraction of a customer's value, it's paying for itself. If it isn't, the insights page will usually show why: missing prices, an unclear service list, or questions you never taught it to answer.

A checklist for estimating your own cost

Before you talk to any vendor, gather:

1. Monthly calls, answered and missed, for the last three months, from your phone provider.
2. Average call length. If your provider doesn't show it, time ten typical calls.
3. Distinct callers as a share of calls, if any vendor you're considering prices per customer.
4. Your busiest month, and how much busier it is than average.
5. Messaging volumes: new threads a month on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and your website.
6. Must-have features: booking into which calendar, which CRM, which alerts, whether calls must be transferred.
7. Hours you need covering: just after hours, lunchtimes, or everything.

Then, for each vendor, price your busiest month on the cheapest plan with all your must-haves, add numbers and channel fees, and divide by calls.

Questions to ask any AI receptionist vendor

• What exactly is a billable unit: a minute, a call, a customer or a conversation?
• How are minutes rounded, and does overage come in single units or blocks?
• What happens when my allowance runs out: overage, a hard stop, or an automatic upgrade?
• Is a phone number included? How many? Can I keep my existing number, and how?
• Which of my must-have features are on the plan I'm being quoted, and which need a higher tier?
• Can the AI transfer a live call to a person?
• Does it send text or email confirmations and reminders?
• Is there a set-up fee or a minimum term?
• Is a card needed for the trial, and can I take real calls during it?
• What currency are prices in, and do they include tax?

A vendor that answers these clearly is easier to budget for than one with a lower headline price.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AI receptionist cost per month?

As of October 2026, entry-level paid plans on the vendors' own pricing pages range from $29 to $150 a month, with Ruby's human service starting at $250. For a business taking a few hundred calls a month, expect roughly $100 to $500 depending on the pricing model and call length.

Is per-minute or per-call pricing cheaper?

It depends on call length. Short calls favour per-minute pricing; long calls favour per-call pricing. Work out your average call length and price a typical month both ways.

What hidden costs should I expect?

Phone numbers, overage, features locked to a higher tier, call-forwarding charges from your own provider, messaging fees from Meta if you use WhatsApp, and your own time to set up and maintain the AI.

Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a human receptionist?

On cost alone, yes, by a wide margin. A full-time receptionist at the US median wage costs around $38,000 a year before benefits. But an AI does a narrower job, so compare it with the calls you're missing, not with everything a person does.

What does Klugon cost?

The AI voice agent starts at $99 a month for 1,000 minutes, plus $9 a month for a phone number. The social agent starts at $79 and the website chatbot at $49. Yearly billing takes roughly 20% off.

Do AI receptionists offer free trials?

Many do. Dialzara and My AI Front Desk list 7-day trials, Smith.ai lists a free plan with 25 calls, and Goodcall lets you test a free demo agent. Klugon's trial is 7 days and requires a card; real phone numbers start after it ends.

Can I keep my phone number?

With most services, yes, usually by forwarding your existing number to the AI. With Klugon, you forward to a Klugon number at $9 a month or connect your own phone system over SIP on the Business tier. Porting isn't supported.

What's the cheapest AI receptionist?

By headline price, Dialzara's $29 plan was the lowest we found as of October 2026, for 60 minutes. The cheapest for your business is whichever gives the lowest cost per call at your volume, with the features you can't do without.

Work out your calls, minutes and must-haves, price your busiest month with two or three vendors, and use the trial to check the AI handles your real calls before the first full bill. If you want to see how Klugon's numbers work for you, the AI phone receptionist page shows what you get for them, and you can start a trial from the Klugon home page.