AI receptionist pricing, explained line by line

The plan cards above give you the headline numbers. This page is for the questions that come next, usually around the time you open a spreadsheet: which product you need, how many minutes a month your phone actually uses, what the bill looks like once a phone number and a busy month are added, and what you won't get for the money.

Klugon's AI receptionist pricing is split into three products, each billed on its own. You can take one, two or all three. Every plan has a 7-day free trial, a card is taken at the start, and nothing is charged until the trial ends. Everything below is in US dollars, and every figure comes from the same price list the plan cards use.

If you'd rather see what the AI receptionist does before reading about its price, start there and come back.

How AI receptionist pricing works at Klugon

There are three products, and each one covers a different set of channels:

These are monthly prices. Paying yearly takes roughly 20% off, which we come to below.

A few rules apply across all three:

• Each product is its own subscription. A salon that only cares about phone calls takes the voice agent and nothing else. A shop that lives on WhatsApp takes the social agent. You don't pay for channels you don't use.
• Unlimited assistants on every plan. You can set up a separate assistant for, say, your main line and your out-of-hours line, or one per brand, without paying per assistant. All assistants in one account share the same knowledge base.
• Features follow your best plan. If any product you pay for includes a feature, your account has it. Take the voice agent on Business and the chatbot on Starter, and the Business-level integrations are open to your whole account.
• Allowances reset monthly and don't roll over.

The three products and how to choose

The quickest way to choose is to look at where your customers already contact you, and how they'd rather do it. Most small businesses have one channel that carries most of the load and one or two that matter less.

AI voice agent

This is the product most people mean when they say "AI receptionist". It answers your phone 24/7, in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese or Arabic. It answers from your own information, books appointments into Klugon's built-in calendar using your opening hours, service lengths and staff, takes down leads, and can cancel bookings. It also answers voice in the browser on your Klugon business page, which you can link to or embed on your website with an iframe.

What you're buying is voice minutes. Starter includes 1,000 a month, Business 3,600 and Scale 6,000. A phone number is a separate $9 a month, because some businesses only want voice on their website and don't need one.

Choose it if most of your enquiries arrive by phone, or if the calls you miss are the ones that cost you. There's more on how it handles calls on the AI phone receptionist page.

AI social agent

This one answers messages on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, with Telegram in a limited form (more on that under "What isn't included"). It can answer questions, book appointments, suggest related products and take down leads in the chat.

You buy conversations: 300 a month on Starter, 1,500 on Business and 3,500 on Scale. One conversation is one customer: however many messages they send you on a channel, they count once. Each WhatsApp number you connect adds $19 a month: one on Starter, up to 3 on Business and up to 10 on Scale.

Choose it if your customers already message you more than they ring, which is common for salons, restaurants and shops whose customers found them on Instagram. Setting it up takes more work than the other two, because WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger each need some configuration on Meta's side. The WhatsApp AI chatbot and Instagram and Messenger pages explain what's involved.

AI chatbot

The website chat widget. You paste one script tag into your site, and it works on any site where you can add HTML. It answers from your website and your price list and takes down leads, and on Business and Scale it can also book appointments and hand conversations to your team.

You buy conversations: 100 a month on Starter, 400 on Business and 2,000 on Scale.

Choose it if your website gets steady traffic and people ask the same questions before they book or buy. The AI chatbot for small business page has the detail.

Matching products to the way your customers contact you

Starting with one product and adding a second once you've seen a month of data is a sensible order. Each product has its own trial, so adding one later still gets you 7 free days on it.

Choosing a tier within a product

Tiers differ in three ways: the allowance, the number of phone or WhatsApp numbers, and which integrations and features are open.

Starter suits a single site with one number that wants calls or messages answered and booked. Booking, handover to your team, lead capture and document upload are all included on voice and social Starter. Chatbot Starter is narrower: it answers and captures leads, but booking, handover and document upload start at chatbot Business.

Business is where the integrations open up. On the voice or social agent, Business lets you connect Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Calendly, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive, Slack, Zapier, Notion and Mailchimp. It also adds SIP trunking on voice, so you can connect your own phone system, and removes the "Powered by Klugon" footer from the widget. Business is also the tier to pick if you want Slack or Zapier alerts when the AI hands a conversation over, because those two connections sit at this level.

Scale adds Salesforce, read-only lookups in your own database (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB or Supabase), unlimited phone numbers on voice, and the largest allowances.

A rule of thumb: choose the tier for its allowance first and its features second. Paying for Business because you might connect HubSpot one day is a common way to overspend.

What a voice minute and a conversation are

These two units decide whether a plan fits, so it's worth being precise.

Voice minutes

A voice minute is a minute the AI spends talking with a caller. Two kinds of call count towards your voice allowance:

• calls to your phone number, whether bought from us, forwarded from your existing number or arriving over your own SIP trunk;
• voice calls started from your website or your Klugon business page.

Text chat on your website doesn't count towards voice minutes, and neither do WhatsApp messages. Those belong to the chatbot and social agent.

To estimate your usage, you need two numbers from your phone provider or your call log: how many calls you answer a month, and how long they last on average. Multiply them. A business taking 600 calls a month at an average of 1.5 minutes uses about 900 minutes, which fits inside Starter's 1,000. Call length varies a lot by trade. Booking a haircut is quick. Explaining a boiler fault takes longer.

Conversations

On the social agent and the chatbot, you pay per conversation. One conversation is one customer thread, however many messages it has. On the social agent that means 1 conversation = 1 customer on each channel: a regular who messages you every week is still one conversation, counted in the month they first wrote. A customer who sends twelve WhatsApp messages to ask about prices, check a time and confirm a booking is one conversation, not twelve.

Conversations are counted per product. The social agent counts WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Telegram threads. The chatbot counts website widget threads. A customer who chats on your website and then messages on WhatsApp uses one conversation on each.

What happens when you reach your allowance

The rules differ between voice and messaging.

Voice keeps answering. When you pass your included minutes, extra minutes are billed at $15 per started block of 100. Calls aren't cut off and callers don't hear a "sorry, we're closed" message because you had a busy month.

Social and chat stop taking new conversations at 110% of the allowance. On social Starter, that's 330 conversations in the month. Conversations already in progress carry on, but the AI stops starting new ones until the next month or until you move to a bigger tier. There's no pay-as-you-go overage for messaging. If you hit the limit regularly, the tier is too small.

Estimating your own usage

Before you choose, pull these from the last three months:

1. Answered and missed calls per month, from your phone provider's dashboard or bill.
2. Average call length. If your provider doesn't show it, time ten typical calls.
3. Your busiest month, not your average one.
4. New message threads per month on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Count threads, not messages.
5. Chats or contact-form enquiries from your website.

Size the plan against your busy month. For voice, a busy month only costs overage. For messaging, a busy month that goes past 110% means unanswered new enquiries, which is the outcome you're paying to avoid.

Yearly vs monthly billing

Yearly billing takes roughly 20% off the monthly price, and you pay for the year in one charge.

A few things to know before you pick yearly:

• Add-ons aren't discounted. On a yearly plan, a phone number is $108 a year and a WhatsApp number is $228 a year, the same as 12 monthly payments.
• Extra voice minutes on a yearly plan are added up and billed with the yearly renewal, not each month.
• The allowance is still monthly. A yearly voice Starter plan includes 1,000 minutes each month, not 12,000 minutes to use whenever you like.

Our advice: start monthly. Run it through at least one busy period, check your real minutes and conversations on the analytics page, then switch to yearly once you know the tier is right. The saving is real, but it's smaller than the cost of locking in the wrong tier for a year.

Add-ons and overage

There are three things that can appear on a bill on top of the plan price.

Phone numbers: $9 a month each

To take real phone calls, the voice agent needs a phone number. There are three ways to get one:

• Buy a new number from inside Klugon, at $9 a month.
• Keep your existing number and forward it. We give you a dedicated number at the same $9 a month, and you set call forwarding on your current line. Your customers keep dialling the number on your van, your website and your Google profile. The call forwarding guide walks through it.
• Bring your own number over a SIP trunk. If you have a business phone system that supports SIP, you can point it at Klugon. This needs voice Business or Scale.

Starter allows one number, Business up to three and Scale as many as you need. Number porting isn't supported, so moving a number to Klugon means forwarding or SIP.

Two practical points. The number search defaults to US numbers, so if you're elsewhere, check which numbers are available before you rely on forwarding, because many carriers charge forwarding to a number in another country as an international call. And your own carrier may charge for forwarded calls; that charge is between you and them, not on your Klugon bill.

WhatsApp: $19 a month

When you connect WhatsApp to the social agent, $19 a month is added to that subscription. The WhatsApp number itself is your own, registered through Meta's WhatsApp Business Platform. Klugon doesn't supply WhatsApp numbers; it connects to yours.

Meta also has its own price list for WhatsApp messages, which is separate from ours. According to Meta's WhatsApp pricing page, from 1 October 2026 each business phone number gets 1,000 free service messages a month, with charges after that. Check that page for the rates that apply to your country before you budget.

Each WhatsApp number is $19 a month. Starter connects one number, Business up to 3 and Scale up to 10, which suits a business with several branches or separate lines for sales and bookings. All your numbers are answered by the same assistant, and replies from your inbox go out from the number the customer wrote to.

Extra voice minutes: $15 per started 100

Voice minutes past your allowance cost $15 for each started block of 100. "Started" matters: 30 minutes over costs $15, and 101 minutes over costs $30, because the second block has begun.

Per minute, that's 15 cents, against about 9.9 cents on Starter's included minutes and about 8.3 cents on Business and Scale. Overage is a safety net, not a cheap way to buy minutes.

That gives you a simple way to tell when to move up a tier. Voice Business costs $200 a month more than Starter. Overage of 1,300 minutes costs $195, and 1,400 costs $210. So if you regularly use more than about 2,300 minutes on Starter, Business is cheaper. The same arithmetic between Business and Scale: if you regularly use more than about 4,900 minutes on Business, Scale is the cheaper plan.

Three worked bills

These businesses are made up. The call and message volumes are assumptions, stated so you can swap in your own.

A two-chair hair salon

Assumptions: open six days a week, about 22 calls a day that reach the line, averaging 1.5 minutes. That's roughly 570 calls and 860 minutes a month. Around 60 website chats a month, mostly about prices and parking. The owner is happy to see handovers in the Klugon inbox and doesn't need Slack. Customers keep calling the salon's existing number, which is forwarded.

On yearly billing, the same set-up is $948 + $468 for the plans and $108 for the number, so $1,524 for the year, against $1,884 paid monthly.

What to watch: chatbot Starter doesn't include booking, so the website chat answers questions and takes contact details, and bookings happen on the phone. If the owner wants the website chat to book too, chatbot Business at $149 is the step, which makes the monthly bill $257. Many salons would rather keep the $100 and let the phone do the booking. The salons page covers salon booking in more detail.

A heating and plumbing firm with an emergency line

Assumptions: two numbers, a main line and an out-of-hours line, both forwarded. The owner wants new jobs to appear in Google Calendar and a Slack alert whenever the AI flags a call for the team. Winter is busy: 2,100 calls a month averaging 1.9 minutes, or about 3,990 minutes. Summer is quieter: 1,400 calls, about 2,660 minutes.

Google Calendar and Slack mean voice Business.

Should this firm be on Scale? Scale plus two numbers is $517. Business stays cheaper until overage passes 13 blocks, which means more than about 4,900 minutes in a month. At 3,990 minutes, Business wins comfortably.

What to watch: the AI can't put an emergency caller through to the engineer on call. It takes the details, flags the conversation for the team and posts the alert to Slack, and someone rings the customer back. If your emergencies need a person on the line within minutes, plan for that: a Slack channel someone actually watches, or keep a human on the out-of-hours line and use the AI for routine calls. The trades page goes through which calls to keep for yourself.

A neighbourhood restaurant on every channel

Assumptions: about 900 calls a month for bookings and opening-hours questions, averaging 1.2 minutes, which is 1,080 minutes. About 260 WhatsApp and Instagram threads a month. About 80 website chats. One forwarded number, WhatsApp connected.

What to watch: December. If WhatsApp and Instagram threads jump to 400, social Starter stops taking new conversations at 330. For a restaurant, those unanswered threads are the Christmas party enquiries. Moving the social agent to Business for that month ($249 instead of $79) lifts the allowance to 1,500. Voice is less of a worry, because a busy month only adds overage. And Meta's own WhatsApp charges, if any apply to you, are billed by Meta, not by us.

None of these three businesses needs Scale. Scale is for high volumes, Salesforce, database lookups or a large number of phone lines.

The 7-day free trial and how billing works

What happens during the trial

Each product has a 7-day free trial, one per product per business. You can start a trial on the voice agent this month and on the chatbot next month, and each gets its own 7 days.

During the trial you can set up your assistant, add your services, opening hours and knowledge, and test the voice agent from your browser. What you can't do is add a phone number. Numbers activate once the trial ends and the plan is paid. That means the trial is for getting the assistant right: its answers, its greeting, its booking rules. Real callers reach it after the trial.

The chatbot and social agent can go live with real customers during the trial, because they don't need a number from us. The chatbot is a paste of one script tag. WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger depend on how quickly you complete Meta's side of the setup.

Card details and the first charge

A card is required to start the trial. It's taken at checkout and charged when the trial ends, unless you cancel before then. Cancel during the trial and you pay nothing. If no payment method is on file when the trial ends, the trial is cancelled.

There's no free plan. An account without a subscription can sign up and look around, but none of the products answers customers. A call to a number with no live voice plan hears that the business can't take calls right now.

Invoices, plan changes and cancelling

Billing runs through Stripe. The Billing page in your dashboard shows each product's status (on trial, active or cancelling), the date the trial ends, and your invoices. "Payment details and invoices" opens Stripe's billing portal, where you can update your card, change plan or cancel.

All prices are in US dollars. If your card is in pounds or euros, your bank converts the charge at its own rate.

What isn't included

A pricing page that lists only what you get isn't much use to a sceptical buyer. Here is what Klugon doesn't do today, on any plan.

Things no plan includes

• Live call transfer. The AI can't put a caller through to you or a colleague. When a call needs a person, it hands the conversation to your team: it marks the conversation as needing a person in your inbox and, if you've connected them, posts to Slack or Zapier. Someone then calls the customer back. Where the plan cards mention handover, this is what it means. The handing calls to staff article explains how to set this up so nothing waits too long.
• Outbound calls. The AI answers calls. It doesn't make them, so there are no reminder calls or callbacks.
• SMS of any kind. No text confirmations, reminders or missed-call text-backs.
• Automatic booking confirmations and reminders. The customer gets a booking reference in the conversation itself. Nothing is sent afterwards by email, WhatsApp or text.
• Email or push alerts to you. New leads, bookings and handovers reach you through Slack or Zapier, or you check the inbox and the insights page.
• Call recordings. Every call appears in your inbox, but there's no audio recording, and the written log may contain only the AI's side.
• Number porting. Keep your number by forwarding or SIP, as above.
• A free tier.

Plan features to read carefully

A few things are worth knowing before you pick a tier:

• Nothing sends follow-up messages automatically. There are no follow-up sequences or abandoned-cart messages on any plan.
• There's no separate multi-location tooling. An account has one business address. If you run several sites, talk to us before you buy.
• Removing the "Powered by Klugon" footer is the extent of the branding options. There's no further white-labelling.
• Custom tools (Scale) means read-only lookups in your own database, using named queries you define.
• Dedicated onboarding and priority support (Scale) and onboarding support (social Business) are service promises. We don't publish response times or an onboarding programme, so don't buy a tier for them alone.
• Payment links in chat (social Business and up) aren't ready for taking card payments through Stripe, so don't choose a tier for them. PayPal, using your own PayPal account, does work on the same tiers.
• One WhatsApp number per account. More than one isn't possible yet.
• Telegram works only in a limited, manual form and isn't self-serve. Plan around WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
• Instagram needs Meta to approve the app's messaging permission before the public can message it. Until then, only people with a role on the app can.

Integrations by tier

This one catches people out, so here it is in one place:

• Slack, Zapier, Notion, Mailchimp, Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Calendly, HubSpot, Zoho and Pipedrive need the voice or social agent on Business or Scale.
• Salesforce needs voice or social Scale.
• The chatbot alone doesn't open any of these, on any tier. If you only buy the chatbot and want Slack alerts, you'd need the voice or social agent on Business as well.
• Google Analytics and Mixpanel need Business or Scale on any product. The analytics page inside Klugon is available on every plan.

The CRM connections send a lead when the AI decides to send it, not automatically for every lead. The calendars can be checked and written to after setup, but Klugon's own calendar is the one bookings always go into. The Slack and Zapier pages explain what each sends.

How the price compares with a receptionist

Most people reading AI receptionist pricing are comparing it with a person, or with an answering service.

In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for receptionists at $18.27 an hour in May 2025, or $38,010 a year, before taxes and benefits. In the UK, the National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over from April 2026, which comes to about £24,800 a year for a 37.5-hour week before employer costs. For context, the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings put median full-time pay across all jobs at £39,039 in April 2025.

Voice Starter with one number is $1,296 a year on monthly billing. That's not a like-for-like swap. A person can transfer calls, deal with an upset customer, spot a problem the AI wouldn't, and do the rest of the front-desk work. The AI answers at 3am on a Sunday and doesn't take holidays. For most small businesses, the realistic plan is to keep the people they have and stop losing the calls nobody was free to answer.

The full comparison, with employer costs and answering services, is in our guide to AI receptionist cost. If you're weighing tools against each other rather than against a person, the best AI receptionist for small business roundup compares them on the same criteria.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free plan?

No. Every product has a 7-day free trial, but after that a paid plan is needed for the AI to answer customers. An account without a subscription can't take calls or messages.

Do I need a card to start the free trial?

Yes. A card is taken when you start the trial and charged when the 7 days end. Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing.

Can I use a real phone number during the trial?

No. Phone numbers can only be added once the trial has ended and the plan is paid. During the trial you test the voice agent from your browser, so you can hear how it answers before customers do.

Can I keep my existing business number?

Yes, by forwarding it to a Klugon number ($9 a month) or, on voice Business and Scale, by connecting your own phone system over SIP. Number porting isn't supported.

What happens if I use more voice minutes than my plan includes?

Calls keep being answered, and extra minutes are billed at $15 per started block of 100. If that happens most months, the next tier up is usually cheaper.

What happens if I go over my conversations on the chatbot or social agent?

New conversations stop at 110% of your allowance, and conversations already going carry on. There's no pay-as-you-go top-up for messaging, so pick the tier that covers your busiest month.

Do I pay per assistant or per channel?

Neither. Every plan includes unlimited assistants. You pay per product: the voice agent covers phone and website voice, the social agent covers messaging apps, and the chatbot covers the website widget.

Can the AI transfer a call to me?

No. It hands the conversation to your team by flagging it in the inbox and, on Business and up, alerting Slack or Zapier. Someone on your team then calls the customer back.

Is yearly billing worth it?

It saves roughly 20% on the plan price, and add-ons aren't discounted. It's worth it once you've run a month or two and know your tier is right.

What currency are the prices in?

US dollars. If you pay with a card in another currency, your bank converts it.

If you've read this far, you know more about the bill than most people do before they buy. Pick the product that matches your busiest channel, size it for your busiest month, and use the trial week to get the answers right. The plans are at the top of the page, and you can start a trial from there.