AI receptionist pricing runs from about $50 to $800 a month on the plans vendors publish, checked on 10 November 2026: Rosie starts at $49 a month for 250 minutes, Goodcall at $79 for 100 unique callers, and Smith.ai's AI Receptionist charges $1.60 to $2.00 a call on its paid tiers. People cost several times more. Smith.ai's live receptionists start at $300 for 30 calls, Ruby at $250 for 50 minutes, and a part-time receptionist at the BLS median wage of $18.27 an hour costs about $1,580 a month in wages for 20 hours a week.
Every vendor price below was read on the vendor's own pricing page today, and the wage and benefit figures come from bls.gov. The guide is for the person who owns the phone line at a multi-location clinic group, a professional-services firm or any company whose customers still call: what the plans cost, what they leave out, what a person costs, and what the bill looks like at 100, 500 and 1,500 calls a month.
AI receptionist pricing by vendor
| Vendor | How it bills | Published plans | What is included | Terms and limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai AI Receptionist | Per call | Free: 25 calls. Pro: from $150/mo for 75 calls ($2.00 a call), 150 calls at $1.80, 300 at $1.67. Enterprise: from $500/mo for 300 calls ($1.67), 500 at $1.60, 1,000+ custom | 24/7 answering, recordings, transcripts and summaries, lead qualification and routing, scheduling, integrations; Enterprise adds full-service setup and multi-location support | Overage $3.00 (Free), $2.50–$2.17 (Pro), $2.17–$2.10 (Enterprise) a call; month to month, 30 days' notice |
| Goodcall | Per unique customer a month | Starter $79 (100 customers, about 150 calls); Growth $129 (500, about 750); Scale $299 (2,000, about 3,000); Enterprise by quote | No per-minute, per-call or token charges; local number included or forward your own | Extra customers at 79¢, 26¢ or 15¢ by plan |
| Rosie | Minutes a month | Professional $49 (250 minutes); Scale $149 (1,000); Growth $299 (2,000) | Calendar booking and live or warm transfers from Scale; English and Spanish on every plan | Annual billing gives two months free; overage rate not published |
| My AI Front Desk | Minutes plus credits | Business-in-a-Box $99/mo, or $79/mo billed annually, with 200 voice minutes; Partner/Enterprise by quote | Also chatbot, SMS and email allowances | $0.25 per extra minute; aimed at 1–10 interactions a day; enterprise volume as low as $0.07 a minute |
| Retell AI (a platform to build your own) | Per minute | Pay as you go, $0.07–$0.31 a minute; its worked example is $0.11 | Voice infrastructure, voice and model; you or a developer builds the agent | Numbers $2/mo; 20 concurrent calls free, then $8 each a month |
Sources, all opened 10 November 2026: Smith.ai AI Receptionist, Goodcall, Rosie, My AI Front Desk and Retell AI. Smith.ai shows only the base price for Pro and Enterprise and the per-call rate for the larger tiers, so a tier's monthly total is the call count times the rate.
How the billing models differ
The four models reward different call patterns, so the cheapest vendor depends on your calls, not on the headline price.
- Per call (Smith.ai). The bill follows call count, not length. It suits long calls such as intake or booking with several questions. Check what counts: Smith.ai filters known spam before answering and lets you remove up to 10% of calls a cycle as spam.
- Per minute (Rosie, My AI Front Desk, Retell AI). Cheap for short calls such as hours and directions, and dearer for long ones. Ask how minutes are rounded and whether transfer time counts.
- Per unique customer (Goodcall). Repeat callers in the same month cost nothing extra, which suits businesses where the same people call back to confirm or reschedule.
- Platform per minute (Retell AI). The lowest running cost, because you are buying parts, not a finished receptionist. Someone has to build, test and maintain the agent and its integrations.
Two plan details matter more than the price. First, whether booking writes into your real scheduling system or only sends the caller a link. Rosie, for example, sends appointment links on its entry plan and books directly on the calendar from Scale up. Second, what happens when the allowance runs out. Rosie does not publish an overage rate, so a busy month means a plan change.
What a human answering service costs
| Service | How it bills | Published plans | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai Virtual Receptionists (live) | Per call | Starter $300 for 30 calls; Basic $810 for 90; Pro $2,100 for 300; Enterprise by quote | Overage $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 a call; 10% off for a 12-month subscription; wrong numbers and spam not counted |
| Ruby | Minutes a month | $250 for 50 minutes; $395 for 100; $720 for 200; $1,725 for 500 | 24/7 live answering, Spanish and bilingual handling, HIPAA-compliant services listed; AI enhancements included; overage rate not published |
Sources: Smith.ai pricing and Ruby pricing, opened 10 November 2026. On those plans a live-answered call costs $7 to $10 at Smith.ai, and a live minute costs $3.45 to $5.00 at Ruby, by our arithmetic on the plan prices.
What an in-house receptionist costs
BLS puts the median pay of receptionists at $38,010 a year, or $18.27 an hour, in May 2025. The lowest 10% earned less than $13.83 an hour and the highest 10% more than $24.01. In healthcare and social assistance, which employs 42% of receptionists, the median is $19.00 an hour.
Employers pay benefits on top. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 shows private-industry office and administrative support workers costing $25.22 an hour in wages and $11.51 in benefits, so benefits are 31.3% of total compensation, or about 46 cents per wage dollar. Part-time staff often get fewer benefits than that average, so we show wages alone and wages plus benefits as a range.
| Staffing | Hours a month | Wages at $18.27 | With benefits (wages × 1.46) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part-time, 20 hours a week | 86.7 | $1,583 | $2,306 |
| Full-time, 40 hours a week | 173.3 | $3,168 | $4,613 |
The comparison is not one for one. A receptionist also greets visitors, handles paperwork and judges situations a script cannot. But one person answers one call at a time and covers only staffed hours. The calls that go to voicemail at lunch, during a rush or after 5 p.m. are the ones an AI receptionist is usually bought for.
Worked costs at three call volumes
The inputs are examples: an average call of 3 minutes, so 300, 1,500 and 4,500 minutes a month; Goodcall's own ratio of about 1.5 calls per unique customer; list prices on monthly billing, with no discounts. Totals are our arithmetic on the published prices, before your own phone-line costs.
| Option | 100 calls a month | 500 calls a month | 1,500 calls a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goodcall | $79 (Starter, about 67 customers) | $129 (Growth, about 333) | $299 (Scale, about 1,000) |
| Rosie | $149 (Scale; 300 minutes is over Professional's 250 and overage is not published) | $299 (Growth, 2,000 minutes) | Not published (4,500 minutes is over Growth) |
| My AI Front Desk | $124 ($99 + 100 × $0.25) | $424 ($99 + 1,300 × $0.25) | $1,174 at list ($99 + 4,300 × $0.25); this volume is in its quote-only band |
| Smith.ai AI Receptionist | $212.50 (Pro 75 calls + 25 × $2.50) | $800 (500 × $1.60) | Custom; $2,900 at published overage ($800 + 1,000 × $2.10) |
| Retell AI, build your own (at $0.11 a minute) | $33 + build | $165 + build | $495 + build |
| Smith.ai live receptionists | $915 (Basic 90 + 10 × $10.50) | $3,800 (Pro 300 + 200 × $8.50) | $12,300 at published overage, or a quote |
| Ruby | $1,725 (500-minute plan) | Not published above 500 minutes | Not published |
| In-house receptionist | $1,583–$2,306 (part-time) | $1,583–$2,306 (part-time) | $3,168–$4,613 (full-time) |
Per call at 500 calls a month, that is about $0.26 on Goodcall, $1.60 on Smith.ai's AI Receptionist, $3.17–$4.61 for a part-time receptionist and $7.60 for Smith.ai's live service. At 1,500 calls, talk time alone is 75 hours a month, close to the 86.7 hours a part-time receptionist works, which is why the table moves to full-time staff there. Even a full-time person covers about 40 hours of a 168-hour week.
Three things the table cannot show. The AI plans differ in what they do with a call, so the cheapest one may only take a message. The human services are answering for you, not booking into your system unless they integrate with it. And none of the figures include the value of a booked appointment, which is usually the number that decides it. If you know your missed-call rate and what a new customer is worth, multiply them before you compare plans.
What the plan price leaves out
- Integration with your scheduling system. The useful receptionist books, reschedules and cancels in the system your staff use. Check the vendor's integration list against yours before you sign, and ask what happens when the system has no usable connection.
- Setup and scripts. Someone writes the approved answers, booking rules and transfer paths, and keeps them current when prices, hours or staff change.
- Phone numbers and forwarding. Most plans include a number or let you forward yours. Porting the main line is a separate step with its own lead time.
- Review time. Plan on a weekly read of transcripts for the first months, to catch wrong answers before customers do.
- Health information. If callers give health details, you need a business associate agreement with every company that handles the call. Ruby lists HIPAA-compliant services on its plan page; for the others, ask for the BAA before go-live. Our guide to HIPAA-compliant AI agents lists the controls to check.
- Escalation. Decide which calls must reach a person, and test the transfer at the busiest hour, not the quietest.
Off the shelf or a custom build
An off-the-shelf AI receptionist is the right first step for most single-site businesses. The entry plans above cost less than a week of part-time wages, and most can be tested on after-hours calls before they touch the main line.
A custom build makes sense when the off-the-shelf plans cannot do the job:
- Booking has to write into a practice-management, field-service or scheduling system the vendors do not support, with rules for visit types, durations and providers.
- Several locations need their own routing, hours and answers in one receptionist.
- Answers must stay inside information your team approved, with every conversation and action logged for audit.
- Health information is involved and you need a BAA chain you control.
- You want one agent across website chat, SMS, WhatsApp and the phone, and you want to own the prompts and the data.
Gigabit builds AI receptionists for that case. A Standard build covering chat and up to two integrations, such as your scheduling system and your website, is one flat fee from $8,000, built, integrated and deployed, with 30 days of tuning after launch. Voice, three or more integrations and HIPAA scope are priced above the Standard build, in writing after a scoping call. Telephony, messaging and model usage are separate running costs that depend on volume, and Managed AI Operations keeps the agent reviewed and updated at $3,000–$20,000 a month if you do not want to do that in-house.
As an example of the arithmetic, $8,000 spread over 24 months is about $333 a month before running costs, which is in the range of the larger AI plans above. The build wins when it books into a system the plans cannot reach, not on price alone. One honest note from our own service page: our published front-desk builds are chat, SMS, WhatsApp, phone-menu deflection and self-serve booking. We build voice receptionists, but we have no published case of one yet, so we pilot voice on real calls before it takes the main line. For the wider picture of build and running costs, see what an AI agent costs and the agent catalog.
For dental practices
Dental front desks are a common fit: many calls are bookings, reschedules, insurance and first-visit questions, and the phones ring hardest when the team is chairside. For a single practice, our AI dental receptionist is a managed service on a flat monthly plan. It answers every call, books new patients by your front desk's rules, routes urgent calls to your on-call number, texts back callers who hang up, and passes anything clinical to your team. The missed-call calculator works out what unanswered calls are costing before you compare any of the prices above.
How to choose in five steps
- Pull a month of call data from your phone system: count, length, time of day and how many went unanswered.
- Sort the calls by type: questions, new bookings, changes, and calls that need a person.
- Price two or three plans at your real volume and call length using the table above, including overage.
- Check the booking integration and the BAA before price, because a cheap plan that only takes messages moves the work, it does not remove it.
- Start on after-hours and overflow calls, read every transcript for the first weeks, then decide whether it takes the main line.
