How much does an AI receptionist cost?
When an owner asks me this, they want a single number. I get it — every other bill in the business is a single number. But the honest answer is a range, and anyone who gives you a flat "$X" before asking how many calls you take is either guessing or selling. So here's the real range, the three ways these things get priced, and exactly what moves your number up or down. Read it and you'll be able to size your own before you ever get on a sales call.
The short answer
For most small businesses, an AI receptionist lands somewhere between $50 and $500 a month. The low end is a bare, self-serve bot you configure yourself. The high end is a fully built, done-for-you agent wired into your calendar and CRM, answering in your business's voice, with after-hours coverage and text follow-up. Most owners who take real call volume end up in the $150–$350 range once it's doing actual work.
For comparison, a traditional human answering service runs roughly $1 to $1.50 a minute, which usually pencils out to $200 to $1,500+ a month depending on how long your calls are and how many you take. That per-minute meter is the thing to watch — it means a busy month costs you more precisely when you can least afford the surprise.
The three pricing models
Once you know how a provider prices, you know how your bill will behave when you get busy. There are only three models worth understanding.
Per-minute (usually human answering services). You pay for every minute the receptionist is on the line. It's predictable per call and brutal at scale — chatty callers and hold time both cost you, and your bill climbs exactly as your call volume does. Fine at low volume, punishing at high.
Per-call or metered AI. You pay a base rate plus a charge per call or per minute of AI talk time. Cheaper than a human per minute, but you're still on a meter, and a good month of inbound calls shows up as a bigger invoice. Read the overage terms before you sign — that's where the number you were quoted quietly stops being the number you pay.
Flat monthly. One price sized to your expected call volume, with the meter turned off inside that tier. You trade a little precision for predictability: you know the number every month, and a busy stretch doesn't punish you for it. For most owners this is the model that actually fits how a small business budgets. It's the one we use.
What moves your price up or down
Two businesses on the same street can pay very different amounts for the same category of tool, because the price tracks the work, not the logo. Here's what actually moves it:
Call volume. The single biggest lever. Twenty calls a week and two hundred calls a week are not the same product, and no honest pricing pretends they are.
Integrations. A bot that just answers is cheap. One that books straight onto your calendar, logs the lead to your CRM, and texts you a summary the second the call ends costs more to set up — and is the only version worth paying for, because the alternative is you re-typing everything by hand.
After-hours and 24/7 coverage. Nights, weekends, and holidays are where most of the leaked calls actually happen, so full coverage is usually where the value is — but it's also part of what you're paying for.
Complexity and languages. Simple "book an appointment" flows are inexpensive. Qualifying callers, quoting service ranges, routing by issue type, or answering in more than one language all add build time up front.
Done-for-you vs. do-it-yourself. The $50 tier assumes you'll write the script, wire the integrations, and maintain it. The $300 tier assumes someone does that for you and keeps it working. Your time has a price too — decide honestly which side of that you're on before you pick the cheap tier.
The number that decides whether it's worth it
Here's the part most pricing pages skip: the subscription isn't the number that matters. The number that matters is what a missed call is worth to you.
Count the calls you miss in a normal week — the ones that ring out at lunch, after hours, or while you're already on the phone. Multiply that by the share of callers who never call back and just dial the next name (industry callback studies put that at 60–85%), then by what one new customer is actually worth to you. For a lot of trades and practices, that quiet leak runs into the thousands of dollars a month — with no line item anywhere that admits it. Against a leak that size, a $200 subscription isn't a cost; it's the cheapest thing on the page. If you want the longer version of that math, I wrote it out in does your small business need an AI receptionist?
That's the real test. Not "can I afford the tool" — "how much is not having it already costing me, unmeasured."
What ours costs
Ours is a flat monthly rate, sized to your call volume — not a per-minute meter, and not a one-size number I can honestly quote you in a blog post without knowing how many calls your phone takes. What I can do is let you hear it. Iris, our own AI receptionist, is live on our line right now — call her at (617) 812-4881 and she'll answer like a front desk would. That's the demo. It's the actual product, not a script.
If you want your specific number, the Authority Assessment sizes it against your real call volume alongside the rest of your visibility — search, reviews, and AI answers — so the recommendation matches your business instead of a pricing tier someone picked for you.
— Kyle Tysvaer, Founder, Insightful Eye Marketing