What an AI receptionist costs.

Flat monthly plans are the first shape you meet. You pay one price every month, and it covers a fixed quantity of minutes. The five vendors named in this guide publish plans between $24.95 and $899 a month. SkipCalls costs $29.99 a month. Its website advertises unlimited minutes under a fair usage policy, and the policy does not publish a number. Dialzara starts at $29 for 60 minutes, which covers about twenty calls if each call lasts three minutes. Its largest plan costs $349 and includes 1,000 minutes. The vendor Upfirst sells its plans by the call. The cheapest Upfirst plan is $24.95 and covers 30 calls. At AgentZap the Starter plan costs $109 a month and includes 150 minutes, and the Business plan costs $899 a month and includes 1,500 minutes. AgentZap also charges a setup fee of $499 at the start, and that fee is paid one time. Minutes beyond the Starter allowance cost 85 cents each. Managed is a separate AgentZap plan for a business with several locations. It also costs $899 a month, and it runs on a six-month commitment. Loman does not publish any prices. It asks you to contact its sales team.

Per-minute pricing charges for the time a call is connected. Dialzara costs 35 to 48 cents a minute, and AgentZap costs 60 to 85 cents a minute. Developer platforms such as Vapi, Retell and Bland publish per-minute rates between 5 and 31 cents, before telephony. Their customers are engineers who build an agent of their own. A shop that buys a finished service pays about five times as much. Live answering services, where a person picks up, run about $0.75 to $2.00 a minute, which is why a human service that looks cheap each month rarely is.

Platform fee plus usage is the enterprise shape. A helpdesk vendor charges for the software, then meters the AI on top. It suits a team that already runs the helpdesk and wants the agent inside it.

Per-resolution pricing charges only when the AI finishes the conversation without a person. Intercom publishes $0.99 an outcome for Fin, Zendesk $1.50 to $2.00 an automated resolution, and the Gorgias AI Agent 90 cents to $1.00 an automated interaction plus a ticket fee. Those are enterprise rates, and almost nobody selling to a single restaurant or shop prices this way.

Prices checked on 27 October 2026. Every price in this section is a list price the vendor publishes, and the pricing pages are linked below so you can read them yourself. Prices change often, so check that date before you quote any price from this page.

Setup fees. AgentZap charges $499 when you sign up, and that fee is paid one time. Dialzara charges no setup fee. The first month therefore differs by $499 between two plans that look comparable. Ask each vendor what the first month costs in total.

Minute caps and overage. A 150-minute plan covers about fifty three-minute calls. The fifty-first call is billed at the overage rate, and a busy Friday can use a month of minutes in a weekend.

Integrations on a higher tier. Booking into your shop calendar or pushing an order into your point of sale is often what the mid or top plan is for, and the bottom plan usually only takes a message.

The calls the AI could not finish. A message-taking receptionist counts a call as handled when it writes the note down. Somebody on your staff still has to call back, and that time is the real cost of a plan that only takes messages.

What a call is worth depends on what it is for, so the most accurate way to get the number is from your own prices rather than an industry average. Take the last ten calls you can remember. Count how many were somebody ready to place an order or make a booking, and add up what those orders came to. The average across all ten is what one call is worth to you, including the calls that were never going to come to anything. For an ecommerce brand the call is usually a question about an order already paid for, so the figure is the cost of a refund or of a customer who does not come back, rather than a sale you never made.

Whatever your figure is, multiply it by the calls you miss in a month. That is the ceiling on what an answering service is worth to you, and any quote should be read against it.

Merrows charges by outcome. A conversation uses credits when the AI-powered rep resolves it or hands the customer to your team. A web chat or email conversation uses one credit and an SMS thread uses two. A phone call uses three credits for every ten minutes it starts, counted up to the handoff, so most calls use three. A failure on our side uses nothing.

Each plan carries a monthly credit allotment, with metered overage at the plan rate and one-off reload packs when a month runs long. Web chat and email come with every plan, and answering phone calls needs the voice add-on, which includes a local number. There is no setup fee. Enterprise customers with their own helpdesk and compliance requirements are quoted directly and billed by invoice.

Start with your own calls: how many you take in a month, how long they last, and the share that end in something worth money to you. 600 calls at three minutes each is 1,800 minutes. Those 1,800 minutes cost $720 at a rate of 40 cents a minute, before any platform fee. On a 450-minute flat plan it is the plan price plus 1,350 minutes of overage. On an outcome plan you pay the credit rate for a call the AI finished or handed to your team. A call the caller gave up on, or one that failed on our side, costs nothing.

Then ask each vendor the same four questions. What happens on the call the AI cannot finish. Whether the integration you need is on the plan you are quoted. What the overage rate is. And whether you can read the transcripts, because you will want to check what it said.