What an AI receptionist costs.

Flat monthly plans are the most common. You pay one figure, from about $25 to $300 a month at the vendors we compared, for a set number of minutes. Dialzara, Upfirst and SkipCalls sit at the low end with unlimited or generous caps; AgentZap prices a single shop at $109 a month for 150 minutes and a multi-location plan at $899 for 1,500.

Per-minute pricing charges for connected talk time. AI vendors quote roughly $0.08 to $0.20 a minute, often on top of a platform seat. 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 per 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 Gorgias about $0.60 to $1.27 depending on tier. Those are enterprise rates, and almost nobody selling to a single restaurant or shop prices this way.

Setup fees. A one-time charge of a few hundred dollars is common on the flat plans, and it is rarely on the pricing page headline.

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.

The number depends on what a call is for. Loman puts a restaurant phone order at $25 to $50 a ticket. AgentZap puts the average repair order lost when an auto shop misses a call at $650. For an ecommerce brand the call is usually a question about an order already paid for, so the cost is a refund or a lost repeat customer rather than a lost sale.

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 that ends with an order placed or a question answered, with no person stepping in, uses credits: one credit for a resolved chat, text or email conversation, three for a resolved phone call. A conversation handed to your staff because the customer asked for a person costs half a credit, one that engaged the customer and reached no answer costs a third, and a failure on our side costs 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. There is no per-minute charge and no setup fee. Enterprise customers with their own helpdesk and compliance requirements are quoted directly and billed by invoice.

Start from your own numbers: calls a month, average length, and the share that end in something worth money to you. Six hundred calls at three minutes is 1,800 minutes. On a $0.12 per-minute plan that is $216 before the platform fee. On a 450-minute flat plan it is the plan price plus 1,350 minutes of overage. On an outcome plan it is the number of calls that ended well, times the credit rate, and the calls that did not are free.

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.