AI Receptionist Pricing & Cost in 2026: $0–$500/Month
TL;DR — Self-serve AI receptionists publish prices between roughly $0 and $500 a month. Done-for-you builds are quoted rather than published. But the number on the pricing page is not what determines your bill: some vendors charge per call and some charge per minute, and which one is cheaper for you depends entirely on how long your calls run. All figures below were checked on 22 July 2026.
The published range, as of July 2026
Answer first: Among self-serve AI receptionists, published pricing currently runs from $0/month for a starter tier to about $500/month at the top of the self-serve range. Human-answered services cost substantially more — the same vendor may charge four times as much for a human plan at the same call volume.
Checked 22 July 2026 from public pricing pages:
Smith.ai's AI Receptionist publishes a free tier at $0/month for 25 calls ($3.00 per call beyond that), a Pro plan at $150/month for roughly 60 calls, and an Enterprise plan at $500/month for roughly 300 calls, working out to about $1.67 per call.
Rosie publishes Professional at $49/month for 250 minutes, Scale at $149/month for 1,000 minutes, and Growth at $299/month for 2,000 minutes, with annual billing advertised as two months free.
For contrast, human answering costs several times more. Smith.ai's human-answered Virtual Receptionist plans run $300/month for 30 calls, $810/month for 90 calls, and $2,100/month for 300 calls. That last one is worth sitting with: $500/month for ~300 AI-handled calls versus $2,100/month for 300 human-handled calls, from the same company. Roughly a 4x difference for the same volume.
Prices in this category move. Check the vendor's own page before you rely on any of this, including ours.
The variable almost nobody explains: per call vs per minute
Answer first: Smith.ai bills by the call. Rosie bills by the minute. Two vendors can look similarly priced on the page and produce very different invoices, because the thing being counted is different. Which model favours you depends on your average call length — a number most owners have never looked up.
Work it through. Rosie's Growth plan is $299 for 2,000 minutes. If your average call runs 4 minutes, that's about 500 calls, or roughly $0.60 a call. If your calls run 8 minutes, it's about 250 calls, or roughly $1.20 a call — same plan, double the unit cost, because your calls are longer.
Smith.ai's AI Enterprise plan is $500 for about 300 calls, or about $1.67 a call, and that number does not move when a call runs long.
So the rule is straightforward. If your calls are short — confirmations, simple bookings, message-taking — per-minute billing usually wins. If your calls are long, per-call billing protects you, because you stop paying for the length of the conversation.
This matters enormously in some trades and barely at all in others. A cleaning company quoting a recurring clean asks about bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, frequency and condition. That is not a 90-second call. Neither is a roofing estimate or a multi-unit commercial job. If that is your business, per-minute pricing is quietly working against you.
What actually changes the price
Answer first: Four things move the number: call volume, how long your calls run, how much the agent has to do beyond answering, and whether you are buying software or an installation.
Volume is the obvious one and the one every pricing page is built around.
Call length is the one that gets missed, for the reasons above.
Scope is where the real spread lives. An agent that answers and takes a message is a fundamentally simpler build than one that qualifies a caller, quotes from your approved pricing, and writes a record into your field-service software during the call. Those are different products wearing the same name.
Self-serve versus done-for-you. A self-serve product can publish a price because every customer gets the same thing. A done-for-you build cannot, because the work differs by business — and that is the honest reason some vendors quote instead of publish, including us.
Why we don't publish a price
Answer first: Because we build each agent around one business's actual pricing rules, escalation policy and software, and those builds are not the same size. Publishing a single number would mean either overcharging the simple installs or underdelivering on the complex ones.
We would rather say that plainly than put a number on a page and then "customise" it on the call, which is the same thing with extra steps. What we will tell you is the shape of it: pricing depends on your call volume and what the agent needs to handle, and you will get a real number on the demo call rather than a range designed to get you into a funnel.
If a published price is what you want, the self-serve products above are genuinely good at that, and we would rather you buy one of those than buy the wrong thing from us.
What Smith.ai and Rosie do that we don't
Answer first: Smith.ai offers live human agents as a per-call add-on. We do not. If having a real person available as a fallback matters to you, that is a genuine advantage and you should weigh it.
Golden Signal AI is AI-only. If a caller explicitly asks for a human, our agent takes a detailed message and notifies your team — it does not transfer to a receptionist we employ, because we don't employ any. Both models are defensible. They are not the same purchase, and any vendor blurring that line is not being straight with you.
The self-serve products are also genuinely faster to switch on. If you want something running this afternoon and you're comfortable configuring it yourself, that is a real advantage over a done-for-you build.
The five questions to ask any vendor
Answer first: Ask these before you look at a single price, because the answers determine what the price actually means.
"Do you bill per call or per minute?" Then check it against your own average call length.
"What counts as a call?" Do spam calls count? Hang-ups? Wrong numbers? Some vendors exclude them; assume nothing.
"What happens when I go over?" Overage rates vary a lot — published examples above range from $1.67 to $3.00 per call on AI plans.
"Is there a setup fee, and what does setup include?" A no-setup-fee product usually means you are doing the setup.
"Show me the record it creates in my software." Answering is the cheap part. Whether the caller's details end up somewhere your team can act on is what you are actually buying.
Working out what it's worth to you
Answer first: Take your average job value, multiply by the jobs you'd need to win per month to cover the fee, and ask whether your missed calls plausibly contain that many. For most home-services businesses the number is small enough to be uncomfortable.
At our own company, one recurring cleaning client booked at $165 a month is worth $1,980 over a year. Against a monthly fee in the ranges above, that is one recovered client. We measured our own phones before building anything: in June 2026 the office line took about 995 calls and missed 44% of them, and after hours the miss rate was 94%. There's a fuller breakdown in our guide for cleaning companies.
You do not need our numbers to run this. You need one month of your own call logs.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an AI receptionist cost per month?
Self-serve AI receptionists published prices between about $0 and $500 per month as of July 2026 — for example $0, $150 and $500 tiers from Smith.ai's AI product, and $49, $149 and $299 tiers from Rosie. Done-for-you builds are typically quoted rather than published.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a human answering service?
Substantially, at the same call volume. Smith.ai publishes $500/month for roughly 300 AI-handled calls and $2,100/month for 300 human-handled calls — about a 4x difference from one vendor, checked July 2026.
What's the difference between per-call and per-minute pricing?
Per-call billing charges a flat amount however long the conversation runs. Per-minute billing charges for time. Short calls usually favour per-minute pricing; long calls, like detailed quoting conversations, favour per-call pricing.
Are there setup fees for an AI receptionist?
Self-serve products generally advertise no setup fee, because you configure them yourself. Done-for-you providers usually charge for installation, since someone else is doing the build.
Why won't some vendors publish their pricing?
Because a done-for-you build varies by business — call volume, scope, and which systems it has to write into. A single published number would either overcharge simple installs or underdeliver on complex ones.
How much does Golden Signal AI cost?
It depends on your call volume and what the agent needs to handle, so we scope it on a demo call rather than publish a number. You can hear the agent take a live call at (217) 712-3297, or book a demo.
