AI Receptionist Pricing 2026:12 Vendors Compared

The cheapest AI receptionist I found this week costs $0 a month. The most expensive published number was $30,000 a year, and that was described as where contracts start.Both numbers are real, both are on the vendors' own pages, and neither tells you what your phone will cost you.

That gap is the whole reason this article exists. On September 27, 2026 I went through the pricing pages of every AI receptionist vendor I could find, kept the ones that publish a usable price, and wrote down exactly what each one charges and for what unit.

Twelve made the cut. Every price below links to the page it came from, and every one carries the same check date. If a vendor changes its page tomorrow, you can see where I got it and check the new number yourself.

Here is the wrong mental model most buyers bring to this: they compare the monthly plan prices, pick the cheapest one that sounds competent, and expect the invoice to match. That works for software that bills per seat. It does not work here, because an AI receptionist is priced like software but consumed like a utility.

The right model is closer to a phone bill or an electricity bill. The plan price buys you an allowance. Your calls consume it. Whatever you use beyond the allowance is billed at a different rate, and each vendor measures consumption in a different unit.

Therefore the question to ask is not which plan is cheapest. It is which unit of measurement flatters your call pattern, and what that vendor charges when you exceed it. The rest of this article answers that, vendor by vendor, then runs one worked month through all twelve.

If you are earlier in the process and still deciding what category of product you even want (an answering service with AI, a developer platform, a vertical receptionist or a custom build), start with our AI receptionist software buyer's guide and come back here when you have a shortlist to price.

Every AI receptionist on this list meters one of four things: calls, minutes, unique customers, or seats plus credits. Which one your vendor uses will move your bill more than any discount code.

Think about how a gym, a taxi and a buffet each charge you. The gym charges a flat membership, the taxi charges by distance, the buffet charges per person. Same hunger, three very different receipts. Phone calls work the same way here.

Here is the one piece of arithmetic that decides most comparisons. Divide a per-call overage rate by a per-minute overage rate, and you get the break-even call length.

Take Upfirst Pro, which charges $0.75 for each extra call, and Dialzara Plus, which charges $0.40 for each extra minute. $0.75 divided by $0.40 is about 1.9. So if your average call runs under roughly 1.9 minutes, the per-minute plan is cheaper at the margin; above that, the per-call plan wins, and the longer your calls, the harder it wins.

To be clear, that is a marginal comparison. The included bundles differ too, and I run the full numbers in the scenario below. But if you remember one thing from this section, remember the division: it tells you which pricing family to shortlist before you read a single feature list.

A price appears in this article only if I read it on the vendor's own pricing page on September 27, 2026, and the link is in the sources list. Anything I could not see there is marked not captured or not computable, never filled in.

That rule sounds obvious. It is not how most pricing roundups are built. A roundup that quotes a vendor's price from another roundup, which quoted it from a third, can carry a number that went stale somewhere along the chain. I would rather print a gap than a guess.

That last rule deserves a sentence of its own. I looked for an independent, non-vendor evaluation of commercial AI receptionist products and did not find one. The rankings that come up in search are vendor or affiliate content. So this article compares what can be compared, which is price, and says nothing about which one sounds most human.

If you want the opinionated version, where I rank vendors on the attributes that can be verified, that is our ranking of the best AI receptionist companies for 2026. This page stays on money.

Here are the twelve, in rough order of entry price, with the model, what the entry plan includes and what overage costs. All figures are from the official pages listed in the sources, checked September 27, 2026.

Read the table the way you would read a restaurant menu with no portion sizes. The entry price is the smallest thing on offer, not what a real month costs. Rosie, for instance, published three clean plan prices but no included minutes I could capture, which makes it impossible to say what a busy month would add.

Two rows are not like the others. Bland and Vapi are developer platforms: they sell you the voice engine by the minute, and you (or someone you hire) build the receptionist on top. Their per-minute numbers look tiny next to the packaged products because they leave out the thing the packaged products include, which is the receptionist.

Each vendor below gets its published prices, its unit, and the one thing on its pricing page I would ask about before signing. The links go to the exact page I read.

Several well-known names are missing from the twelve, each for a stated reason: no usable AI receptionist price, a different product, or a page that did not load. Leaving them out is not a verdict on quality.

Retell AI publishes plenty, but as a component price list rather than a receptionist price: pay-as-you-go $0.07 to $0.31 a minute, voice infrastructure at $0.055 a minute, platform voices at $0.015 a minute, telephony from $0.015 a minute, knowledge base +$0.005 a minute, 20 concurrent calls included and $8 per extra concurrent call a month, with $10 in free credits. Retell says it is SOC 2 certified and HIPAA-ready; its custom BAA is in the Enterprise column. It belongs in the same family as Bland and Vapi, and I kept the twelve to one developer platform short of crowded.

Synthflow showed no self-serve price on the page I fetched; it said enterprise contracts start at $30,000 annually. That is a real published figure, and it is a floor for a contract, not a receptionist plan you can compare.

Lindy is a general agent platform that can answer phones. Plus is $29.99 a month per user with 3,000 credits per user, and HIPAA with a signed BAA is on Enterprise only. I could not find how many credits a phone call consumes, so I cannot price a receptionist month on it. Note also that its 7-day trial was only available via a Slack join; direct signups were billed immediately.

Ruby and Abby Connect are human-first services with AI features, and they get their own comparison below. Numa now positions itself as an AI operating system for car dealerships and publishes no pricing. Allo and AnswerConnect's AI pricing pages returned 404 when I checked, and I could not extract AI receptionist prices from Nextiva, Dialpad or Grasshopper's pricing pages. I print nothing about those.

Six costs sit outside the plan price on most of these pages: compliance tiers, overage, telephony, model pass-through, concurrency and billing increments. Any one can double a small bill.

The wrong model here is the one we all learned from streaming subscriptions: the monthly price is the price. The right model is a hotel bill. The room rate is on the booking page; the parking, the resort fee and the minibar are on the checkout receipt. Therefore read the pricing page from the bottom up, footnotes first.

Consider a hypothetical small practice taking 200 inbound calls a month, averaging 3 minutes each, from 150 unique callers: 600 minutes in total. This is a scenario I made up to exercise the pricing pages, not a client and not a benchmark.

I picked those numbers because they are modest and round, so you can redo the maths with your own. For each vendor I chose the cheapest published tier that covers the month, then added published overage. I ignored annual discounts, taxes and any setup work.

Let me do a few of these out loud, because the arithmetic is the point. On Smith.ai, Pro covers 75 calls for $150, and the other 125 calls at $2.50 add $312.50, so Pro would cost $462.50. The 150-call tier at $270 plus 50 extra calls at $2.30 ($115) comes to $385, which is cheaper. Picking the wrong tier costs about $77 a month for the same calls.

On Upfirst, Premium covers 90 calls for $59.95, and 110 extra calls at $1 each would add $110, for $169.95. Pro covers all 300 for $159.95 flat. Again the bigger plan is cheaper, by about $10, with 100 calls of headroom.

On Trillet, the $49 plan covers 150 minutes. The other 450 minutes at $0.20 add $90, for $139. On RingCentral, the $49 plan covers 100 minutes, and 500 more at $0.50 add $250, for $299, before the 30-second rounding adds anything.

Now reduce it to one number. Among the packaged receptionists I could price, the cheapest scenario month was Goodcall at about $104 and the most expensive was Smith.ai at about $385. $385 divided by $104 is about 3.7. Same calls, same callers, 3.7x the bill, purely because of how each vendor counts.

Change one input and the order shuffles. If the average call were 8 minutes instead of 3, the month would be 1,600 minutes. Trillet would become $49 plus 1,450 minutes at $0.20, or $339, while Upfirst Pro would stay at $159.95 because it charges per call. The per-call vendor now costs less than half as much. That is the break-even division from earlier, playing out in dollars.

And the developer platforms? Bland comes out at about $84 for 600 minutes and Vapi at about $35 plus model costs. Those look like the winners until you remember they include no receptionist design, no testing and no maintenance. The scenario prices the engine, not the car.

Three vendors I could not price at all: My AI Front Desk (no published credits-per-minute rate for voice overage), Rosie (included minutes not captured) and Newo.ai (unit not defined on the page). That is a quarter of the list. A quarter of published AI receptionist prices still cannot tell you what a normal month costs.

On published list prices, human answering services cost roughly 4x to 8x more per minute than a packaged AI receptionist at similar volume. That is a real gap, and it is not the whole comparison.

The arithmetic behind the table: Ruby's $720 for 200 minutes is $3.60 a minute. Abby Connect's $599 for 200 minutes is about $3.00. PATLive's$349 for 200 minutes is about $1.75. Dialzara's $99 for 220 minutes is about $0.45, and Trillet's $49 for 150 is about $0.33.

So PATLive against Dialzara is about 3.9x, and Ruby against Dialzara is about 8x. Those are list prices from the vendors' own pages on September 27, 2026, and they are the most flattering way to state the AI case.

Here is the honest other half. A human receptionist handles the upset caller, the ambiguous request, the person who needs to be told no kindly. An AI receptionist will, at best, recognise those calls and hand them to a person. And callers notice: Pew Research found in a June 2025 survey that 50% of US adults were more concerned than excited about AI in daily life. The cheaper per minute is only cheaper per call you are happy with.

Abby Connect is a useful hybrid to know about: its plans double the minutes when you choose AI answering, so the same plan buys twice the coverage. Ruby says its "AI Enhancements" are included in all plans at no extra cost, but it sells no standalone AI receptionist price.

If you want the full salary comparison, including what an in-house receptionist costs with benefits using BLS wage data, that is our AI versus human receptionist cost breakdown. This section only compares one outsourced service with another.

Disclosure: Frenchy Digital is my company, so weigh this pick accordingly; it is not scored in the ranking above. None of the twelve vendors above is affected by this section, and none of their numbers changed because of it.

Everything above is a subscription. Our AI Receptionist is priced the other way round: $5,000 for the agent plus a $5,000 one-time setup fee, both paid through Stripe Checkout as one-time payments, not a subscription. The product page says most builds run 2 to 4 weeks.

Why would anyone pay $10,000 up front when Upfirst starts at $24.95? Mostly because of ownership. Source code and IP transfer to you, so the receptionist is an asset you hold, not a rental you renew. There is a 30-day post-launch warranty. Usage costs depend on the telephony and model providers you run it on, and those are separate from the build price.

The downside, in the same breath: $10,000 is a lot more than a year of most of the plans above, and if your call pattern fits one of them cleanly, you should buy the subscription. Our build makes sense when the calls are specific to your business (your intake questions, your scheduling rules, your handoff to a named person) and a packaged product keeps forcing you into its template.

It also does not replace your receptionist. It covers after hours, lunch and busy-line overflow, and when it hands a call to a person, it hands off with the conversation attached so nobody asks the caller to start over.

What we can point to is website work, not receptionist results, and I want to be plain about that. For BH Dental Corp, we revamped a Beverly Hills cosmetic practice's WordPress site with one page per treatment and visible prices in its shop. That matters here only because a receptionist's answers come from the same place callers land: the website. It is not evidence of how a receptionist performs, and I will not present it as such.

For larger or regulated work, our standard engagement bands apply: a discovery and workflow audit at $9k to $22k over 2 to 4 weeks, a single-workflow agent at $28k to $70k over 4 to 9 weeks, and a multi-workflow platform at $70k to $180k over 9 to 16 weeks. The AI agent development service page covers that side, and a fixed-price phased proposal follows within 5 business days.

The red flags on an AI receptionist pricing page are about what is missing, not what is shown. Here are the ones I would walk away over, or at least demand in writing.

One regulatory note belongs here. The FTC's Operation AI Comply in September 2024 went after unsubstantiated AI capability claims, including a proposed $193,000 order against DoNotPay. It is a reminder that a vendor's claims about what its AI does are claims, and you are entitled to ask for the evidence.

And one legal note on recording, since most of these products record and transcribe calls. In California, Penal Code section 632 requires the consent of all parties to record a confidential communication. Check your state, and check that your receptionist says it is recording at the start of the call. That costs nothing and it is not optional.

AI receptionist marketing often argues its case with a missed-call statistic, and the three I chased do not survive a trace back to their source. Here is what I found when I chased them.

The most quoted is the claim that 62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered. It traces to a single post by 411 Locals, a marketing vendor, dated January 18, 2016: 85 businesses in 58 industries, monitored for 30 days. They found 37.8% answered, 37.8% went to voicemail and 24.3% got no response. The 62% counts voicemail as unanswered. Ten years old, 85 businesses, vendor-run. It is not a current rate, and I do not use it as one.

The second is that 85% of callers who cannot reach you will not call back. I could not find a primary study at all. Blogs attribute it to Forbes or BIA/Kelsey with no link, date or method. The 411 Locals post contains no callback data. I refuse it.

The third is some version of 80% of callers sent to voicemail hanging up. The earliest trace I found was a 2014 trade article citing an unnamed Forbes study with no date or sample, later relabelled by various vendors. I refuse that too, and every dollar figure for missed calls that vendor blogs build on these three.

So what should you use instead? Your own phone records. Your carrier or phone system can tell you how many calls came in, how many were answered, and when the missed ones cluster. That number is small, dull and yours, which makes it worth more than any of the above.

This is a snapshot of published list prices on one day, and it has gaps I could not close. Here they are, stated plainly.

Prices change. Everything here was checked on September 27, 2026, and any vendor can revise its page the next day. Use the source links to re-check before you buy.

List price is not negotiated price. Enterprise and volume deals are quoted privately, and I have no visibility into them.

Some cells are empty because the page did not say. I could not capture Rosie's included minutes, Newo.ai's definition of a unit, My AI Front Desk's credits per voice minute, or Goodcall's compliance and trial terms. I did not re-verify whether Smith.ai offers a BAA on its AI plans.

Compliance statements are the vendors' own. I did not inspect any SOC 2 report, HIPAA attestation or BAA, and I could not tell whether any certification belongs to the vendor or is inherited from its cloud provider.

Vapi's $2,000 a month HIPAA add-on was read on its pricing page, which describes it as per organization and bundled with a business associate agreement. That page renders with JavaScript, so if it looks different when you visit, confirm the figure with Vapi directly.

The scenario is invented and simple. Real call patterns have peaks, transfers, spam and after-hours clusters, all of which change the result. And I did not score quality at all, because nobody has published an independent benchmark I could use.

You can have a defensible price comparison for your own business by Friday. It takes three steps.

• 1. Pull 90 days of call records: Get calls per month, average call length and unique callers from your phone system. Use the busiest month, not the average.
• 2. Do the break-even division: Divide a per-call overage rate by a per-minute one. If your average call is longer than the result, shortlist per-call vendors; if shorter, per-minute ones.
• 3. Email three vendors one question: Ask each shortlisted vendor for the all-in monthly price at your volume, including overage, telephony, and the tier with a signed BAA if you need one. Compare the answers, not the pricing pages.

If a medical practice is what you run, our piece on AI voice agents for the medical front desk covers the workflow side. Then get the numbers.