AI Voice Receptionist Pricing Benchmarks for 2026

TL;DR: An AI voice receptionist costs $29 to $599 a month in 2026, with most small businesses paying $25 to $300 a month. Per-minute plans run $0.25 to $0.50 a minute above the included bundle, per-call plans run $1.67 to $3 a call, and building your own voice agent on a platform like Retell or Vapi costs $0.08 to $0.20 a minute all in. A human answering service costs $175 to $1,700 a month for the same job. The cheapest option is rarely the right one: the pricing model that fits your call pattern matters more than the headline monthly price.

AI receptionists went from a novelty to a standard small-business purchase in about eighteen months. The pricing has not settled into one model. One vendor bills per minute, the next per call, the next per unique caller, and the build-your-own platforms bill per component. Comparing them on monthly price alone is meaningless, because the same 300 minutes can cost $49 on one plan and $530 on another.

This post prices every major option at the same call volumes so you can compare them on the same bill. Every figure comes from the vendors' own pricing pages as published in September and October 2026, or from the OnceHub survey of the category. Prices change often, so treat the vendor links as the source of truth and the ranges below as planning figures.

What an AI receptionist costs in 2026: the headline numbers

Most small businesses pay $25 to $300 a month for an AI receptionist in 2026, according to a September 2026 survey by OnceHub. Published plans across nine vendors checked in October 2026 run from $29 to $599 a month, with most plans that include a few hundred minutes landing between $49 and $199.

Pricing model	Typical price (2026)	Best for	Watch out for
Flat monthly with minutes	$29 to $599 a month	Steady call volume	Overage above the bundle
Per minute	$0.25 to $0.50 a minute	Short, quick calls	Long calls and rounding
Per call	$1.67 to $3 a call	Long, complex calls	Short calls cost the same
Per unique caller	$79 to $249 a month	Repeat callers	Feature limits on low tiers
Build your own platform	$0.08 to $0.20 a minute	High volume, custom flows	You build and maintain it
Human answering service	$175 to $1,700 a month	Callers who demand a person	Ten times the AI price

Sources: OnceHub survey September 2026, Aibrify October 2026 vendor check, QuioTech October 2026, Built With Agents October 2026. The human answering range comes from the same OnceHub survey and is included so the AI saving is visible on the same page.

Use our ROI calculator to work out what answering your missed calls is worth before you compare plans.

Per-minute plans: the most common model

The most common model is a monthly plan with a bundle of minutes and a per-minute rate above the bundle. The table below lists the published plans from the October 2026 vendor checks.

Vendor	Plan	Price	Minutes included	Overage
Dialzara	Business Lite	$29 a month	60	$0.48 a minute
Dialzara	Business Pro	$99 a month	220	$0.40 a minute
Dialzara	Business Plus	$199 a month	500	$0.38 a minute
Dialzara	Business Elite	$349 a month	1,000	$0.35 a minute
RingCentral	AI Receptionist	$49 a month	100	$0.50 a minute
Rosie	Professional	$49 a month	250	Not published
Rosie	Scale	$149 a month	1,000	Not published
Rosie	Growth	$299 a month	2,000	Not published
My AI Front Desk	Business-in-a-Box	$99 a month	200	$0.25 a minute
Aibrify Desk	Standard	$179 a month	400	$0.30 a minute
Slang.ai	Premium	$599 a month	Per location	Not published

Sources: vendor pricing pages as checked by Aibrify and Built With Agents, October 2026. RingCentral's $49 plan is standalone; as a RingEX add-on it is $39 a month with the same 100 minutes.

Two things to notice. First, the per-minute cost falls as the bundle grows: Dialzara charges $0.48 a minute at the bottom tier and $0.35 at the top. Second, the cheapest entry plan is not the cheapest plan at real volumes. Dialzara Lite at $29 covers 60 minutes, which is about 20 three-minute calls. A business taking 100 calls a month would blow through it in the first week and pay overage on the rest.

Rosie's Professional plan at $49 for 250 minutes only takes messages: no booking and no transfers. If your receptionist needs to book appointments, that plan does not do the job, however cheap it looks.

Per-call and per-caller plans: when minutes are the wrong unit

Per-call vendors charge for each answered call regardless of length. Smith.ai's AI receptionist offers 25 calls free, then Pro at $150 a month for 75 calls, and about $1.67 a call at the 300-call tier. Per-call pricing rewards long, complex calls and punishes short ones: a thirty-second wrong number costs the same as a ten-minute intake.

Goodcall bills per unique caller rather than per minute or per call, which is unusual and works in your favour if the same people ring repeatedly. Starter is $79 a month for 100 unique customers, Growth is $129 for 250, and Scale is $249 for 500, with $0.50 per extra customer and unlimited minutes. A dental practice with 200 regular patients who each call twice a month pays for 200 customers, not 400 calls. A business with mostly new callers gets no benefit at all from the model.

Model	Example vendor	Entry price	What you get	Breaks even against per-minute when
Per call	Smith.ai	$150 a month	75 calls	Calls average over 4 minutes
Per unique caller	Goodcall	$79 a month	100 customers	Callers repeat regularly
Per minute	RingCentral	$49 a month	100 minutes	Calls average under 3 minutes

The rule is simple. If your calls are short, per-minute wins. If your calls are long, per-call wins. If your callers repeat, per-caller wins. Ask your phone provider for your average call length before choosing, because guessing wrong costs more than the plan difference.

For the capability side of the same decision, what the receptionist should answer, book, and hand off, see our AI voice receptionist guide for local services.

What a month of calls actually costs at 100, 200, and 400 minutes

Headline prices hide the real cost, because every vendor counts usage differently. The table below prices the same three volumes across the main vendors, using each vendor's published rates from October 2026. It assumes a four-minute average call for the per-call vendors, the figure Nextiva reports that most plans assume.

Vendor	100 minutes a month	200 minutes a month	400 minutes a month
Dialzara	$29 to $99	$99	$199
RingCentral	$49	$99	$199
My AI Front Desk	$99	$99	$149
Rosie	$49	$49	$149
Goodcall	$79	$79 to $129	$129 to $249
Smith.ai AI	$150	$150	$300 to $530
Aibrify Desk	$179	$179	$179
Slang.ai	$599	$599	$599

Sources: Aibrify October 2026 comparison, Built With Agents October 2026. At 200 minutes the AI plans checked cost $49 to $530, and at 400 minutes $79 to $915. Aibrify Desk is $179 at every volume in this table because its 400-minute bundle covers all three.

The spread is the story. At 200 minutes, the cheapest workable plan is $49 and the most expensive is $530, a tenfold gap for the same minutes. The gap is features, not minutes: booking, CRM sync, transfers, and multi-language support sit on the higher tiers. A plan that only takes messages is not comparable to a plan that books appointments, even at the same minute count.

Build your own: Retell, Vapi, and the component bill

Platforms like Retell AI and Vapi let you assemble a voice agent yourself, paying per minute for each part: the voice platform, the speech-to-text, the language model, the text-to-speech voice, and the phone line. The all-in cost lands at $0.08 to $0.20 a minute.

Component	Retell AI	Vapi
Platform fee	$0.055 a minute	$0.05 a minute
Speech-to-text	Included in platform	About $0.01 a minute
Language model	$0.003 to $0.08 a minute	Under $0.01 to $0.045 a minute
Voice	$0.015 a minute	$0.015 to $0.024 a minute
Phone line	$0.015 a minute	Pass-through, about $0.015
All-in example	About $0.11 a minute	About $0.10 to $0.15 a minute

Sources: Retell AI and Vapi published pricing, October 2026. The phone leg itself is cheap: Twilio charges $0.0085 a minute to receive a call on a local number and $0.014 to place one, plus $1.15 a month per number. Deepgram's Nova-3 speech-to-text is $0.0048 a minute on promotion, $0.0077 list.

At $0.11 a minute, a three-minute booking call costs about 33 cents. A business taking 300 calls a month at three minutes each spends about $99 on the voice platform, before any subscription. Compare that with $150 to $300 for a packaged plan at the same volume, and the build-your-own route looks cheap. The cost it hides is your time: you build the flows, you handle the edge cases, and you maintain it when a model changes. For a business with one location and standard booking flows, a packaged plan is usually cheaper once your time is counted. For an agency deploying the same agent across many clients, the platform route wins quickly.

Our AI automation services build voice agents on these platforms for local service businesses, and the $0.08 to $0.20 all-in range above is the same maths we use when quoting a build.

AI receptionist vs human answering: the honest comparison

A human answering service costs $175 to $1,700 a month, against $25 to $300 for AI. The human options at the low end are not comparable to the AI options at the high end, so compare like with like.

Option	Entry price	What it handles	Cost per call at 100 calls
AI, per minute	$29 to $49 a month	Answers, messages, booking	$0.50 to $1.50
AI, per call	$150 a month	Answers, booking, transfers	$1.67 to $3.00
Human, per minute	$250 a month (Ruby)	Answers, messages, booking	$2.50 to $5.00
Human, per call	$300 a month (Smith.ai)	Answers, intake, transfers	$10.00 to $11.50

Sources: Ruby and Smith.ai published pricing, October 2026. Ruby sells minutes: $250 for 50, $395 for 100, $720 for 200, $1,725 for 500. Smith.ai's human plans are $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90, and $2,100 for 300, with overage from $11.50 down to $8.50 a call.

The human service wins on one thing only: callers who demand a person and will hang up on a machine. Every other dimension, cost, availability, consistency, goes to AI. The businesses that keep a human service usually keep it for a slice of calls, not all of them: AI answers everything, and the calls that need a person transfer to one. That hybrid is cheaper than either option alone.

If you are weighing AI against a chatbot instead of a human, the trade-offs are different again, and our rule-based vs AI chatbot comparison covers what actually works for pipeline.

The hidden fees to check before you sign

Four charges catch buyers out. First, overage: $0.25 to $0.50 a minute, $0.50 per extra caller, or $2 to $3 per extra call, depending on the model. Second, setup: most packaged plans include setup, but custom builds and integrations are quoted separately. Third, phone numbers: $1.15 a month per number, plus $4.50 and $15 to register for texting. Fourth, rounding: RingCentral bills overage in 30-second steps, so a 61-second call costs two minutes. None of these is large alone. Together they can add 20 to 30 percent to the headline price.

What this means for your budget

Take your last month of calls and do the maths in three lines. Count your calls, multiply by your average call length, and price the total minutes against the table above. A dental practice taking 150 calls a month at three minutes each needs 450 minutes. On RingCentral that is $199 a month. On Rosie it is $149. On Goodcall, if those 150 calls come from 120 regular patients, it is $129. On a build-your-own platform at $0.11 a minute, it is about $50 plus your time.

Then compare it with the cost of missing the calls. If 20 percent of those 150 calls go unanswered and a new patient is worth $400, the missed calls cost $12,000 a month in lost revenue against a $149 receptionist. The pricing question is not whether $149 is cheap. It is whether $12,000 of missed revenue is acceptable.

Get a free audit of your missed calls

Send us your last 30 days of call logs and we will tell you, in writing, how many calls went unanswered, what those missed calls are worth at your average job value, and which receptionist pricing model fits your call pattern. The audit is free, it takes 48 hours, and there is no obligation to work with us afterwards. Book your free audit.