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What will answering my phone cost each year?
For 90 calls a month at 3 minutes each, AI services cost US$719 to US$2,340 a year (7 priced) and the cheapest person-answered plan costs US$9,720.
Answer 4 questions (20 seconds)
Every link is a plain link to the vendor's own site; no vendor has paid for placement. How we are paid. US dollars, monthly billing, before tax. B2B Fees priced these on 2026-11-03; each plan's read date is on its card.
Your lowest-cost three
1. Upfirst
Premium plan, billed per call: 90 calls a month against 90 included. We called it: our test call, 2026-11-03.
Not for you if you need it to know when a technician can arrive: on our plumbing call it said it would arrange one "as soon as possible today" with no time in what we had told it, and it stated a policy we had not given it.
Plan price read 2026-10-27, from the vendor's own page.
2. Goodcall
Starter plan, billed per unique caller: 60 unique callers a month against 100 included (we count 1.5 calls to each unique caller). Not tested by us.
Not for you if you want to hear it first: we could not test it (it has no phone number to call). It bills unique callers, so a caller who rings several times in a month counts once.
Plan price read 2026-10-27, from the vendor's own page.
3. My AI Front Desk
Business In A Box plan, billed per minute: 270 minutes a month against 200 included, plus US$18 a month over. Not tested by us.
Minutes past the plan are billed in credits (25 credits a minute at US$0.01 a credit on its page); we price them at US$0.25 a minute, which can differ by a few dollars a month.
Not for you if you want to hear it first: we did not test it. It bills per minute, and calls past the plan draw on a pool of overage credits.
Plan price read 2026-10-27, from the vendor's own page.
| Every service priced | Plan | Billed | A year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfirst | Premium | per call | US$719 |
| Goodcall | Starter | per unique caller | US$948 |
| My AI Front Desk | Business In A Box | per minute | US$1,398 |
| Dialzara | Business Pro | per minute | US$1,458 |
| RingCentral AI Receptionist | Standalone | per minute | US$1,608 |
| Rosie | Scale | per minute | US$1,788 |
| Smith.ai AI Receptionist | Free | per call | US$2,340 |
| Smith.ai (people) | Basic | per call | US$9,720 |
| Ruby (people) | 500 Minutes | per minute | US$20,700 |
Not priced, and why
- Jobber AI Receptionist: An add-on, not priced. An add-on to a paid Jobber plan: US$29 a month for 30 conversations (calls and texts both). It needs a Jobber plan, so it is not a standalone service.
Quick answers
How much does an AI receptionist cost a small business a year?
For 90 calls a month at 3 minutes each, AI services cost US$719 to US$2,340 a year (7 priced) and the cheapest person-answered plan costs US$9,720. Prices are read from each service's own pages and dated; they assume monthly billing and exclude tax.
Is AI or a person cheaper for answering the phone?
On published plan prices AI services cost a fraction of person-answered ones. That is price against price, not a test of quality: on one plumbing call we saw an AI service promise something it had not been told and a person-answered service take about 8 seconds to connect plus a hold of about 30 seconds.
What these numbers assume
- The plan with the lowest total that covers your month, 12 months of monthly billing, no tax. Calls a month times minutes a call is the minutes a per-minute service bills; Goodcall bills unique callers (we count 1.5 calls each, as its pages do).
- A service that prints no overage rate is priced only on a plan whose allowance covers your month, and is not priced above its largest plan (Rosie says it moves you up to the next plan at that plan's standard price, so a bigger month is priced on the bigger plan; Ruby says nothing about overage).
- A feature sold as an add-on is priced when the vendor prints its fee per call, otherwise flagged as extra. A feature we could not confirm leaves that service out of your answer, with the reason shown above.
- A feature that only some plans have (Rosie lists booking and transfers from its Scale plan) moves the answer to the first plan that has it. A service counts as handling Spanish when its own pages say so; Upfirst lists 35+ languages on every plan without naming Spanish, and is counted.
- Smith.ai's AI page lists volume tiers we do not model, and only its Free plan's overage rate is confirmed by us, so a month past a paid Smith.ai AI plan is not priced on that plan.
- Prices are US dollars from each vendor's own pages, read 2026-10-27. Canadian prices are not shown.
Property management
We have not tested any service for property management, so every price above is from vendor pages only, labelled "not tested by us". The same plan maths applies: after-hours maintenance and tenant calls mostly change how many calls you get, which is question 1.
What we saw when we called
On 2026-11-03 we phoned four services (five calls) with the same burst-pipe call: what each captured and missed. The others are not tested by us yet.
How we set each one up. Our plumbing test calls used a deliberately thin setup (business name, services, a US$129 call, hours, an after-hours message; no website training). Vendors say results improve after a few rounds of tuning, so budget about an hour to tune any AI service on your own calls. How we set each one up.
Browse all the pages
Answering service by trade
- Answering service for plumbersWhat five services did on one burst-pipe call, and what each costs a year.
What phone answering costs
- What phone answering costsAI against people, priced by the call, the minute and the caller.