A vintage rotary telephone sitting on a brass scale, weighed against a stack of paper invoices, a taxi-style fare meter glowing orange in the background
FN·080 · The plan is the sticker. The meter is the bill

"How much does a virtual receptionist cost?" is the question I get right after "can it book appointments," and the honest answer is that it depends on which meter you are being billed on. A human service that charges by the minute, a human service that charges by the call, a software plan with a flat monthly fee, and a person at a front desk with a W-2 are four different products with four different math problems. Most of the pricing guides you will find online are written by one of those vendors, and they quietly benchmark against whichever model makes theirs look cheapest.

So this note is the version I hand to owners before they sign anything. Every number below was checked against the vendor's own pricing page or a government source in September 2026, and I have listed where each came from at the bottom. Where a vendor hides its prices behind a quote form, I say so instead of guessing. And where I could not verify a figure, it is not here.

One thing I should say upfront: I build owned AI answering systems for a living, so I am not a neutral party on the last section. I have tried to keep the market numbers straight regardless, because you cannot make a good decision about any option, including mine, without a real picture of what the alternatives cost.

Key Takeaways

The short version, for anyone who is going to skim and then come back later.

Point Details
Four billing models, not one price Per-minute human, per-call human, flat monthly AI software, and an in-house employee. Compare within a model first, then across.
Human per-minute plans run roughly $99 to $1,725 a month Published entry tiers start at 50 minutes. Effective rates land between about $1.50 and $5.00 per minute depending on tier and overage.
Human per-call plans run about $300 to $2,100 a month One published ladder is 30 calls for $300 up to 300 calls for $2,100, with overage calls at $8.50 to $11.50 each.
Flat AI plans run about $29 to $500 a month Overage is measured in cents per minute or a few dollars per call rather than the human rates above. Watch per-agent and per-customer meters.
An in-house receptionist is roughly $54,000 a year fully loaded BLS median wage of $38,010 (May 2025) plus a 30 percent private-industry benefits load from the June 2026 ECEC release.
The traps are in the definition of a minute Rounding, after-call notes, transfer legs, setup fees, per-seat charges, and annual lock-in all live below the sticker price.

What Does a Virtual Receptionist Cost in 2026?

If you want one sentence: a small business paying for a live, human virtual receptionist should expect a few hundred dollars a month at low volume and somewhere north of a thousand once the phone is genuinely busy, while AI-based software plans mostly sit between about thirty and a few hundred dollars a month, and a person on payroll costs several thousand a month once you load benefits. The spread is that wide because the word "virtual receptionist" covers everything from a call center in Oregon to a language model on a server.

The trick is to stop comparing headline prices and start comparing what a minute, or a call, actually costs you at your real volume, including everything that gets billed after the person hangs up. That is what the rest of this note does.

The Four Billing Models, Side by Side

Four vintage cash registers in a row on a wooden counter, each labeled with a different brass tag: per minute, per call, flat monthly, and payroll
Four meters · the same phone call costs four different amounts

Here is the table I walk through with owners. Prices are published list prices as of September 16, 2026, and vendors change them, so treat this as a snapshot and a shape rather than a quote.

Model Published examples (checked September 2026) Overage What to watch
Per-minute, human PATLive: $99 for 50 min up to $759 for 500 min. Ruby: $250 for 50 min, $395 for 100, $720 for 200, $1,725 for 500. Abby: $165 for 50, $329 for 100, $599 for 200, $1,380 for 500. Davinci: $129 for 50, $239 for 100. PATLive $1.79 to $2.29 per extra minute by tier. Abby bills overage at your plan's per-minute rate. Ruby's overage is not published on its pricing page. Rounding increment, after-call time, both legs of a transfer
Per-call, human Smith.ai: $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90, $2,100 for 300. $11.50, $10.50, and $8.50 per extra call by tier. What counts as a call, spam filtering, notice period
Flat monthly, AI software Dialzara: $29 for 60 min, $99 for 220, $199 for 500, $349 for 1,000. Goodcall: $79, $129, $249 per agent with unlimited minutes. Smith.ai AI: free for 25 calls, $150 and $500 tiers. Dialzara $0.35 to $0.48 per minute. Goodcall $0.50 per unique customer over the cap. Smith.ai AI $1.67 to $3.00 per call. Per-agent or per-location pricing, "unique customer" caps, annual billing discounts
In-house employee BLS median $18.27 per hour, $38,010 per year (May 2025). Roughly $54,300 a year with a 30 percent benefits load. Overtime, coverage during lunch, sick days, and turnover. Forty hours of coverage does not equal 168 hours of coverage

Two vendors deserve a note for what they do not publish. AnswerConnect's pricing page is a quote-request form, and Nexa lists 100, 300, and 500 minute tiers with no prices, stating only that extra minutes bill at your base rate. Neither is a red flag on its own, but a price you have to ask for is a price you cannot comparison shop, and you should treat the sales call accordingly.

Per-Minute Human Plans

This is the oldest model and still the most common one for live services. You buy a block of minutes, a real person answers under your business name, and every minute they spend on your callers draws down the block. Run out and you pay a per-minute overage, usually higher than the blended rate you paid for the block.

Work the blended rates and the shape becomes clear. PATLive's 50-minute plan at $99 is about $1.98 per minute; its 500-minute plan at $759 is about $1.52. Ruby's 50-minute plan at $250 is $5.00 per minute; its 500-minute plan at $1,725 is $3.45. Abby's 50 minutes at $165 is $3.30, falling to $2.76 at 500 minutes. Davinci's Business 50 at $129 is $2.58. Same product category, and the entry rates range by a factor of two and a half. Part of that is service level (Ruby markets a US-based, higher-touch receptionist; PATLive markets volume), and part of it is simply what the market will bear.

What matters more than the sticker is how the minute is measured, and that is the part vendors are least consistent about. PATLive's FAQ says it bills the first minute in full and then in six-second increments after that. Ruby's own pricing explainer says minutes are charged in 60-second increments, rounded up, from the moment a receptionist answers until the call ends or transfers and the receptionist finishes after-call notes. Jill's Office bills in 15-second increments and waives calls of 15 seconds or less. Those three policies produce very different bills for the same 200 calls, and none of them is on the plan comparison table.

Per-Call Human Plans

The per-call model bills you a fixed amount for every call a receptionist handles, however long it runs. Smith.ai is the most visible example: $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90, $2,100 for 300, with overage calls at $11.50, $10.50, and $8.50 respectively. Its page makes the pitch explicitly, that a call at 2pm and a call at 2am cost the same and there are no setup fees.

The appeal is predictability. If your calls are long, say an intake conversation for a law firm or a service history for a repair shop, per-call pricing protects you from a bad minute meter. The math flips if your calls are short. A 30-call plan at $300 is $10.00 per call, and if your typical call is a two-minute "are you open Saturday," you are paying $5.00 a minute for it.

The definition question here is what counts as a call. Wrong numbers, hangups, robocalls, and the caller who rings three times about the same thing all hit the counter unless the vendor filters them. Smith.ai's AI product page says spam from known numbers is filtered automatically and lets you strike up to 10 percent of calls per billing cycle as spam. Ask any per-call vendor the same question before you sign, and ask about notice periods too: Smith.ai's AI plan, for example, requires 30 days' notice to cancel.

Flat Monthly AI Plans

The newest category, and the one moving fastest. An AI receptionist answers with a synthetic voice, follows a script you configure, and books or takes a message. Because there is no human on the clock, the marginal cost of a minute is small, and the pricing reflects that.

Dialzara sells 60 receptionist minutes for $29, 220 for $99, 500 for $199, and 1,000 for $349, with overage at $0.48 down to $0.35 per minute and a seven-day trial. Goodcall sells unlimited minutes at $79, $129, and $249 a month, but the meter is elsewhere: each tier is priced per agent and capped at 100, 250, or 500 unique customers a month, with $0.50 per customer above that, and annual billing takes 15 percent off. Smith.ai's AI receptionist starts free at 25 calls a month with $3.00 per call after, then $150 and $500 tiers with per-call overage between $1.67 and $2.17. Abby has gone hybrid: on its plans a human minute costs one "Abby Minute" and an AI minute costs half of one.

Two cautions. First, the cheap plans are cheap because you are doing the configuration and the quality control yourself. If the script is wrong, the agent will be wrong at scale, politely, all night. Second, read the meter. "Unlimited minutes" with a unique-customer cap and per-agent pricing is not the same as unlimited, and a second phone line or a second location can double the bill. I wrote about what actually separates a good AI receptionist from a bad one in will AI replace receptionists, so I will not repeat it here.

What an In-House Receptionist Really Costs

Every vendor pricing page compares itself to a salary, and almost every one of them gets the salary wrong in the vendor's favor. Here is the version from the government's own data.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook puts the May 2025 median wage for receptionists at $18.27 an hour, or $38,010 a year, across about 947,500 jobs. Median means half of receptionists earn more, and in a high-cost metro or a medical office you will pay above it.

Wages are not the cost. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 reports that private-industry employers paid $46.89 an hour in total compensation, of which $32.82 was wages and $14.07 was benefits: paid leave, supplemental pay, insurance, retirement, and legally required contributions such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and workers' compensation. Benefits were 30.0 percent of total compensation, which works out to about 43 cents of benefit cost for every wage dollar. Apply that ratio to the median receptionist wage and a fully loaded front-desk hire is roughly $54,300 a year, or about $4,525 a month. Small shops offering thin benefits will land below that; anyone offering health insurance will be at or above it.

Then add what the salary does not buy. Forty hours is 24 percent of the week. Lunch, sick days, vacation, and turnover leave gaps, and every gap is a voicemail. A payroll receptionist is the right answer for plenty of businesses, and a bad answer for the after-hours problem specifically, which is the one that costs contractors and clinics the most. I covered the after-hours math on its own in the after-hours answering service page.

The Overage Traps

An old-fashioned taxi fare meter mounted on a telephone handset, its numbers spinning upward while a small bear trap sits open beneath it on a paper invoice
The meter keeps running after the caller hangs up

Here is where the quote and the invoice part ways. None of these are secrets, and most are disclosed somewhere in a FAQ. They are simply not on the page with the big price.

  • Minute rounding. A 61-second call billed in 60-second increments is two minutes. Across 200 short calls a month, full-minute rounding can add 25 to 40 percent to billed minutes compared to six-second or fifteen-second billing. PATLive (first minute in full, then six-second increments), Jill's Office (15-second increments), and Ruby (60-second increments, rounded up) are all doing something different, and all of them are being honest about it if you go looking.
  • Billable time that is not talk time. Ruby's explainer states the clock runs until the receptionist completes after-call notes. That is fair, the notes are work, but it means a 90-second call can bill as three minutes. Warm transfers can bill both legs, the receptionist's time and your time on the line together, as the OnceHub cost guide notes.
  • Setup and porting fees. Several major vendors advertise no setup fee (Ruby, Smith.ai, PATLive, Abby, Dialzara all say so on their pages). Others do not: Jill's Office charges a $599 one-time setup on its weekly plans and waives it on annual plans. The OnceHub guide puts typical setup at $0 to $99 and flags number-porting fees as the one to confirm in writing.
  • Per-seat, per-agent, per-location add-ons. Goodcall prices per agent. Some AI vendors price per phone number or per location. PATLive charges a one-time $50 regulatory fee to enable business texting. Each is small until you have three of them.
  • After-hours and holiday surcharges. Not universal, and worth asking about directly. PATLive's FAQ says flatly that nights, weekends, and holidays are included in the package price. The OnceHub guide reports that where surcharges exist they can add 20 to 30 percent for a business whose calls skew to evenings, which is exactly the business that needed the service in the first place.
  • Annual contracts and non-refundable prepayment. The discount is real (Goodcall takes 15 percent off for annual billing; Jill's Office trades the $599 setup fee for an annual commitment). So is the lock: Jill's Office states annual payments are non-refundable. If your volume drops or the service disappoints in month two, the discount was expensive.
  • Tier jumps at the cap. Overage is priced to push you up a tier. On PATLive's ladder, 100 minutes is $189 and the 101st minute is $2.09. Blow through 200-minute Ruby at $720 and you are being nudged toward $1,725. The plan you need is the one that fits your busiest month, not your average one, and vendors know most people buy for the average.

None of this makes these vendors bad actors. It makes them vendors. The job on your side is to translate every one of those meters into your actual call pattern before you sign, which is what the next section does.

What a Month Actually Looks Like

Take a plausible small shop: a two-truck plumbing company, about 120 inbound calls a month, average talk time three minutes, roughly a third of calls arriving after 5pm or on weekends. Here is what the same month costs under each model, using published list prices and stated billing policies, and being conservative about rounding.

Per-minute human. 120 calls at three minutes is 360 talk minutes. Add rounding and after-call notes and billed minutes land nearer 420. On PATLive that is the 300-minute plan at $479 plus 120 overage minutes at $1.89, about $706, or simply the 500-minute plan at $759. On Ruby, 420 billed minutes is the 500-minute Enterprise tier at $1,725, because the 200-minute Business tier at $720 would leave you 220 minutes in overage at a rate Ruby does not publish. On Abby, the 500-minute Growth plan is $1,380. Call it $700 to $1,725 depending on vendor.

Per-call human. 120 calls on Smith.ai is the 90-call Basic plan at $810 plus 30 overage calls at $10.50, about $1,125. If a quarter of those calls are spam and you strike the maximum 10 percent, you shave a few. Roughly $1,000 to $1,125.

Flat AI software. 360 to 420 minutes on Dialzara is the 500-minute plan at $199, or the 220-minute plan at $99 plus 200 overage minutes at $0.45, about $189. On Goodcall, 120 calls is under the 250 unique-customer cap on the $129 Growth tier, assuming one agent. Smith.ai's AI Pro at $150 covers it. Roughly $130 to $200.

In-house, part time. A 20-hour-a-week receptionist at the $18.27 median is about $1,585 in monthly wages and about $2,265 fully loaded, and covers business hours only, so the after-hours third of the calls still goes to voicemail. Full time is about $4,525 a month for the same coverage window.

Read those four numbers together and notice what the spread is actually telling you. The human services are not overpriced; you are paying a person to be awake at 2am, and that costs what it costs. The AI plans are not underpriced; you are paying for software and doing the thinking yourself. The employee is the only option that also unloads the truck. Which one is right depends on what the calls are worth, and a missed emergency plumbing call is worth a great deal more than a missed "what are your hours." If you want to go deeper on the human-service side specifically, I broke that down in how much an answering service costs.

Questions to Ask Before Signing

Print this, or paste it into the email. A vendor who answers all of them in writing is one you can do business with.

  • What is the billing increment: per second, six seconds, fifteen, thirty, or a full minute? Is the first minute billed in full?
  • When does the clock start and stop? Does after-call work count? Does hold time? Does a warm transfer bill both legs?
  • What counts as a call? Are wrong numbers, hangups, and robocalls filtered, and can I dispute them?
  • What is the overage rate on my tier, in writing, and does it change if I move tiers mid-month?
  • Are there setup, porting, number, texting, or integration fees, and are any of them recurring?
  • Is pricing per agent, per line, per location, or per seat? What happens when I add a second one?
  • Are nights, weekends, and holidays included at the listed price?
  • What is the contract term, the notice period, and the refund policy on annual prepayment?
  • Can I see a sample invoice for a business my size, with the minute or call count shown?
  • If I leave, what do I take with me: call logs, transcripts, the script, the phone number?

That last one is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the one I care about most.

A Plan You Run vs a Plan Run for You

Every AI plan above has the same fine print: the software is the cheap part, and you are the labor. You write the script, you wire up the calendar, you listen to recordings at 11pm to figure out why it booked a Sunday appointment. Most owners I talk to did not lose the call because a tool was missing. They lost it because nobody had time to run the tool.

That is the gap we work in. We run a hosted CRM with the AI already wired in, set up and managed for your shop, live in about two weeks, and priced in the same range as the AI plans in this article, at one flat monthly price. You get the receptionist and the follow-up without becoming its part-time administrator. The pieces most shops start with:

  • Voice AI receptionist. Answers, qualifies, and books onto your calendar day or night, and hands the call to a person when it needs one. More on how that works on the after-hours answering service page.
  • Speed to lead. A new form fill, ad lead, or missed call gets a text back right away, while the customer is still shopping. I wrote up why the first few minutes decide the job.
  • Database reactivation. The old leads and past customers already sitting in your system get a conversational text campaign that books the ones who are ready now.
  • AI social replies. Facebook and Instagram comments and DMs get answered and routed instead of sitting unread until Monday.

The last question on the checklist applies to me too. Your contacts, your conversation history, and your phone number are yours to export or port out if you leave.

For shops that want the whole thing on hardware they own, prompts, logs, and models included, we still do custom builds. That is a bigger project, about 30 days with the hardware and integrations, and a different conversation. Most shops should start with the managed setup and grow into a rig, not the other way around.

Sources

Prices are published list prices on the date checked and change without notice. Confirm with the vendor before you sign, and get the billing policy in writing.

FAQ

How Much Does a Virtual Receptionist Cost per Month?

As of September 2026, published human virtual receptionist plans run from about $99 to $1,725 a month on per-minute billing and about $300 to $2,100 on per-call billing, while AI receptionist software plans run from free or $29 up to about $500 a month. Overage, rounding, and add-ons decide where in that range your actual bill lands.

What Is the Difference Between Per-Minute and Per-Call Pricing?

Per-minute plans bill for receptionist time, usually rounded up in increments from six seconds to a full minute and often including after-call notes. Per-call plans charge a fixed amount per handled call regardless of length. Per-call favors long calls, per-minute favors short ones, and both depend on how the vendor defines the unit.

How Much Does an In-House Receptionist Cost Fully Loaded?

The BLS median wage for receptionists was $18.27 an hour, or $38,010 a year, in May 2025. Applying the private-industry benefits share from the June 2026 Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release, about 30 percent of total compensation, a full-time receptionist costs roughly $54,000 a year, or about $4,500 a month, for business-hours coverage only.

What Are the Most Common Hidden Fees?

Full-minute rounding, billable after-call and transfer time, setup and number-porting fees, per-agent or per-location pricing, after-hours or holiday surcharges, non-refundable annual prepayment, and overage rates designed to push you into the next tier. Most are disclosed in a FAQ rather than on the pricing table.

Is an AI Receptionist Cheaper Than a Human Virtual Receptionist?

On published prices, yes, by a wide margin: AI plans meter minutes in cents and calls in single dollars, while human services charge roughly $1.50 to $5.00 per minute or $8.50 to $11.50 per call. The tradeoff is that you configure and quality-check the AI yourself, and a rented AI plan still lives inside the vendor's account.

What Does Pulp AI Studio Charge for an AI Receptionist?

Pulp AI Studio sets up and manages a hosted CRM with the AI built in: a voice AI receptionist, speed-to-lead text back, database reactivation, and AI social replies. It is priced in the same range as the AI receptionist plans above, with the setup and ongoing management done for you. Shops that want the system on hardware they own can get a scoped custom build. Pricing is confirmed per shop on a short call rather than published as a monthly tier.