TL;DR & Quick Summary
AI receptionist pricing in 2026 is genuinely difficult to compare, and not by accident. Vendors meter different things — minutes, calls, unique customers, locations — which makes headline prices close to meaningless until you normalise them.
This guide takes published pricing from nine vendors, verified against their own pricing pages in August 2026, and converts every plan to the same basis: 200 calls per month at an average of three minutes per call, a realistic profile for a small clinic, trades business, or professional practice.
The short version:
AI-only services land between roughly $129 and $399/month at that volume.
Human and hybrid services land between roughly $1,725 and $2,100/month for the same work.
Developer platforms price the raw minutes at $0.05 to $0.31, which looks dramatically cheaper until engineering and maintenance are added.
Key Takeaway: At typical service-business volume, AI answering costs roughly one-tenth of a human answering service — but the cheapest headline plan is almost never the cheapest total cost once overages are counted.
Get Started: Want a voice agent built around your actual booking system rather than a generic template? Schedule a Strategy Call with Cogniq AI or explore our voice AI automation services.
Why AI Receptionist Pricing Is So Hard to Compare
Four different metering models are in active use, and vendors rarely publish conversions between them.
| Metering Model | Vendors Using It | What You Are Actually Buying |
|---|---|---|
| Per minute (bundled) | Rosie, Dialzara, Ruby | A monthly minute allowance, then overage |
| Per call | Smith.ai, Simple Phones | A call count, regardless of call length |
| Per unique customer | Goodcall | Unlimited minutes, capped distinct callers |
| Per location (flat) | Slang.ai | Unlimited usage at one site |
| Per minute (raw usage) | Retell AI, Vapi | Infrastructure only; you build the agent |
A business with many short calls and one with few long calls will get opposite answers about which vendor is cheapest. That is why the comparison below fixes the volume first.
Two numbers you need before reading further:
- Monthly inbound call count. Pull this from your phone provider's call log, not from memory. Most businesses underestimate it.
- Average call duration. For appointment booking and intake this is typically two to four minutes.
If you do not have these, get them before signing anything. Every pricing decision below depends on them.
Published Pricing: AI-Only Receptionists
All figures below are taken from each vendor's own published pricing page as of August 2026. Prices change frequently; verify before purchase.
Dialzara
| Plan | Monthly Price | Included Minutes | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Business Lite | $29 | 60 | $0.48/min |
| Business Pro | $99 | 220 | $0.45/min |
| Business Plus | $199 | 500 | $0.40/min |
| Business Elite | $349 | 1,000 | $0.35/min |
All inbound plans include 24/7 answering, appointment booking, lead qualification, call routing, voicemail transcription, CRM and calendar integration, English and Spanish, and a custom AI voice. A seven-day free trial is offered.
Dialzara is the only vendor in this comparison publishing a full overage schedule that decreases with plan size — useful if your volume is unpredictable.
Rosie
| Plan | Monthly Price | Included Minutes | Notable Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional | $49 | 250 | 2 custom message scenarios, spam detection, chat widget |
| Scale | $149 | 1,000 | 5 scenarios, calendar booking, warm and live transfers, in-call texting |
| Growth | $299 | 2,000 | Unlimited scenarios, waterfall transfers, custom training, priority support |
Website chat is free on all plans. Website texting is a $50/month add-on covering 25 conversations, then $1 per additional conversation. Rosie does not publish an overage rate for exceeding minute allowances — worth confirming with sales.
Note that calendar appointment booking begins at the $149 tier. For most service businesses that is the entire point of the product, which makes Professional a trial plan rather than an operating plan.
Goodcall
| Plan | Monthly (Standard) | Monthly (Annual) | Unique Customers | Logic Flows |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $79/agent | $66/agent | 100 | 1 |
| Growth | $129/agent | $108/agent | 250 | 3 |
| Scale | $249/agent | $208/agent | 500 | 25 |
Goodcall explicitly does not charge for call minutes or tokens. The constraint is unique customers per month, billed at $0.50 per customer beyond the allowance. Annual billing carries a 15% discount.
This model favours businesses with long calls or repeat callers, and penalises those with high volumes of one-time contacts. A clinic whose patients call repeatedly is a good fit; a business fielding hundreds of first-time enquiries is not.
Simple Phones
Simple Phones publishes a starting price of $97/month for 100 calls, with a 14-day free trial and no commitment. Higher tiers are not published in full. The company states that exceeding your tier's call allowance results in phone numbers being released rather than overage billing — a meaningfully different failure mode worth understanding before you rely on it.
Slang.ai
| Plan | Monthly Price | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Core | From $399 | Per location |
| Premium | From $599 | Per location |
| Enterprise | Custom | Per location |
Slang.ai is built for restaurants, with reservation integrations for OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, and Fishbowl. Core covers reservation management, call recordings and summaries, VIP call handling, and CSAT measurement. Premium adds custom branding, cross-selling, real-time alerts, AI-powered texting, and bilingual Spanish support.
Two add-ons are billed separately: Tripleseat private events integration at $199/month and bilingual support at $99/month on Core. The bilingual surcharge is a good illustration of a general rule — capabilities that feel standard are frequently line items.
Published Pricing: Human and Hybrid Services
These are not AI products, but they are the alternative most businesses are actually choosing between.
Smith.ai (live agents, AI-assisted)
| Plan | Monthly Price | Included Calls | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $300 | 30 | $11.50/call |
| Basic | $810 | 90 | $10.50/call |
| Pro | $2,100 | 300 | $8.50/call |
All plans include lead screening, qualification and intake, live-staffed 24/7 coverage, and no charge for spam calls. Enterprise pricing is custom.
Ruby (live receptionists)
| Plan | Monthly Price | Included Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $250 | 50 |
| Professional | $395 | 100 |
| Small Business | $720 | 200 |
| Growing Business | $1,725 | 500 |
Ruby states there are no additional fees for activation, onboarding, setup, or customisation, and includes AI enhancements at no extra cost across plans. Live chat is priced separately, from $143/month for 10 chats, with a 20% discount when bundled with phone service.
Developer Platforms: The Build-Your-Own Tier
If you are commissioning a custom agent, these are the underlying infrastructure costs.
Retell AI
Published all-in pricing is $0.07 to $0.31 per minute depending on model and feature selection, broken out as:
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| Voice infrastructure | $0.055/min |
| Text-to-speech | $0.015–$0.040/min |
| LLM | $0.003–$0.16/min |
| Telephony | $0.015/min |
There is no platform fee. Subscriptions apply to phone numbers ($2/month), SMS service ($20/month), concurrent calls beyond the 20 included ($8 per call/month), knowledge bases beyond the first 10 ($8/month), and verified numbers ($10/month).
Vapi
Vapi charges $0.05/min for hosting, with speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech billed at cost — or $0 if you supply your own API keys. Chat messages are $0.005 each. The Build plan includes 10 concurrent lines, with additional lines at $10/month each.
Compliance is priced separately and significantly: HIPAA compliance at $2,000/month and zero data retention at $1,000/month. For any healthcare deployment, that surcharge dominates the per-minute economics and must be in the model from day one — a point we cover in more depth in our guide to AI scheduling for medical clinics.
Normalised Comparison: 200 Calls, 3 Minutes Each
Here is the same workload — 200 calls, 600 minutes per month — priced across every vendor. This is the table that actually answers the question.
| Vendor | Category | Plan Required | Estimated Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goodcall | AI-only | Growth ($129, 250 unique customers) | ~$129 |
| Rosie | AI-only | Scale ($149, 1,000 min) | ~$149 |
| Dialzara | AI-only | Business Plus + 100 min overage | ~$239 |
| Slang.ai | AI-only (restaurants) | Core, single location | ~$399 |
| Simple Phones | AI-only | Above published tier | Not published |
| Ruby | Human | Growing Business (500 min) + overage | $1,725+ |
| Smith.ai | Human hybrid | Basic + 110 call overage | ~$1,965 |
| Retell AI | Platform | 600 min at $0.07–$0.31 + number | ~$44–$188 + build |
| Vapi | Platform | 600 min hosting + model costs | ~$30–$90 + build |
Three observations from this table:
1. The AI-versus-human gap is roughly 10x. At this volume, a mainstream AI vendor costs $129–$249 against $1,725–$1,965 for human coverage. That gap, not feature parity, is what drives adoption.
2. Entry pricing is a poor predictor of operating cost. Dialzara has the lowest headline price at $29 but lands mid-pack at realistic volume, because its allowances are tight. Goodcall's $79 entry looks higher and finishes cheapest, because minutes are uncapped. Rank vendors at your volume, never at their entry tier.
3. Platform economics only win at scale. Raw minutes are cheap. The build is not. Custom becomes the rational choice when volume is high enough for the per-minute delta to fund engineering, or — more commonly — when the requirement is deep integration that no subscription product offers. For the component-level arithmetic behind those raw minutes — telephony, speech-to-text, LLM and voice synthesis priced individually — see our AI voice agent cost teardown, which works the build-versus-buy break-even in full.
What Pricing Pages Do Not Tell You
Four factors materially affect cost and appear on no pricing page.
Call length drift. AI agents that handle complex intake produce longer calls than simple message-taking. On a per-minute plan, a jump from two-minute to four-minute average calls doubles your bill. Model your worst case, not your average.
Spam and wrong numbers. Some vendors bill these, some do not. Smith.ai explicitly does not charge for spam. On a per-minute AI plan, spam consumes your allowance silently.
Integration depth. Nearly every vendor advertises calendar and CRM integration, but depth varies enormously — from writing a calendar event to checking real-time technician availability against a routing system. The second is rarely available off the shelf, which is the most common reason businesses move from subscription tools to custom AI agents.
The cost of a bad call. The most expensive outcome is not overage. It is an agent that mishandles a high-value enquiry. When comparing plans, weight transfer logic, escalation paths, and after-hours handling well above the monthly price difference. The revenue arithmetic behind this is worked through in how AI phone receptionists save service businesses $10k monthly.
Choosing a Model by Business Profile
| Business Profile | Best-Fit Metering | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Repeat callers, long calls (clinics, legal) | Unique-customer or flat | Minutes are the wrong unit |
| High volume of short first-time enquiries | Per minute, high allowance | Unique-customer caps get expensive fast |
| Single-site restaurant | Flat per location | Predictable, reservation-native |
| Multi-location with central booking | Custom build | Per-location pricing scales badly |
| Deep EHR, ERP, or dispatch integration | Custom build | Subscription integrations are shallow |
| Under 50 calls/month | Entry AI plan | Not enough volume to justify more |
For businesses whose bottleneck is scheduling rather than answering, note that call handling is only half the problem — confirmation and reminder sequencing is what actually recovers revenue, as covered in our no-show prevention guide and our automated reminders comparison.
Conclusion
The 2026 AI receptionist market has settled into a clear structure: entry AI plans between $29 and $99, mainstream AI plans between $129 and $299, vertical products from $399 per location, and human coverage an order of magnitude above all of it. Developer platforms sell the same minutes for pennies, minus the software that makes them useful.
The mistake most buyers make is comparing headline prices across incompatible metering models. Measure your call volume and average duration first, then price every candidate at your numbers. That single exercise usually changes the ranking — and frequently reveals that the vendor with the most attractive entry tier is the most expensive one to actually operate.
If your requirement is deeper than any subscription product covers — real-time availability checks, multi-location routing, EHR or ERP writes, or compliance obligations that make managed platforms expensive — a custom agent is likely the cheaper path at your volume. Book a strategy call with Cogniq AI and we will model both options against your actual call data before recommending either.
