The Short Answer
An AI receptionist costs $297 to $997 per month on a flat-rate plan, plus a one-time setup fee of $299 to $899, at Otherworlds AI. That price covers 24/7 answering, unlimited inbound calls (fair use), caller qualification, direct booking into your calendar or CRM, and a written escalation playbook for calls that need a human. Live deployment is typically inside two weeks.
Across the wider market you will see three pricing models competing for that same budget:
- Per-minute answering services — $0.85 to $1.50 per minute, usually with a $150–$400 base fee that only covers the first 100–200 minutes. Overages stack quietly.
- Virtual receptionist marketplaces — $50 to $200 per month for a shared human pool with limited AI, or $300 to $800 per month for an AI-first platform with a call-minute cap.
- Flat-rate AI receptionist platforms — a fixed monthly subscription with unlimited or high-cap inbound calls, no per-minute billing, and CRM write-back included. This is what Agent+ sells.
None of those three numbers is the "right" one. The correct price depends on how many minutes of conversation you buy each month and what you need the receptionist to actually do — answer questions, book jobs, triage emergencies, or write records into a CRM.
If you only remember one thing from this post: a $297 plan that books 20 real jobs is cheaper per booked job than a $79 plan that lets 80% of your callers leave voicemail. Cost is not the number to compare; cost per booked job is. The rest of this post is that math.
What an AI Receptionist Really Costs: Four Ways to Buy the Same Outcome
The table below puts four ways of covering a small service business's phones side by side. Numbers are typical US small-business ranges gathered from vendor rate cards and public job-posting data, not quotes from any single provider. Use them for relative comparison, not for budgeting a specific vendor.
| Coverage model | Typical monthly cost | What you actually get | Where the cost hides |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-house human receptionist | $3,000 – $5,000 fully-loaded ($48,000 – $60,000+ per year with payroll tax, benefits, overhead) | One person, one shift, one location. Vacations and sick days are your problem. | Hiring, training, turnover, unemployment insurance, workers' comp. After-hours requires a second hire. |
| Legacy per-minute answering service | $150 – $400 base + $0.85 – $1.50 per minute past the first 100 – 200 minutes | Shared human call-takers answering in your name. Message relay, not booking. | Overage minutes. Every booking attempt costs you twice. Emergencies routed by a script, not your rules. |
| DIY IVR / Google Voice voicemail | $0 – $25 | A phone that rings into a box. | Nothing costs more than a missed $5,000 job you did not know was calling. |
| Flat-rate AI receptionist (Agent+) | $297 / $497 / $997 | Answers every call 24/7, qualifies the caller, books into your calendar or CRM, warm-transfers with a transcript when it needs a human. Unlimited inbound on fair use. | One-time setup fee ($299 / $599 / $899) and configuration time on your side. Nothing per-minute. |
The full plan-by-plan breakdown (what changes between Starter, Professional and Premium) lives on the Agent+ pricing page.
The Billing Model Is the Real Cost
Per-minute billing was designed for a world where typing was slower than talking. It transfers every surprise onto the customer: a busy week costs more than a slow week, a curious caller costs the same as a booked job, and no one can forecast what the phone line will cost next month.
Here is what a single month looks like on a mid-tier legacy service (base $200 for the first 150 minutes, $1.00 per minute after). Assume 260 inbound calls, four minutes average per call, so about 1,040 total minutes.
- Base: $200 (first 150 minutes)
- Overage: 1,040 − 150 = 890 minutes × $1.00 = $890
- Total for the month: $1,090 — and every one of those 260 callers still has to leave a message or get a callback, because per-minute services are almost never allowed to book directly into your CRM.
On the same call volume, Agent+ Professional is $497 flat, unlimited inbound on fair use, with ServiceTitan/Jobber/Housecall Pro write-back included. Same 260 calls. Roughly half the cost and every call gets booked.
The math flips the harder you work at marketing. Every ad you run, every GBP post, every seasonal spike pushes more minutes into the tier where the legacy provider is charging you the most per unit. Flat-rate inverts the incentive: the more calls you capture, the cheaper each one gets.
Setup Fees: What Actually Changes Between Tiers
Every flat-rate AI receptionist vendor charges some kind of setup. The number matters less than what it covers. Here is the Agent+ tier ladder so you can see the shape of a fair one:
| Tier | Monthly | One-time setup | What it covers | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $297/mo | $299 | One number, 24/7 answering, unlimited inbound (fair use), FAQ knowledge base, calendar booking, email + SMS notifications, live transfer to a defined cell. | Solo operators and single-location shops getting phones off the founder's mobile. |
| Professional | $497/mo | $599 | Everything in Starter, plus CRM write-back (ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro), emergency-triage playbook with escalation triggers, up to 3 concurrent lines, call-recording + transcript archive, monthly reporting call. | Two-to-five-truck shops and multi-practice small firms that need jobs to land in the CRM without anyone typing. |
| Premium | $997/mo | $899 | Everything in Professional, plus multi-location territory routing, custom voice, deeper API access, priority onboarding, dedicated account manager. | Franchise groups, five-plus trucks, and businesses running several brands from one line. |
Setup is not an "activation fee" you pay for nothing. On our plans the fee covers your greeting script, your FAQ knowledge base, your escalation rules, your calendar or CRM connection, and a supervised pilot before full cutover. Most deployments go live inside two weeks — often two to three business days for the core call flow. If we don't book at least 5 qualified appointments in your first 60 days, we refund the entire setup fee and keep working until we hit that. That guarantee is what makes the setup fee a fair charge.
Google Voice Alternative for Business Calls: 6 Real Options Compared
Free AI Receptionists and Free Trials
Truly free tiers do exist. The trick is that none of them answer anybody. A "free AI receptionist" plan is usually one of three things:
- A free trial on a paid platform — the AI is real, but the trial ends after 7–14 days and the price you see in month two is the price you should have been quoted in month one.
- A feature inside another product — Google Voice's transcription, a website chatbot's "voice" mode, a VoIP provider's basic auto-attendant. None of these will book a job, none of them know your escalation rules, and none of them answer a burst-pipe call at 2 a.m.
- A marketing lead-gen shell — the "free" receptionist takes a name and phone number and hands your callers to a sales team. Your lead becomes their lead.
If you actually want a receptionist that answers, qualifies and books without you watching, no free tier does it. What we do instead is put skin in the game on the paid plan: 5 booked jobs in the first 60 days or we refund your setup fee. That is a stronger consumer protection than a 14-day trial where you will not know a plan works until it is off.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Puts in the Comparison
Once you look past the sticker, three line items show up on almost every real bill. Plan for them.
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- Overage and premium minutes. Legacy answering services charge more at night, on weekends and for "bilingual" or "emergency handling" call types. A shop that thinks it is paying $200/month often discovers a $700 invoice in January.
- Booking-not-included. Most virtual receptionist services take a message; the actual booking back into your calendar is either a paid add-on or a manual step your team still has to do. If your "AI receptionist" does not write to your CRM, the admin cost of the human touching the record after the fact is still on you.
- Integration setup. Any vendor charging $99/month and promising ServiceTitan write-back is going to add a $500–$2,500 one-off integration fee, or quietly exclude the fields that matter (job type, priority, membership status, deposit collection). Read the integration scope, not the logo wall.
Agent+ prices include CRM write-back on Professional and above and unlimited inbound calls on every tier. If you want a plan comparison side by side with the numbers on the page (not a sales call), see the full pricing breakdown.
Real Cost per Booked Job
Cost comparison without booked-job math is marketing. Here is booked-job math from a representative single-location HVAC shop running Agent+ Professional:
- Setup month: 12 inbound calls/day at 4 min average → about 1,440 min/month, so a legacy per-minute service at $1.00/min past 150 min would be roughly $1,490. On Agent+ Professional, same 1,440 minutes: $497 flat.
- Bookings per month (typical after the first 60 days for a single-location shop): 40 to 70 booked jobs, depending on season and call quality. Assume 50 in the middle.
- Cost per booked job: $497 ÷ 50 = $9.94. Compare that to a $3,500/month in-house hire booking the same 50 = $70 per booked job, or to a $1,490 per-minute invoice booking 25 (because the other 25 callers just left messages) = $59.60 per booked job.
Once you have run this once for your own call volume, the whole "AI receptionist cost" question changes shape. It stops being about the monthly sticker and starts being about how much you would happily pay for each booked job that used to go to voicemail. If you want to plug in your own numbers, the AI ROI calculator does the same math interactively.
By Vertical: What "Cheap" Actually Means
Same plan, different break-even:
- HVAC and plumbing. Tickets average $350 to $800, and after-hours no-heat or burst-pipe calls are the highest-intent leads you will get. On the HVAC answering service page the whole model is laid out; a single captured emergency call often covers the month's fee.
- Dental, legal and medical. Ticket values are higher ($500 to $5,000+ per new patient or client), and a "cheaper" receptionist that does not capture patient intake, insurance verification, or the conflict-of-interest screening a lawyer needs is not cheaper. The AI has to write the record, not just take the message.
- QSR and retail franchise. Call volume is what kills per-minute billing on a lunch or dinner rush; flat-rate is the only model that survives a Valentine's Day.
- Real estate and field services. Missed-call math is similar to trades but the sales cycle is longer, so the "job booked" number is a showing, not an invoice. Compare against how many showings a human receptionist actually books in a month at $3,000+.
For an adjacent take on missed-call math outside the trades, see the dealership after-hours calls post.
FAQ
How much does an AI receptionist cost? Agent+ AI receptionist plans are $297, $497 or $997 per month with a one-time setup fee of $299, $599 or $899. Every tier includes unlimited inbound calls on flat-rate pricing — no per-minute billing and no overage charges.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than hiring a person? For most small service businesses, yes, by a wide margin. A fully-loaded in-house receptionist runs $48,000 to $60,000+ a year and covers one shift at one location. A $297/month AI receptionist covers 24/7 at three locations on higher tiers for roughly $3,564 to $11,964 a year. The human still matters — for the calls that need one. The AI's job is to hand those to you with a transcript, not to replace your team.
Are there hidden fees I should watch for? Three that come up most often: per-minute overage charges past your base allowance, add-on pricing for CRM write-back that a plan's headline claimed was included, and setup-integration fees quoted separately from the monthly. Ask any vendor to put all three in writing before you sign.
What does the setup fee actually cover? Greeting script, FAQ knowledge base, escalation playbook, calendar or CRM connection, and a supervised pilot before going live. It is a real configuration cost, not an activation fee. If a plan charges a setup fee without doing any of that, push back.
Is there a free AI receptionist or free trial? Truly free tiers exist, but they answer nobody: the phone rings and the call still goes to voicemail. Instead of a fake free plan we make a guarantee — if we don't book at least 5 qualified appointments in your first 60 days, we refund your entire setup fee and keep working until we hit it.
