How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost? 2026 Pricing Guide

AI receptionists span free plans with a couple dozen calls a month to several hundred dollars once you add volume, overage, and extra integrations. What moves the number is minutes included, per-call overage rates, and how many channels and phone numbers you connect. We build Evoriqa, so it is on this list — and here is how we kept the rest honest.

The short answer, in one table

Prices below are each vendor's own published entry-level plan billed monthly, checked directly on their pricing pages.

A note on comparing across the table: "entry plan" here means the cheapest tier that actually answers calls. My AI Front Desk, for instance, sells a $16–20/mo plan below Business-in-a-Box, but that cheaper tier includes zero voice minutes — it is a chatbot plan, not a receptionist — so it is left out of the comparison.

The four ways AI receptionists are priced

Underneath the marketing names, every vendor above is running one of four billing models. Knowing which one you are looking at is the fastest way to tell whether a low-looking sticker price is actually cheap for your call volume.

Per minute

Dialzara's Business Lite plan (September 2026) is the clearest example: $29/mo buys 60 receptionist minutes, and every minute past that is billed individually at $0.48. This model is easy to reason about if your call volume is steady — you can multiply minutes by rate and know your ceiling — but it punishes a slow month that suddenly gets busy, since every extra minute is metered on top of the flat fee rather than smoothed into a bigger bucket.

Per call

Smith.ai and Upfirst both meter by the call rather than the minute. Smith.ai's Free plan (September 2026) includes 25 calls before $3.00 per call kicks in; Upfirst's $24.95/mo Starter plan (September 2026) includes 30 calls before $1.50 per call. Per-call pricing is simpler to forecast if your calls run a predictable length, but it charges the same for a 20-second wrong number as a 12-minute booking, so it rewards short calls and quietly punishes a business whose calls tend to run long.

Flat monthly with a minute allowance

Rosie's Professional plan (September 2026) is $49/mo for a pool of 250 minutes, and My AI Front Desk's Business-in-a-Box (September 2026) is $99/mo for 200 voice minutes plus a chat and SMS allowance bundled in. This is the model most small businesses actually budget against: one number, refreshed monthly, with a defined overage path once you exceed it. Goodcall's Starter plan (September 2026) takes a variant of this approach — unlimited minutes for a flat per-agent fee — and instead caps the plan by unique customers served per month.

Credits shared with chat

Evoriqa doesn't sell voice minutes as their own line item. A voice minute draws down the same monthly AI-credit pool that chat, email, and every other channel draws from, at roughly 2,500 credits per minute. The practical effect is that a slow month for calls and a busy month for chat cancel each other out inside one number instead of leaving a voice allowance unused while a separate chat allowance runs dry. It also means there is nothing extra to add to your plan to get phone answering — it is metered the same way everything else on the account is.

What actually drives your bill

Whichever pricing model a vendor uses, five things determine what you actually end up paying each month, and none of them show up on the pricing page as a single line.

• Call volume and average length. A per-minute or per-call plan bills almost entirely on this one input. A flat-allowance plan hides it until you cross the included minutes, at which point overage rates (like Dialzara's $0.48/min or Upfirst's $1.50/call) apply.
• The phone number itself. Some vendors bundle a number into every plan; others treat it as a setup step or a small add-on. Confirm whether the number, local or toll-free, is already covered before you commit to a monthly figure.
• Integrations. Connecting a calendar for booking, a CRM for logging calls, or a helpdesk for escalation is sometimes included at every tier and sometimes gated behind a higher plan — Goodcall's logic-flow count and directory-contact limits both scale with plan tier, for example.
• Overage rates. The published entry price is a floor, not a ceiling. If your call volume is seasonal or growing, the per-minute or per-call overage rate matters more than the base price, because it is the rate you will actually pay on the calls above your allowance.
• Multiple locations or numbers. A single-location plan rarely maps cleanly onto a business running two or three phone lines. Check whether a vendor prices additional locations as separate subscriptions, additional seats, or a straightforward allowance increase.

What Evoriqa costs, exactly

Evoriqa's AI receptionist is included on every plan rather than sold as a separate add-on, so the numbers below are the whole story, not a starting point before a phone add-on gets tacked on.

The Free plan includes 10 voice minutes a month at no cost. Starter, at $29/mo, includes 60 voice minutes. Those minutes are drawn from the same monthly AI-credit pool that funds chat, email, and every other channel — a voice minute uses roughly 2,500 credits, so 60 minutes of calls is what the Starter pool funds if you spend it on nothing else; most workspaces split it between calls and chat. Pro, at $99/mo, has a 1,000,000-credit pool that funds roughly 400 voice minutes if spent on nothing else; Business, at $399/mo, has a 4,000,000-credit pool funding roughly 1,600 minutes on the same basis.

Because voice draws from the same pool as everything else, there is no second invoice for phone answering and no separate per-minute bill to reconcile against a base subscription. Per-workspace spend caps mean a busy month cannot silently run past what you have budgeted — the account stops drawing rather than surprising you with an overage line. The full credit-burn table, including exact rates for chat messages and agentic actions alongside voice, is published on the pricing page, and the AI answering service page covers what the phone-answering experience itself looks like for callers.

AI receptionist vs a human answering service

This comparison is harder to make with the same precision as the table above, because most human answering services quote custom pricing after a sales call rather than publishing a rate card the way the AI vendors here do. The general shape, though, is consistent across the market: human answering services are typically priced per minute of live agent time, often with a monthly base fee layered on top, and a live agent costs more per minute than an AI system because a person's time is the product being sold.

One data point from a vendor's own published pricing page: Smith.ai — which sells both a live-human virtual receptionist service and the AI-only product in the table above — prices its human Starter plan (September 2026) at $300/mo for 30 calls, published on smith.ai/pricing. That is one vendor's own number rather than a market average, but it illustrates the gap: the same company's AI plan starts free for a similar call count, while its human-staffed plan starts at $300/mo. The trade-off is not purely about price — a live agent can handle situations an AI script cannot, and some callers simply prefer a person — but on cost alone, the AI side of that same vendor's price list is the cheaper way to keep a phone answered around the clock.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free AI receptionist?

Yes, on more than one vendor. Evoriqa's Free plan includes 10 voice minutes a month at no cost, and Smith.ai's Free plan (September 2026) includes 25 calls a month before per-call overage applies. Neither requires a paid plan to start; both are meant to let you test call handling before committing to a paid tier.

Is per-minute or flat pricing better for a small business?

It depends on how predictable your call volume is. If your calls are steady in number and length, a per-minute or per-call plan (like Dialzara or Upfirst) is easy to forecast and you rarely pay for capacity you don't use. If your volume swings month to month, a flat monthly allowance with a defined overage rate is usually less stressful to budget against, because one number covers a typical month and the overage rate only matters in the months you exceed it.

Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a human answering service?

On published pricing, generally yes. Every AI vendor in the table that publishes a self-serve price lists an entry plan at $99/mo or less, and two — Evoriqa and Smith.ai — offer a free tier. Human answering services more commonly quote custom pricing after a call, and the one published reference point in this research (Smith.ai's own human Starter plan at $300/mo for 30 calls) sits well above any AI entry price here.

Does the price include the phone number?

It varies by vendor, and the pricing page rarely says so explicitly — this is worth confirming before you sign up rather than assuming either way. Evoriqa includes phone answering as part of every plan without a separate number-provisioning fee; other vendors handle number setup as part of onboarding or as a distinct step, so check this specifically if a dedicated local or toll-free number matters to your setup.

Where to go next

If you want the fuller picture beyond pricing, AI receptionist covers what the product actually does on a call, and AI answering service focuses specifically on the answering-and-routing experience callers get. Solutions breaks down how the same phone-answering AI applies across different business types, from clinics to home services. And when you're ready to see the numbers against your own expected call volume, the full plan breakdown is on pricing.