The pitch for every AI receptionist is the same: nothing rings unanswered, nothing goes to voicemail, and you stopped losing the customer who hung up and called the next listing. The pricing, on the other hand, is all over the place. One vendor charges $29 a month. One starts at $0 and bills $3 a call after that. One sells per location and wants a quote. Pick the wrong pricing model for your call volume and the “cheap” option quietly becomes the expensive one.
I pulled the published numbers from every pricing page I could verify this week. Here is what AI receptionists for a small business actually cost in November 2026, and which billing structure fits which kind of phone line.
The published numbers, November 2026
| Tool | Entry price | Billing model | Live call transfer | Books appointments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dialzara | $29/mo, 60 minutes | Minutes, then $0.48/min | Blind on all plans; warm from $99 | Calendar sync from $99 plan |
| Rosie | $49/mo, 250 minutes | Minutes | Warm/live from $149 plan | Booking on $149+; links by text on $49 |
| Goodcall | $79/mo, 100 unique customers | Per unique caller | Yes | Yes (Google Calendar, HighLevel) |
| My AI Front Desk | $99/mo, 200 minutes | Plan plus credits | Yes | Yes; 400 SMS included |
| Smith.ai (AI) | $0/mo, 25 calls, then $3.00/call | Per call | Yes | Yes |
| Moneypenny (AI) | $69/mo, 25 calls | Per call (AI); per minute (human) | Warm transfer | Scheduling service |
| Ruby | $250/mo, 50 minutes | Per minute, human agents | Yes | Yes |
| Klugon | $99/mo, 1,000 minutes | Flat minute allowance | No (flags for your team) | Yes, built-in calendar |
| Slang.ai | From $399 per location | Per location, quote | Instant human transfer | OpenTable, Resy, SevenRooms, Yelp |
Look at the billing-model column before the price column. Minutes, calls, unique customers and locations are four different denominations, and they reward and punish completely different businesses.
The cheapest way in: minute plans from $29 to $99
Three vendors publish self-serve plans that a one-location business can switch on this afternoon.
Dialzara is the cheapest entry in the category at $29 a month for 60 minutes. That is roughly 20 to 25 short calls. Go over and you pay $0.48 a minute, stepping down to $0.35 on the $349 tier. Every plan includes call recordings, summaries, a US number, and blind transfer to your team; warm transfer and calendar sync need the $99 Business Pro plan. For a low-volume line, this is the whole experiment for less than a phone bill.
Rosie starts at $49 for 250 minutes and is the better mid-range pick for owner-run businesses like home services. The catch is product placement: booking that writes to your calendar and warm or live transfer to your mobile start at the $149 Scale plan. The $49 tier takes messages and texts booking links instead. If “put the emergency caller through to me” is the feature you’re buying, budget for $149, not $49.
My AI Front Desk at $99 for 200 minutes is the one that bundles two-way texting into the base plan, with 400 SMS included. If your follow-up loop is “text them the link, text them the reminder,” that’s doing the job of a separate SMS tool.
The honest arithmetic on minute plans: run your last two months of call logs and multiply average call length by call count. A shop whose calls average four minutes burns through 250 minutes in about 60 calls. The overage rate, not the headline price, is what you’ll actually be paying by month three.
Per-call and per-caller pricing: the models decide the winner
The second tier of this market doesn’t sell minutes at all, and the differences matter more there than anywhere else.
Goodcall bills by unique customer: $79 covers 100 distinct phone numbers a month, however many times each of them calls and however long they talk. For a business where the same twenty customers call back repeatedly, this is brilliantly cheap. For a business where every call is a stranger with a two-minute question, it’s the worst possible deal, because you’ll exhaust the 100-caller pool and pay $0.79 each after. Also worth noting: spam and wrong numbers don’t count against you, and HIPAA compliance with a signed BAA is available on the $299 Scale plan and up.
Smith.ai is the per-call play. The free plan answers 25 real calls a month, which is the only genuinely free trial in this category that touches your actual phone line. After that, Pro is $150 for 75 calls at $2.00 a call. Per-call pricing is forgiving of long calls and brutal on busy ones: 150 calls a month on AI Pro runs about $270. Where Smith.ai stands out is the human safety net, since live North American agents can take over on hybrid plans, and it’s the category’s default for law firms, with Clio and Salesforce integrations to match.
Moneypenny sits between the worlds, with AI from $69 a month for 25 calls and human answering from $165 for 50 minutes. Ruby is the pure human end: $250 for 50 minutes, $1,725 for 500, real trained receptionists around the clock. Ruby’s AI enhancements are included, but you are buying people, and the price reflects it. If your callers include upset, confused, or legally sensitive people, this is the tier where that’s handled.
The messaging angle and the restaurant specialist
Klugon is the outlier on both price shape and channels: $99 buys 1,000 minutes, the largest entry allowance on the list, because it does no live call transfer at all. When a caller needs a person, the AI collects their details and flags your team instead of putting them through. The trade you get is channels: the same assistant can run your WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and website chat as separate products from $49 to $89 each, in one shared inbox. For a business whose customers actually text, that combination doesn’t exist at Dialzara or Rosie at any price. Read the trial terms carefully, though: it’s 7 days with a card required, and a phone number can only be connected after the trial ends.
Slang.ai is vertical, and the price says so: Core starts at $399 per location with Premium from $599, quote required, no published trial. It books reservations directly into OpenTable, Resy, SevenRooms and Yelp, takes special requests and private-event inquiries, and texts guests confirmations. For a restaurant group taking 200 reservation calls a week, that’s a real product. For anyone else, it’s $399 for features you don’t need.
Check Dialzara pricing · Check Rosie pricing · Compare Goodcall plans
Three setups, priced for a year
- Low-volume line, proving it works. Dialzara Business Lite at $29 is $348 a year. If the phone rings under 60 minutes a month, this is your whole cost, and the 7-day trial tells you most of what you need before you spend it.
- Owner-run service business that needs emergencies transferred. Rosie Scale at $149, with warm and live transfer included, is $1,788 a year. Add the $50 website texting add-on only if website visitors actually convert to calls.
- Repeat-caller business (salon, clinic, med spa). Goodcall Growth at $129 for 500 unique customers is $1,548 a year, and every minutes are free, so a chatty regular costs nothing extra. Compare that against a minute plan at the same volume before you sign anything.
For a business where a missed call is a lost patient or client, the hybrid tiers change the math: Smith.ai hybrid from about $2.50 a call, Moneypenny human from $165, Ruby from $250. You’re paying two to five times the AI price for judgment, and for some phone lines that judgment is the product.
Five traps in this category
- The wrong billing model costs more than the wrong vendor. Per-minute plans punish long calls, per-caller plans punish new strangers, per-call plans punish volume. Match the model to your call log, not the marketing.
- Transfers and booking are often upper-tier features. Rosie gates live transfer behind $149, Dialzara gates warm transfer and calendar sync behind $99. Price the tier you need, not the one on the homepage.
- Trial terms are not all equal. Dialzara, Rosie and My AI Front Desk offer 7-day trials; Goodcall gives you a demo agent you can’t put on a real line; Klugon requires a card and won’t connect a phone number until you pay. Smith.ai’s free plan is the only one that answers real calls at $0.
- HIPAA is plan-gated, not automatic. Goodcall signs BAAs on Scale and up; most AI-only plans don’t publish their position at all. A medical or behavioral-health front desk should get the BAA answer in writing before the demo, not after the invoice.
- Overage rates are the second invoice. Dialzara publishes theirs ($0.48 down to $0.35). Several competitors don’t publish overage pricing at all, which means ask, in writing, before you connect your number.
See Smith.ai AI receptionist pricing (free 25-call plan) · Request Ruby virtual receptionist pricing · Get a Slang.ai quote for restaurants
Key takeaways
- Published entry prices run from $0 (Smith.ai’s 25-call plan) to $99 (Klugon, My AI Front Desk), with $29 to $49 the real floor for a usable AI-only plan.
- Minutes, calls, unique callers and locations are four pricing denominations; the right one depends on call length, repeat rate and volume, in that order.
- Live call transfer is the most common paywall in the category; Rosie from $149, Dialzara warm from $99.
- Human backup (Smith.ai hybrid, Moneypenny, Ruby) roughly doubles to quadruples the cost and is worth it only when callers need judgment, not bookings.
- Multi-channel (WhatsApp, Instagram, web chat) currently means Klugon or a separate chat product; no minute-plan vendor bundles it.
If you’re starting from zero this month: run your call log first, pick the billing model that matches it second, and only then compare vendors within that model. Most small businesses overbuy minutes and underbuy transfer. The tool that answers everything is only saving you money if the calls that mattered reached a person.
Prices read November 11, 2026 from vendor pricing pages and a 10-vendor comparison with October-2026 dated reads. Receptionist pricing changes often, so confirm on the vendor page before you commit. Some links here are affiliate links, which cost you nothing and don’t change which tools made the list.