Virtual receptionist pricing: what 10 US vendors actually publish

6 of 10 vendors in this table do not publish an overage rate. Overage is where most of the real cost sits, so a plan's headline price is not the price. Where a rate is missing above, it is because the vendor does not publish it — not because we could not find it.

The three billing models, and who they favor

Per minute is the default. You buy a block of minutes and pay a stated rate for anything beyond it. Seven of the ten vendors here work this way. It favors businesses with low call volume, and punishes long calls.

Per call is rarer. Smith.ai is the only vendor in this table using it: you buy a number of calls and pay per additional call regardless of length. That inverts the incentive. A firm taking a hundred thirty-second calls a month pays a great deal per-call and very little per-minute; a firm taking twenty ten-minute intake calls is far better off per-call.

Flat monthly with a non-time overage is where the AI vendors are landing. GoodCall charges per agent with unlimited minutes and meters unique customers instead — $0.50 for each one beyond the plan’s allowance. That is not a variation on per-minute pricing; it is a different axis, and it means a direct rate comparison against a human service is misleading in both directions.

One detail that moves real money and almost nobody advertises: rounding. Most vendors round each call up to the nearest minute. AnswerFirst and Back Office Betties both state that they bill real time without rounding. On a business taking many short calls, per-call rounding can be a large fraction of the bill — a forty-second call billed as a full minute is a 50% markup on that call.

What is not published, and why that matters

Six of the ten vendors do not publish an overage rate. One — Nexa Receptionists — publishes no dollar figure at all: the plans are named for their included minutes (Nexa 100, 300, 500) and the page states that additional minutes are “charged at your base rate” without saying what the base rate is.

This is the single most important thing to understand about pricing in this category. The headline monthly price is not the price. It is the price of staying inside your plan. Every business that has ever used an answering service has had a month where a campaign, an outage or a seasonal spike pushed it over, and the overage rate is what decides whether that month costs 20% more or 200% more.

Where a rate is missing from the table above, it is because the vendor does not publish it — not because we could not find it. See how we verify this.

Abby Connect is a specific case worth naming. Its overage is billed at “your plan’s Abby Minute rate”, which is not published, and it bills in a proprietary unit: a minute handled by a human costs one Abby Minute, a minute handled by AI costs half. The effective rate therefore depends on a human/AI mix the buyer does not control and cannot see in advance.

The AI and human price gap

The clearest number in this table is the gap between AI-first and human services.

Rosie publishes $49 a month for 250 minutes. Ruby publishes $250 a month for 50 minutes. On included minutes alone that is roughly a twenty-five-fold difference in unit price.

The gap is real, but it is not a like-for-like comparison and should not be read as one. A human receptionist service is being bought for judgment: conflict checks, triage, knowing when to interrupt someone. An AI agent is being bought for availability and consistency at volume. The industries where that distinction matters most are the ones with a compliance constraint on what a receptionist may say — legal, medical, insurance — and those are covered on the individual industry pages rather than here.

What the gap does establish is that “virtual receptionist pricing” no longer describes one market. Any comparison that averages an AI agent and a staffed answering service into a single per-minute figure is producing a number that describes nothing.

Setup and onboarding fees

Mostly absent, and disclosed where present.

Ruby states no activation, setup, onboarding or customization fee. Back Office Betties discloses a $399 one-time onboarding fee covering the first 30 days or 100 minutes, whichever comes first. AnswerFirst states no minimum usage and no contract.

PATLive notes that its published prices exclude taxes and fees, which is worth reading as written: the monthly figure is a floor.

What this table does not tell you

Stated plainly, because a reference that overstates its own coverage is not a reference.

• It is not all vendors. Ten are listed. Two more were checked and excluded because their rates could not be read from a primary source: AnswerConnect publishes rates only inside a PDF brochure, and Moneypenny — which VoiceNation now redirects to — blocks automated access to its pricing page. Neither is a judgment about the vendor.
• It is not your price. Several of these vendors negotiate, and the enterprise tiers are universally unpublished. Every “Enterprise: contact us” in this category means the number is set per customer.
• It is not a ranking. There is no best column. The order is alphabetical.
• It does not yet carry per-industry cost-per-outcome rows — cost per signed case, per new patient, per bound policy. Those arrive with the industry pages.

How this table is put together

Two things about the method, because they are what make the table worth citing.

The rates are read, not supplied. Every figure comes from the vendor’s own published pricing page, on the date shown in the row. No vendor submits its numbers to us, and a vendor asking for a correction gets the same treatment as anyone else: we go back and read the published page again. See how we verify this.

The order is alphabetical, and there is no ranking. No best-of, no scores, no editor’s pick. That is a deliberate constraint on this page rather than a claim about anyone’s motives.

A separate page covering how this site is funded is in preparation and will be linked here.