How We Price AI and Virtual Receptionists, and What a Hire Costs

Our index prices 27 AI and virtual receptionist products, each read from the vendor's own pricing page, with prices last checked on October 26, 2026. They come from the 18 vendors we cover in full and eight live services priced as rows in our tables. This page states the arithmetic behind every number on the site, the sources behind the hire-cost model, and how the dates move.

What we price and what we leave out

We price AI receptionists, live virtual receptionists, one service that mixes the two (Abby Connect), and four build-your-own voice AI platforms. The vendors are the ones buyers search for by name: Smith.ai, Ruby, Posh, Abby Connect, Rosie, Goodcall, Dialzara, My AI Front Desk, Upfirst, Slang.ai, RingCentral AI Receptionist, Phonely, Simple Phones, NextPhone, Synthflow, Vapi, Retell AI and Bland. Each has a pricing page here, every one but NextPhone has an alternatives page, and all are priced with the same arithmetic.

What stays out:

• All-in-one phone systems. Beside, GoHighLevel, Podium, Nextiva, Dialpad, Grasshopper, Quo, Ooma, Google Voice and Allo are phone or business platforms, not receptionist products, so they stay out of price tables. RingCentral AI Receptionist is the exception: it is sold on its own, with its own published price.
• Answering services, as pages. Their pages live on our sister site. Eight live services appear here as rows in our virtual receptionist tables: ReceptionHQ ReceptionistPlus, Go Answer, Specialty Answering Service, MAP Communications, Answering Service Care, PATLive, AnswerFirst and Moneypenny. They count in the live ranges, the data download and the MCP server like every other row.

Build-your-own platforms carry a "(build your own)" label in every table. Their per-minute rate is not the cost of a working receptionist: the phone line, the build and the upkeep come on top.

Where every price comes from

Each price was read from the vendor's own pricing page. The page as read is saved as a dated capture, and the list of every page we read sits in a source file next to the data. A price goes into the index only if the page shows it. A vendor that shows prices only after a form or a sales call is listed as quote only, with the date we looked.

Billing terms come from the vendor's terms of service, help center and FAQ pages, each quoted in the vendor's own words with its address and the day we read it. When a vendor's marketing and its terms disagree, we quote both and treat the terms as the contract.

The data is shared with our sister site and read at build time, so a price corrected once is corrected on every page that shows it.

Call volume

Our AI tables price every vendor at 3, 5 and 13 calls a day and order the rows by cost at 13, because Google's CallJoy team "conducted testing and found that small businesses receive an average of 13 phone calls every day" (Bob Summers, The Keyword, May 1, 2019). The 3 and 5 a day columns rest on CallRail's customer totals, 129,393,520 calls from January 6 to October 8, 2020 for "150,000 small businesses and agencies" (Search Engine Land, December 21, 2020) and "more than 220 million calls" for "more than 200,000 businesses worldwide" in 2021 (CallRail release, January 7, 2022), which our division of their totals puts at about 3 calls a day per account (all read October 27, 2026).

How a price list becomes a monthly cost

For each vendor and each call volume, we take every published plan, add the published overage for usage past the plan's allowance, and keep the cheapest result. That is the vendor's cost at that volume. Every computed number uses 3-minute calls.

• Calls a day become calls a month over 30 days: 3 a day is 90, 5 a day is 150, 13 a day is 390.
• Per-minute plans multiply calls by 3 minutes before the allowance and overage apply.
• Per-call plans ignore call length.
• Goodcall bills per unique caller a month. We count every call as a different caller, which is the most a month can cost; repeat callers make the real bill lower.
• Rosie publishes no overage rate. Its terms move you up to the next plan, so the arithmetic picks the plan that covers the volume.
• Unlimited plans cost their monthly price at any volume.
• Free plans count where they are the cheapest option for a vendor's own cost (Smith.ai AI, Phonely), but never set the low end of a range.
• A plan with no published overage cannot cover usage past its allowance: that cell reads "not computable from the published price".

Taxes, setup fees, add-ons, phone-number fees and time a vendor bills beyond the call are left out of the arithmetic and described in each vendor's catch instead. Rounding is left out too: we use whole 3-minute calls. A vendor that rounds every call up to the next minute costs a little more than the arithmetic shows on short calls.

The hire-cost model

An in-house receptionist is priced from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, every input from a named release:

The arithmetic, in order:

1. Wage plus benefits: the wage times one plus benefits per wage dollar with paid leave left out, $24.60 an hour on the May 2025 median.
2. One full-time receptionist is paid for 2,080 hours a year. Paid leave takes 26 days of eight hours, leaving 1,872 hours on the phone.
3. Paid leave is counted once. The 2,080 paid hours already pay the wage on leave days, so the $0.11 of paid leave in the ECEC benefit cost is not added again.
4. Full cover of a number of hours a week takes that many hours times 52, divided by those productive hours. That is 1.1 staff for 40 hours a week and 4.7 for around the clock.
5. Turnover a year: staff times the quits share times the replacement share times the annual wage.
6. The monthly cost is labor plus turnover, divided by 12: $4,399 for one full-time receptionist on the May 2025 median wage, $4,887 for full cover of 40 hours a week.

Three choices hold the hire cost down. The model uses the median wage, not the mean. It counts quits, not total separations, since a layoff is not a receptionist you have to replace. It uses the study's lowest pay bracket for replacement cost.

Two choices push the other way. Part-time cover gets the same benefits and paid leave as a full-timer. Every hire gets the full NCS leave average, though BLS averages leave days only over workers who have the benefit.

BLS publishes no benefits row for receptionists alone, so the office and administrative support group stands in. State pages use each state's median wage with the national benefit, leave and turnover inputs.

The model prices the phone only. A receptionist who greets visitors and does office work does things no AI or virtual plan prices. Each page that compares a hire says so. Hire vs AI receptionist has the full comparison.

The integration matrix

For each vendor and each of Clio, MyCase, Lawmatics, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Google Calendar, Calendly, Jobber, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Towbook, the matrix records one of three values:

• Built in: the vendor's own pages, or the tool's app directory, document a direct integration.
• Via Zapier: the vendor documents a Zapier connection for that tool, or Zapier lists the pair.
• Not documented: neither shows it. This is not a finding that the integration does not exist, and we never write "no".

Each value carries the page that shows it and the date we read it. A logo on a vendor's homepage is not an integration. The matrix also records how each cell was verified: listed in the tool's app directory, or described in the vendor's documentation. No cell is yet verified on a connected test account; when one is, the page will say so. See which receptionists write to your software.

Ranges and medians

A range ("AI receptionists cost X to Y") runs from the lowest to the highest vendor cost at one volume. It covers the vendors in that category with a computable cost there. The live range covers every live service in our tables, the eight rows from our sister site's data included. A median is the middle of those costs. Slang.ai serves restaurants only and stays out of the AI ranges, as do free plans. A vendor drops out where its published plans cannot cover a volume, so the set behind a range can change from one volume to the next. We never compare medians across volumes as if they were one set.

Every ordering claim on a page ("costs less", "the least") is checked against the data on every build. A claim a price change makes false stops the build until the sentence is rewritten.

What "quote only", "not published" and "not computable" mean

We never fill a gap with an estimate, an average or a number from a review site.

How often we re-check, and how the dates move

Every week we re-read each vendor's pricing page twice and compare every dollar amount, minute and call count with the last capture. A real change becomes an index edit and a dated line on the change log. A re-read that finds nothing new moves only the "prices checked" date.

The sitewide prices-checked date moves only when every published vendor was re-read that week. One unreadable page holds it back, and each vendor's Source cell keeps its own read date. A page's updated date moves only when its text changes or a change in the log touches a vendor it shows. The BLS inputs move when BLS publishes a new release: wages each spring, benefits each quarter.

Corrections

If a price or a term here differs from the vendor's own public page, send us the page. We re-read it, fix the index, and log the change with its date. We do not change a number on request without a public source to read it from.

How to cite and download

Cite a page as: ReceptionistPrices.com, the page title, prices checked with the date, and the page address. The whole index is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as CSV and JSON on the data page. ChatGPT, Claude or any MCP client can read it through our app and MCP server.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where do the prices come from?

From each vendor's own pricing page, read on the date printed next to the price and saved as a capture. A price goes in only if the vendor's page shows it; a vendor that hides prices behind a form is listed as quote only.

Why do you use 3-minute calls?

One call length makes every vendor comparable. Per-minute plans cost more on longer calls and per-call plans do not. The per-day tables on each page show what doubling calls does to each bill, and the calculator on the homepage takes your own call length.

How do you calculate what a receptionist costs to hire?

From four BLS releases and one study. The median receptionist wage is paid for 2,080 hours, which already include paid leave, and employer benefits other than paid leave go on top. Paid leave days set the staff that full cover needs, and quits times a published replacement-cost share price turnover. One full-time receptionist on the BLS median wage for May 2025 comes to $4,399 a month on that arithmetic.

Do you test the receptionists?

No. We publish prices, billing terms and documented integrations, not ratings. We make no test calls and score no answering quality.

How often are prices checked?

Weekly. The prices-checked date moves only when every published vendor's page was re-read and still matches, or was updated in the index.

Why is a vendor marked "not computable"?

Its published plans cannot cover that call volume: a plan's allowance runs out and the vendor publishes no rate past it. We show the gap instead of estimating a price.