What are the three pricing models, and which one bites?
Vendors price one of three ways, and the differences show up on the invoice, not the pricing page. Per-minute billing charges for connected talk time, typically $0.50–$1.50 a minute; it looks cheap until a chatty caller runs six minutes. Per-call billing charges a flat rate per answered call, usually $1–$3, which is predictable but punishes wrong numbers and spam. Flat monthly pricing includes a bundle of calls or minutes for one price. The question to ask any vendor is what happens at the cap: the honest answer is either a hard stop, a graceful degrade to voicemail, or overage billed only after you explicitly opt in. The expensive answer is silent per-minute overage.
- Per-minute: $0.50–$1.50/min — cheapest headline, least predictable bill
- Per-call: $1–$3/call — predictable per event, pays for spam calls too
- Flat monthly: one price, a stated cap — check the overage behaviour
What does a human receptionist actually cost?
The honest comparison is not wage against subscription. A part-time receptionist at $18–22/hour for 25 hours a week is roughly $1,950–2,400 a month in wages, and employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, paid time off, and equipment typically add 20–30% on top — call it $2,400–3,100 all-in for part-time, and $3,900–5,200 for full-time coverage. That buys judgment, warmth, and the ability to handle a genuinely unusual call, which software does not match. What it does not buy is nights, weekends, holidays, or the second simultaneous call, because one person answers one line at a time.
What hidden costs should you check before signing?
Four line items are commonly excluded from the advertised price. Phone number provisioning and per-minute telephony carriage are sometimes billed separately from the AI subscription. Calendar or CRM integrations are frequently gated to a higher tier. Business texting in the US requires carrier registration, and some vendors charge a setup fee for filing it. And usage overage is the big one — read the specific sentence describing what happens when you exceed the included volume, because 'contact us' in that row usually means per-minute billing resumes at an unadvertised rate.
How do you work out whether it pays for itself?
The arithmetic is one line: multiply your average job value by your close rate, and divide the monthly subscription by that number. That gives the number of extra booked jobs the system has to produce each month to break even. For a home-services business with a $400 average ticket closing half of qualified calls, a $129/month plan breaks even on roughly two-thirds of one extra job a month. The reason the maths tends to work is not that AI sells better than you do — it is that the baseline it replaces is an unanswered ring.