An AI receptionist answers calls, handles the routine questions, books appointments, and routes anything complex to a person. The pricing has two parts — a setup cost and a monthly cost — plus some integration work that quotes often leave out.
Setup: $2,500 to $8,000
Setup covers mapping your real call types, writing the responses in your business's own language, connecting the phone system, calendar, and CRM, and testing against realistic scenarios before it goes live. What moves the number:
- How many systems it connects to. Phone plus calendar is straightforward. Phone plus calendar plus CRM plus a practice-management or booking platform is more integration work and more testing.
- Conversation complexity. A handful of FAQ topics and a booking flow is quick. Multi-branch routing, service-specific scripts, and account lookups take longer to design and validate.
- How clean your call data is. If you can hand over a sample of real calls, scripting is faster. If the call mix has to be reconstructed from memory, expect more back-and-forth.
Monthly: $100 to $500
The running cost is platform fees plus usage:
- Platform subscription for the voice AI service — typically a base fee plus a per-minute or per-call rate.
- Usage scales with call volume. A practice taking 200 calls a month sits near the bottom of the range; a busy multi-line operation sits higher.
- Telephony — a number, forwarding, and minutes, usually a small line item.
Most small businesses land between $100 and $300 a month. High call volume or heavy after-hours coverage pushes it toward $500.
The costs quotes leave out
- Integration work if your phone system or booking tool does not expose a clean interface — occasionally a bridge is needed.
- Tuning in the first month or two, as real calls expose gaps in the script. Budget for a round or two of adjustment.
- A monitored fallback so a missed intent routes to a person while the assistant settles in. This is setup, not an add-on, but it is worth confirming it is included.
How it compares
- Full-time receptionist: commonly $3,000 to $5,000+ a month fully loaded, business hours only without additional hires, and a single point of failure when they are out.
- Live answering service: usually billed per minute, mostly message-taking with limited or no direct booking, and little knowledge of your business. Good as overflow, weak as the front door.
- AI receptionist: 24/7, books directly into the calendar, consistent answers every time, roughly $150 to $8,000 in year-one total cost depending on setup and volume — and it needs a clear human escalation path to work well.
The payback question
The number that matters is what a missed call is worth to you. If your average new customer is worth a few hundred dollars and you miss even a handful of new-customer calls a week to voicemail, the math clears quickly. If your call volume is low, or most calls genuinely need a person's judgement, a receptionist or a good voicemail-to-text setup may serve better.
Tell us roughly what your inbound calls look like — volume, how many go to voicemail, what people usually want — and we will tell you whether an AI receptionist fits and what setup would involve. Details on the AI receptionist page, and the trade-off against a hire in AI receptionist vs human receptionist.