Almost nobody publishes this number, which is the first thing worth noticing. Search "AI receptionist pricing" and you get a wall of "Request a demo" buttons. So here is the actual shape of the market in 2026, the three pricing models you will run into, and what we charge — which is on our pricing page in full, because hiding it never made anyone's decision easier.
The short answer
For a small business in the US, expect a one-time setup fee between $300 and $1,500, and a monthly plan between $150 and $800 depending on call volume and how deeply the agent integrates with your scheduler. Bigger practices with multi-location routing and heavy call volume run higher.
Our own published tiers sit inside that range: $399 setup and $199/month at the Starter end, $1,500 setup and $749/month for a busy multi-provider practice.
The three pricing models
Vendors price this in one of three ways, and the model matters more than the headline number.
| Model | How it bills | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| Per minute | A rate per minute of call time, often with no monthly floor | Call volume is low and unpredictable |
| Included minutes + overage | A monthly plan with a minute allowance, then a flat per-minute rate beyond it | Volume is roughly known — most businesses |
| Per seat / per location | Priced by concurrent lines or physical location | Multi-site operations |
Pure per-minute pricing looks cheapest on the pricing page and is the easiest to be surprised by. A single chatty caller who asks about six treatments and reschedules twice can run eight minutes. Forty of those a month is 320 minutes — at a per-minute rate that seemed trivial in isolation.
The included-minutes model is what we use, and what most established vendors use, because it makes the bill predictable. What you should insist on is that the overage rate is stated before you sign. A plan that hides it is a plan that intends to use it.
What actually drives the price
- Concurrent calls. One line answering one call at a time is the cheap tier. The reason to pay more is the second and third simultaneous caller — which is precisely the caller you are currently losing to a busy signal.
- Included minutes. The main volume lever. A single-dentist practice might use 400–600 minutes a month; a four-provider practice with heavy recall calling uses several thousand.
- Integration depth. An agent that reads your live availability and writes bookings into your practice management system costs more to build and more to run than one that takes a message. It is also the difference between "answered" and "booked".
- Recording retention. 90 days versus a year is a storage and compliance cost, and it shows up in tiering.
- After-hours and reminder automation. Outbound reminder sequences consume minutes and messages; they also prevent the no-shows that cost far more.
The setup fee is the part people question
Reasonably so — a $399 to $1,500 one-time charge before anything answers a call feels like a paywall. It is not, and the way to test whether a vendor's setup fee is real is to ask what happens during it.
A genuine setup covers: scripting the call flow against your actual services and prices, tuning the voice, connecting the number, wiring the scheduler or CRM, and adversarial testing before a customer ever reaches it. That is a person's week, not a form submission. A vendor whose "setup" is you typing your business hours into a template and clicking Deploy should not be charging four figures for it — and if they are, ask what the money bought.
How it compares to the alternatives
| Option | Typical monthly cost | Hours covered | Simultaneous calls |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full-time front desk hire (US) | $2,500–3,500 plus employment costs | Business hours, minus leave | One |
| Traditional answering service | Per-minute, commonly $1–2/min | Often 24/7 | Varies |
| AI receptionist | $150–800 including a minute allowance | 24/7 | 2–10 depending on tier |
| Voicemail | $0 | None — it does not answer | Zero |
The honest framing is that an AI receptionist is not competing with your front desk staff — it competes with voicemail, which is what actually answers your phone at 7pm and during your busiest hour. Your staff keep the walk-ins, the checkouts, and the conversations that need a human. The agent catches the calls that currently ring out.
Against a traditional answering service the comparison is tighter, and it turns on two things: per-minute economics at your real volume, and whether the service can book into your calendar or only take a message. We wrote that comparison out properly for dental practices in AI receptionist vs answering service.
What the named services charge
Category comparisons only go so far, so here are the actual published numbers. Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 20 August 2026 — not from a comparison blog. That distinction matters: the roundups currently circulating put Smith.ai at “$95”, while Smith.ai’s own pricing page starts at $300 for 30 calls.
| Service | Type | Monthly | Included | Setup fee | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rosie | AI | $49 – $299/mo | 250 – 2,000 min | None | 7-day free trial |
| Goodcall | AI | $79 – $249/mo per agent | Unlimited minutes, 100 – 500 unique callers | None | $0.50 per caller over the cap |
| Apex (this site) | AI, built for you | $199 – $749/mo | 500 – 4,000 min | $399 – $1,500 | Phone, SMS, web chat and WhatsApp |
| Ruby | Live humans | $250 – $1,725/mo | 50 – 500 min | None | Human receptionists, not AI |
| Smith.ai | Live agents | $300 – $2,100/mo | 30 – 300 calls | None | 30-day money-back guarantee |
Two honest conclusions come out of that table, and neither of them is “pick us”.
If you want the cheapest AI that answers a phone, Rosie is cheaper than we are. $49 a month for 250 minutes is less than our $199, and there is no setup fee. If your call volume is low, your needs are simple, and you are happy to configure it yourself, that is a genuinely good deal and you should take it. Goodcall’s unlimited-minutes model is worth a look too if your calls are long but your caller count is low.
If you want humans, expect to pay several times more. Ruby starts at $250/month for fifty minutes — five dollars a minute — and Smith.ai at $300 for thirty calls, which is ten dollars a call. Those are not bad prices for live people who sound like your practice. They are simply a different product.
The setup fee is where we differ from the self-serve tools, and it is the fairest thing to be blunt about: we charge $399 to $1,500 because somebody configures the agent against your actual services, prices, calendar and hand-off rules, and tests it before it answers a real customer. Rosie and Goodcall hand you the console instead. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on whether you want to do that work.
The place we are genuinely different is channel coverage. Rosie, Goodcall, Ruby and Smith.ai are phone-first, with chat as an add-on. One assistant covering phone, SMS, web chat and WhatsApp from the same instructions is the thing worth paying us for — and if you only need the phone answered, it is not.
Questions worth asking before you buy
- What is the per-minute overage rate, in writing?
- How many calls can it take at once on this tier?
- Does it book into our scheduler, or does it take a message?
- What is the minimum contract term?
- What does it do when it cannot help — transfer, message, or dead end?
- Does it announce that it is an AI and that the call is recorded?
- Who owns the recordings and transcripts, and how long are they kept?
That last group matters more than the price. An agent that quietly guesses at a clinical question is a liability no monthly saving covers. Ours is scoped to appointments, hours, pricing, location and directions, and routes anything clinical or case-specific to a human by rule — that boundary is written into the call flow, not left to the model's discretion.
What we charge
Published in full on the pricing page, but in short: $399 setup and $199/month for 2 concurrent calls and 500 minutes; $799 and $399/month for 5 calls, 1,500 minutes, reminders and scheduler integration; $1,500 and $749/month for 10 calls and 4,000 minutes. Three-month minimum, then month to month. Prices in USD.
If you want to hear one before you decide anything, our AI receptionist page has a live demo, and the assistant answering this website is the same engine.