AI receptionist services compared: what each one really costs
Rosie is the cheapest credible starting point at $49/mo for 250 minutes. Goodcall is cheapest for businesses with repeat callers because it bills per unique caller with unlimited minutes, from $79/mo. Smith.ai has the only genuinely free tier at 25 calls a month. Abby Connect and PATLive are human answering services with AI options, and they cost several times more.
The options, and the losing case for each
Rosie — Minute-priced AI receptionist with a clean ladder from solo to small team. Best for: The default recommendation for a business under about 250 minutes a month that wants message-taking, spam filtering and a texted booking link. $49/mo Professional covers 250 minutes and two custom message-taking scenarios. $149/mo Scale covers 1,000 minutes and adds calendar booking, warm transfers and live transfers — the tier most trades businesses actually need. Not for: Anyone whose call length is unpredictable. Minute-based plans punish long calls, and a business whose callers routinely talk for six minutes will burn a 250-minute plan on forty calls. Also not for anyone who needs live transfers on the entry tier — those start at $149/mo, not $49.
Goodcall — Priced per unique caller per month, with unlimited minutes and tokens. Best for: Businesses with a small number of callers who call a lot: property management, repair shops with regulars, clinics with a recall list. Goodcall states it does not charge for number of calls, call minutes or tokens; it charges per agent per month with a threshold of unique callers — 100 on Starter at $79/mo, 250 on Growth at $129/mo, 500 on Scale at $249/mo, then $0.50 per unique customer beyond it. Annual billing takes 15% off. If your callers are repeat callers, this is structurally the cheapest model on the page. Not for: High-churn inbound. A business whose calls are mostly first-time strangers — a plumber running paid search, a law firm buying leads — is paying $0.50 for every one of them past the threshold, and the unlimited minutes stop being the relevant variable. Run your actual unique-caller count before choosing this.
Frontdesk AI (myaifrontdesk.com) — Multi-channel AI front desk — voice, SMS, chat and forms on a credit system. Best for: Businesses whose inbound is not only phone. The Business-in-a-Box plan is $99/mo monthly or $79/mo billed annually and includes 200 voice minutes, 100 chatbot conversations, 400 SMS and 300 form submissions. If you are currently paying separately for a chat widget and an answering service, consolidating them here is often cheaper than either alone. Not for: Phone-first businesses. The $20/mo Basic plan includes zero voice minutes, and voice overage runs at 25 credits per minute — $0.25/min — which is expensive against a plan that simply includes more minutes. If 95% of your inbound is the phone, a minute-priced product is better value.
Smith.ai (AI receptionist) — Per-call AI receptionist from a company that also sells human receptionists. Best for: Testing the category for free, and for businesses that want AI as the front line with human escalation behind it. The free tier covers 25 calls a month at $0, then $3.00 per call. Pro is $150/mo and Enterprise $500/mo, with per-call rates of $2.00 and $1.67 respectively. Live agent escalations are a per-call add-on, which is the cleanest hybrid model on this page. Not for: High call volume on the cheap tiers. Per-call pricing is the least forgiving model when volume grows: 300 calls a month costs $500 on Enterprise but $900 at the free tier's overage rate. Work out your monthly call count first, because the crossover points are sharp.
Abby Connect — Human receptionist service with AI answering that consumes minutes at half rate. Best for: Professional services where a human voice is part of the product — law, accounting, high-ticket consulting. Plans run from $165/mo for 50 Abby Minutes to $1,380/mo for 500, with no setup fee and month-to-month terms. The interesting mechanic is that one Abby Minute buys two minutes of AI answering, so a mixed deployment effectively doubles the plan. Not for: Anyone comparing on price against a pure AI product. $165/mo for 50 minutes is $3.30 a minute; Rosie is $0.196 a minute at $49 for 250. You are buying trained humans, and that is what humans cost. If the AI is what you actually want, this is the wrong shelf.
PATLive — Long-established live answering service, priced per minute with a pay-as-you-go entry. Best for: Businesses with genuinely unpredictable volume that want humans and refuse to commit. The Basic plan is $75/mo pay-as-you-go at $2.60/min, with Starter at $250/mo including 75 minutes at $2.35/min overage, and the ladder running to $1,170/mo for 600 minutes at $2.00/min. No contracts, no long-term commitment, upgrade or downgrade anytime. Not for: Cost-sensitive buyers. Even the cheapest per-minute rate here, $2.00/min at $1,170/mo, is roughly ten times the effective per-minute cost of an AI receptionist plan. PATLive is a human answering service and should be compared against other human answering services, not against this page's AI products.
Published entry pricing for AI receptionist and answering services, read off each vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026.
Rosie — Entry plan: $49/mo Professional, 250 minutes; What you are billed for: Minutes; Next tier up: $149/mo Scale, 1,000 minutes; Setup fee: None published
Goodcall — Entry plan: $79/mo per agent ($66 annual), 100 unique callers; What you are billed for: Unique callers; minutes and tokens unlimited; Next tier up: $129/mo Growth, 250 unique callers; Setup fee: None published
Frontdesk AI — Entry plan: $20/mo Basic ($16 annual), 0 voice minutes; What you are billed for: Credits across voice, SMS, chat and forms; Next tier up: $99/mo Business-in-a-Box ($79 annual), 200 voice minutes; Setup fee: None published
Smith.ai (AI) — Entry plan: $0 for 25 calls/mo, then $3.00/call; What you are billed for: Calls; Next tier up: $150/mo Pro at $2.00/call; Setup fee: None published
Abby Connect — Entry plan: $165/mo Starter, 50 Abby Minutes; What you are billed for: Minutes; AI minutes count at half rate; Next tier up: $329/mo Essential, 100 Abby Minutes; Setup fee: No setup fee
PATLive — Entry plan: $75/mo Basic, pay as you go at $2.60/min; What you are billed for: Minutes; Next tier up: $250/mo Starter, 75 minutes at $2.35/min over; Setup fee: None listed
AnswerConnect — Entry plan: Not published — quote required; What you are billed for: Not published; Next tier up: Not published; Setup fee: Not published
Footnotes on that table
AnswerConnect does not publish prices. Its pricing page requires registration to unlock the figures, so there is no first-party number to put in this table and we have not put one in. Any comparison article quoting a specific AnswerConnect monthly price is quoting something other than AnswerConnect's own published page.
Abby Connect and PATLive are human answering services that also offer AI. They are in this table because buyers shortlist them together with AI products, not because the per-minute rates are comparable.
Effective per-minute cost, where the plan publishes minutes: Rosie $0.196/min at Professional; Frontdesk AI $0.495/min at Business-in-a-Box; Abby Connect $3.30/min at Starter; PATLive $3.33/min at Starter. Goodcall and Smith.ai do not bill by the minute so no equivalent figure exists.
Which of these is actually the cheapest for your business?
It depends entirely on which of three billing units your call pattern is shaped like, and the industry's habit of publishing an unordered list of monthly prices actively hides this. If you are billed by the minute — Rosie, Frontdesk AI, Abby Connect, PATLive — your cost scales with how long people talk. Long, discursive calls destroy the economics. A 250-minute Rosie plan at $49/mo is superb value at two minutes a call and mediocre at seven. If you are billed by the call — Smith.ai — your cost scales with volume and is completely indifferent to length. A business with lots of short calls should avoid this; a business with few long calls should run to it. Smith.ai's $3.00 per call past the free 25 is expensive at 200 calls a month and irrelevant at 20. If you are billed by the unique caller — Goodcall — your cost scales with how many different people call you, and repeat callers are free. Goodcall states plainly that it does not charge for number of calls, call minutes or tokens. For a property manager whose 300 monthly calls come from 40 tenants, this is dramatically the cheapest model on the page. For a roofer whose 300 monthly calls come from 280 strangers, it is not. Work out your own numbers before you read another price. Pull last month's call log, count total calls, total minutes and distinct phone numbers, and the right answer will usually be obvious within about ten minutes.
Which of these is actually the cheapest for your business? — specifics
Total minutes ÷ total calls = your average handle time. Above four minutes, avoid minute-based plans.
Distinct phone numbers ÷ total calls = your repeat rate. Above 50% repeat, look hard at Goodcall.
Under 25 calls a month, Smith.ai's free tier costs nothing and is a real product, not a trial.
What did the published prices actually turn out to be?
Several of the figures circulating in comparison articles for this category are out of date, and we found that by checking every one of them against the vendor's own page on the same day. Rosie's entry plan is $49/mo, which matches the commonly quoted figure. Goodcall's entry plan is $79/mo per agent, not the $59 that circulates. Frontdesk AI — the product at myaifrontdesk.com, now branded Frontdesk AI — has restructured entirely onto a credit model with a $20/mo Basic tier that includes no voice minutes at all and a $99/mo Business-in-a-Box tier that includes 200. Smith.ai's AI receptionist is free for 25 calls a month with a $150/mo Pro tier, not a mid-double-digit monthly price. Abby Connect's entry plan is $165/mo with no setup fee, not a two-figure price with a setup charge. PATLive's entry plan is $75/mo pay-as-you-go, with the first plan that includes minutes at $250/mo. The pattern is that this category reprices frequently and comparison content does not. That is the entire argument for a visible verified-on date, and it is why every figure on this page is logged below with the URL it came from.
Why will AnswerConnect not tell you its prices?
AnswerConnect's pricing page requires you to register before it shows figures. That is a deliberate lead-generation choice and a common one in the human answering-service market, where price is negotiated against volume and the vendor would rather have the conversation. We have not published an AnswerConnect price because there is no first-party published price to quote. That is a finding worth knowing before you spend an hour on their funnel: the number you eventually get will be quoted to you specifically, which means it is negotiable and which means you should have two written competitor quotes in hand before you take the call. It also means that any article listing AnswerConnect at a specific monthly figure is reporting a number someone was quoted, not a published price. Treat it as an anecdote.
When is a human answering service still the right purchase?
More often than AI vendors would like, and the honest test is whether a caller who is upset would forgive discovering they were talking to software. In personal injury law, funeral services, emergency restoration and mental health intake, they would not. Those are the categories where Abby Connect at $165–$1,380/mo and PATLive at $75–$1,170/mo are not overpriced AI, they are correctly priced humans. Abby publishes no setup fee, month-to-month terms and a free trial on every plan; PATLive publishes no contracts and no penalties for changing tiers. Both are easy to test. The hybrid is usually the real answer for everyone else. Abby Connect's mechanic — one Abby Minute equals two minutes of AI answering, and plans can be used as just human, just AI, or a mix on the same call — is the most literal expression of that on this page. Smith.ai's version is AI as the front line with live agent escalations as a per-call add-on. Both let you put software on the routine 80% and humans on the 20% that matters, which is almost always cheaper than either extreme.
What breaks in AI receptionists, and what should you test in week one?
Three things, consistently, and none of them appear on a pricing page. First, name and address capture. Every one of these products can take a message; a meaningful fraction of them will render a caller's surname or street name as something unrecognisable, and a message with a wrong callback number is worse than no message. Test with the five hardest names among your own staff. Second, the handoff. Warm transfer, live transfer and waterfall transfer are different features at different prices — on Rosie, warm and live transfers begin at the $149/mo Scale plan, not the $49 entry plan. If your requirement is 'get the emergency calls to a human immediately', check which tier that actually lives on before you buy the cheap one. Third, the after-hours boundary. Most of the value in this category is calls that arrive at 7pm and on Saturday. Test the product at those hours specifically, including what happens when a caller asks for something the agent cannot do at 7pm on a Saturday, because that is the interaction your reputation runs through.
What breaks in AI receptionists, and what should you test in week one? — specifics
Call your own agent from a noisy environment with a hard-to-spell name and a long address.
Ask it something outside its scope and listen to the failure — a graceful 'I will have someone call you back' is the whole product.
Confirm which plan tier your transfer type lives on before purchase, not after.
Figures we deliberately did not publish
AnswerConnect's monthly plan prices and setup fee. AnswerConnect gates its pricing behind a registration form; there is no first-party published figure, so we published none.
Rosie's overage rate. Rosie publishes included minutes per plan but does not publish a per-minute overage rate on its pricing page.
Smith.ai's AI receptionist included-call counts. The page describes Pro and Enterprise in terms of calls per day rather than a stated monthly allowance, so we published the plan prices and per-call rates and not a derived monthly call figure.
Price log — what was read, and where
Rosie: Professional $49/mo (250 min) · Scale $149/mo (1,000 min, adds booking, warm and live transfers) · Growth $299/mo (2,000 min); Website Texting add-on $50/mo — read from https://heyrosie.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. $49 entry confirmed.
Goodcall: Starter $79/mo per agent ($66 annual, 100 unique customers) · Growth $129 ($108, 250) · Scale $249 ($208, 500); $0.50 per unique customer over threshold; unlimited minutes and tokens — read from https://www.goodcall.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. STALE FIGURE CORRECTED. The widely quoted $59 entry price is wrong; Goodcall's published entry is $79/mo per agent.
Frontdesk AI (myaifrontdesk.com): Basic $20/mo ($16 annual) with 0 voice minutes · Business-in-a-Box $99/mo ($79 annual) with 200 voice minutes, 100 chats, 400 SMS; voice overage 25 credits/min ($0.25/min) — read from https://www.myaifrontdesk.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. STALE FIGURE CORRECTED. The quoted $65 tier does not exist. The company also now brands itself Frontdesk AI while keeping the myaifrontdesk.com domain.
Smith.ai (AI receptionist): Free $0 for 25 calls/mo then $3.00/call · Pro $150/mo at $2.00/call · Enterprise $500/mo at $1.67/call — read from https://smith.ai/ai-receptionist on 2026-08-23. STALE FIGURE CORRECTED. The quoted $95 AI plan does not exist. Smith.ai's human receptionist plans are separate: $300/mo for 30 calls, $810 for 90, $2,100 for 300.
Abby Connect: Starter $165/mo (50 Abby Minutes) · Essential $329 (100) · Professional $599 (200) · Growth $1,380 (500); no setup fee; AI answering consumes 1 Abby Minute per 2 minutes of service — read from https://abby.com/pricing/ on 2026-08-23. STALE FIGURE CORRECTED. The quoted $99 + $95 setup does not match the published page; entry is $165/mo and Abby states there is no setup fee on any plan.
PATLive: Basic $75/mo pay-as-you-go at $2.60/min · Starter $250/mo (75 min, $2.35 over) · Standard $460 (200, $2.20) · Premium $720 (350, $2.10) · Pro $1,170 (600, $2.00) — read from https://www.patlive.com/pricing on 2026-08-23. STALE FIGURE CORRECTED. The quoted $235 tier does not exist; the ladder is $75 / $250 / $460 / $720 / $1,170.
AnswerConnect: NOT PUBLISHED — pricing page requires registration — read from https://www.answerconnect.com/plans on 2026-08-23. OMITTED. The quoted $325 + $75 setup could not be confirmed against any first-party page, so no AnswerConnect price is published on this page.
What is the cheapest AI receptionist?
Smith.ai's free tier at $0 for 25 calls a month is the cheapest real product. Among paid plans, Rosie's Professional at $49/mo for 250 minutes is the cheapest credible starting point for a business that answers more than a call a day. Frontdesk AI's $20/mo Basic plan is cheaper still but includes zero voice minutes, so it is not a phone product.
How much does Goodcall cost?
Goodcall publishes $79/mo per agent on Starter, $129/mo on Growth and $249/mo on Scale, with 15% off for annual billing ($66, $108 and $208). It bills per unique caller per month rather than per minute — the thresholds are 100, 250 and 500 unique customers, then $0.50 each — and states it does not charge for number of calls, minutes or tokens.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than an answering service?
Substantially. Rosie's Professional plan works out to roughly $0.196 per minute; PATLive's Starter plan is $2.35 per minute over its allowance and Abby Connect's Starter plan is $3.30 per minute. That is a ten-to-twenty-times difference. Human services are not overpriced — they are humans — but they are not competing on cost.
Can an AI receptionist book appointments into my calendar?
Yes, but often not on the entry plan. Rosie puts direct calendar booking, warm transfers and live transfers on the $149/mo Scale tier rather than the $49/mo Professional tier. Check which tier the specific capability you need lives on before you buy, because 'the product does X' and 'the plan you are buying does X' are different claims.