Hiring a receptionist vs. an answering service vs. an AI receptionist: put in your call volume and coverage needs and compare the real annual cost of all three.
Typical US answering services bill $0.90-$1.70 per minute plus a base fee.
See what an AI receptionist actually does on every call, or read the full AI vs. answering service comparison.
In-house hire. We use a $38,000 base salary, in line with typical US receptionist pay, multiplied by 1.25 to account for the employer's real cost: payroll taxes, benefits, and insurance. The bigger driver is coverage. One employee covers about 40 hours a week; the phone rings for 168. Choose extended or 24/7 coverage above and the calculator staffs the schedule honestly, which is why round-the-clock human coverage costs what it does.
Answering service. Per-minute billing between $0.90 and $1.70 plus a base fee is the standard structure across the US answering service industry. The number to watch is not the rate, it's the meter: a good month for your business is an expensive month for your phone bill. Most services also stop at message-taking, so every call still generates work for your team the next morning.
AI receptionist. We use $499/month as a representative flat rate for a professionally built and managed AI phone agent. Some deployments cost less, complex multi-location systems cost more. The structural difference is that the price does not scale with call volume or time of day, and the AI handles outcomes (booking, routing, texting follow-ups), not just messages.
We build and operate these systems for trades, clinics, retail businesses, and nonprofits, so the comparison above is the same one we walk real clients through. If your numbers look different from these defaults, that's the point of the sliders.
A full-time receptionist in the US typically earns in the mid-$30,000s in base salary, and the true cost to the employer lands around 25% higher once payroll taxes, benefits, and insurance are added, so roughly $45,000 to $50,000 per year for one person covering one shift. Coverage beyond business hours multiplies that, because one person cannot staff nights and weekends.
Most human answering services price per minute, commonly in the $0.90 to $1.70 range, on top of a monthly base fee. The catch is that the bill scales with your call volume, so your cost rises exactly when business is good, and most services only take messages rather than booking appointments or answering real questions.
Most professionally built AI receptionists run a few hundred dollars per month at a flat rate, with no per-minute meter. That includes 24/7 coverage and unlimited simultaneous calls. The calculator uses $499/month as a representative mid-market figure; exact pricing depends on call volume, integrations, and how much custom behavior you need.
Different, and for phone coverage specifically, often better. A human wins on in-person hospitality and complex judgment calls. An AI wins on the things phones actually demand: it never misses a call, answers three simultaneous callers at 8pm, books directly into your calendar, and hands anything complicated to your team via warm transfer. Our AI receptionist page walks through exactly what it does on each call.
The most common setup we deploy is overflow and after-hours: your team answers when they can, and the AI catches everything else, including lunch hours, busy lines, and weekends. You keep the human touch where it matters and stop paying for missed calls where it doesn't. Run your missed-call numbers in our missed call calculator to see what that overflow is worth.
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The fastest way to evaluate an AI receptionist is to call one. We'll set up a live demo trained on your business so you can judge it the way your customers would.