Picture the desk. Three quotes printed out, a yellow highlighter, last month's phone bill with the after-hours calls circled in pen. Every quote looks cheap on page one. Page four is where it gets interesting.
If you typed "how much does an answering service cost" into a search bar at eleven at night, here's the short version: there isn't one number, because it mostly comes down to how the vendor counts. Live services tend to charge by the minute or by the call, or they'll sell you a monthly bucket and bill overage once you go past it (with a setup fee and an after-hours or holiday surcharge sometimes stacked on top). AI receptionist plans are more often one flat monthly fee. Either way, your real number comes out of your own call log, and we'll do that math below.
What's in here:
What you're actually paying for
Strip the brochure off and it's three things. Somebody (or something) picking up when you can't. A record of what the caller wanted. And whatever happens next: a message in your inbox at 6 a.m., a transfer to your cell, maybe an actual booked appointment.
That last part is where services differ most, and where the price tag stops telling you much. A plan that takes a message isn't the same product as one that books the job. (There's a longer walk-through of AI receptionist vs answering service vs IVR if you want to see how each handles the same Saturday call.) Scribble it across the top of each quote. Message, transfer, or booking. Then compare prices.
The pricing models
Answering service pricing comes in a few shapes, and one quote can mix two or three of them.
Per minute (and what counts as a minute)
Common with live services, and the one with the most room for surprises. The rate is per minute, fine. What's a minute?
Some vendors round every call up to the next full minute. Some bill in 30 second or 6 second chunks. The clock might start when an agent picks up, or when the call lands in their system, which can put hold time on your bill during a busy hour. Then the after-call work: typing up your message, patching a transfer, waiting while your on-call phone rings out. Page one of the quote may not say whether that's billed. The billing terms might.
Per call
One fee per call, any length. Easy to read. Then you start wondering what they'd call a call. Wrong numbers? Hang-ups? That robocall about your car's extended warranty? And the guy who rings back three times in ten minutes because he wasn't sure the first one went through, is that one call or three? Some vendors exclude very short calls or let you dispute junk. Some don't.
Monthly plans, allowances and overage
A set monthly fee buys a bucket of minutes or calls. Under the bucket, unused time usually just disappears (worth asking if it rolls over). Over it, you pay the overage rate, and that's the number to stare at hardest, because it's the one a busy month pushes you onto.
For seasonal work this is the whole ballgame. An HVAC shop's January is not its April.
Setup fees and surcharges
Then the little stuff, which isn't always little. There might be a one-time setup or onboarding charge, and a few vendors bill again every time you edit the script. Watch the clock-based pricing too. A call at 9 p.m., on a Saturday, or on Christmas morning can cost more than the daytime rate printed up front, and if what you're shopping for is an after-hours answering service, well, that's pretty much every call you'll send them. So it's the after-hours number you want quoted. Plus their holiday list, on paper, because their idea of a holiday and yours (the day after Thanksgiving?) might not line up.
Flat-rate AI plans
AI receptionist pricing tends to be a flat monthly fee per plan tier. Fewer moving parts. "Flat" still deserves a read, though: plans can cap minutes, phone numbers, locations or channels, so look for the limits and what happens when you hit one. Our own tiers are on the pricing page if you want a flat number to hold the other quotes up against.
What's hiding in the contract
This is the highlighter part.
Start with the term. A made-up one that looks perfectly normal: twelve months, renews itself, and you have to cancel inside a 30-day window before the anniversary or you're in for another year. Then the floor: some plans bill a monthly minimum even when February was dead. After that, the stuff nobody reads until they want out. What it costs to leave early. The clause that lets them raise rates "with notice" (notice how, exactly, an email you'll never open?). And whose phone number it really is, because if it's theirs, the number painted on your truck might not come with you. Same question for your call recordings and message history. And the definitions section, which is dull, and is where "billable minute" actually gets defined.
The SBA's finance guide talks about running a cost-benefit analysis on a business decision, money in against money out. Fancy name for what you're doing with the highlighter.
Working out your own volume
You can find your volume yourself. Your carrier or phone system probably lets you export a call log (dig through the portal, or call them and ask). Grab three months if you can. Filter to the hours you're closed. You're after three things: how many calls, how long they ran on average, and how many were junk.
Now a worked example, every number made up. Say you get 300 calls a month after hours, averaging 2 minutes 40 seconds. Real talk time is about 800 minutes. Now bill it in whole minutes and every one of those 2:40 calls turns into a 3, which puts you at 900. Suppose they also tack on 30 seconds of wrap-up before rounding (read the terms to see if yours does). That's 3:10 a call, rounded up to 4. Now it's 1,200. Same calls, same month, half again as many minutes on the bill.
Hold that 1,200 against a plan with a 500-minute bucket and you've got 700 minutes at the overage rate. On a per-call plan it's 300 calls, or fewer if junk is excluded. And run your worst month through it, not your average one.
If you'd rather work from real numbers than guesses, run our free trial for a couple of weeks and read the conversation history afterward.
Missed calls versus the monthly bill
The napkin math nobody puts in the brochure. Your numbers, not mine:
missed calls a month, times the share you'd normally book, times your average job value, equals the work walking out the door
Made-up example: 40 missed after-hours calls, you'd usually book about 1 in 4, average ticket $300. That's 10 jobs, $3,000 a month. Some of those people would've called back in the morning anyway, so knock it down by whatever share actually returns (be honest, your callback notes will tell you). Then set the coverage quote next to what's left. (Running HVAC? Here's how an HVAC answering service decides when to roll a truck at night.)
Thinking you'll just hire a night person instead? Fair enough. O*NET (the Labor Department's occupation database, built on BLS numbers) puts the median receptionist wage at $18.27 an hour for 2025 (O*NET receptionists and information clerks). Now picture covering 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., every night. Fourteen hours, thirty nights, call it 420 hours a month. At that median it's roughly $7,700 in wages, for one person, before payroll taxes, benefits, or anybody covering their sick nights. Not an argument against people. Just the real comparison.
Where AI isn't the right fit
A cost post that only talks about cost would be a little dishonest. The cheapest line on the spreadsheet isn't always the one you want answering your phone.
Some calls need a human, full stop. Homeowner smells gas. Water coming through the kitchen ceiling at 2 a.m. A patient whose symptoms sound wrong, or somebody calling a law office from a police station. Software can read your safety script and get the address and callback number down, sure. The next move still belongs to a person, so whatever you buy needs a handoff path that works: a live transfer to whoever's on call, a callback, or an email to the team with the whole story. (Ours does all three. Test it on a quiet night before you trust it.)
Then there are the calls that aren't emergencies but still aren't a job for software. Somebody crying on the line. A family trying to sort out a funeral. Or the customer who's still angry about the last visit, or a billing mess where how you say it matters as much as the number itself. People are better there, and it isn't close. A decent receptionist catches the pause before the answer and changes course without anybody telling them to. Software can sound polite. That isn't the same as a person who actually cares how the call ends.
So where does that leave the money question? Probably somewhere in the middle. Let software soak up the cheap, repetitive work (nights, weekends, overflow, all those "can you squeeze me in Tuesday" calls) and keep people on the calls where a real voice and some judgment are the whole point. Plenty of room to do both.
Small shop or several locations
One-truck plumber, one phone line. Low volume cuts both ways here. Rounding and a monthly minimum hurt more when there isn't much to spread them over (a minimum you never hit is basically a fee with extra paperwork). For a shop that size it's really about nights and weekends, and whether a flat plan beats a bucket you'd never fill.
Multi-location team, or a bigger office with several lines, and the questions change. Volume is high enough that overage rates and junk-call filtering really move the bill. Routing matters: does the service know which location the caller wants, send the transfer to the right manager, keep a separate script per office? Is pricing per location, per number, per seat? Anything promised about service levels or reporting goes into the agreement, not just the sales call. Running a clinic? Our medical answering service cost breakdown walks through what multi-physician and multi-site practices get quoted.
(Want to hear an AI voice agent pick up before you get into any of this? There's a call-me demo on our homepage: you type in your number and it rings you.)
Questions to ask before you sign
Bring a pen to the sales call. The rep will jump around, so forget the order and just leave with answers.
I'd start with the clock. How do they count a minute, in what increment, and does it start ticking at pickup or the moment the call hits their system? Is hold time on you? What about wrap-up? Then what turns a ring into a billable call, since spam, hang-ups and the guy who meant to dial the pizza place next door all add up. Filtered, or billed?
Next, the bucket. What's in it, does leftover time carry into next month, and what's the overage rate (write that one down twice). Get the setup fee too, and whether script edits cost extra. After that it's nights, weekends and holidays: what rate, and which holidays exactly. Then the contract itself. How long it runs, whether it renews on its own, how much notice it takes to cancel, what leaving early costs, and whether there's a monthly minimum hiding somewhere in there.
The last two matter more than price, honestly. What actually happens to my caller: a message, a transfer, or a booked appointment? And if we part ways, do I keep the number, the recordings and the call history? More than one location? Add routing: is it priced per location, per number or per seat, and can a caller get sent to the right office?
Quick questions
Per minute or per call, which one's actually cheaper for me?
It comes down to what your calls look like. If a lot of them run long (a homeowner describing the noise their furnace makes, in loving detail, for six minutes), a flat fee per call usually comes out ahead. Mostly quick ones, like "are you open Saturday" and "what's the address," and per minute can win, unless the rounding eats the difference. Run last month's log through both and see which total is smaller.
My bill came in way over the quote. What happened?
Get the invoice out and go down it with the highlighter. There are four usual suspects, and sometimes it's more than one: rounding, wrap-up time you didn't know was billed, going past the allowance into overage, and the after-hours or holiday surcharge kicking in on calls you figured were standard rate. If the invoice doesn't break calls out one by one, ask the vendor for the call detail.
Would an AI receptionist come out cheaper than a live service?
It can, and the gap tends to grow as volume goes up, since a flat plan doesn't climb every time somebody talks for an extra minute. Cheap isn't the whole picture, though. Think about what happens to the caller on each, who takes the hard calls (see where AI isn't the right fit, above), and what your worst month costs on both.
Do I even need after-hours coverage, or is voicemail fine?
Look at the log before you buy anything. If it's a handful of calls a month and none of them were urgent, voicemail plus a quick callback first thing in the morning might be all you need. If it's dozens, or a few clearly couldn't wait, run the missed-call math above with your own numbers, then see how an after-hours answering service would handle those calls.
Where an AI receptionist fits
OK, the part where we talk about ourselves. Briefly.
AptaBook is an AI receptionist, and it's priced the flat way. $49, $99 or $149 a month, depending on the tier. Enterprise gets custom pricing. There's a 15-day free trial, and it doesn't ask for a card.
What it does, roughly. Picks up calls at any hour, and handles web chat, WhatsApp and email too. Asks your intake questions, not a generic script. Bookings land on your Google Calendar or Outlook.
More than one office? You set each location up with its own address, hours and services, and when a caller names a location, that calendar gets checked first. If a human needs to take over, it can transfer the call, set up a callback, or email your team.
Do the same thing with us you'd do with anyone, though, and read the limits on whatever tier you're looking at. If you run a trade, the AI receptionist for home services page shows how intake and booking work there. Or book a demo and bring that call log with you.