How much does an AI receptionist cost?

An AI receptionist costs $0.60 CAD per answered minute with BotsDontSleep, billed by the second, with $0 setup, no contract, and no monthly minimum. A business answering 300 minutes of calls a month pays about $180. Across the wider market, AI receptionists are usually sold one of three ways — per minute, per call, or on a monthly plan with an included minute allowance — and the model matters more than the headline rate.

What does an AI receptionist cost per month?

Per-minute pricing means your bill tracks your phone. A quiet January costs less than a busy June, with no adjustment required and nothing to renegotiate.

To turn calls into minutes, use two minutes as a planning figure. That is a planning assumption, not a promise: bookings run longer, wrong numbers run seconds, and your own average will settle within the first month of transcripts. On that assumption, 150 calls a month is roughly 300 minutes, or about $180.

Billing by the second matters more than it sounds. A twenty-second wrong number costs about twenty cents, not a rounded-up minute. Over a month of robocalls that is the difference between a rounding error and a line item.

What are the three ways AI receptionists are priced?

Per-call pricing looks simple and punishes you for junk. Every robocall, wrong number, and hang-up bills at the same rate as a fifteen-minute booking.

Monthly plans look predictable and are only predictable if you guess your volume correctly. Guess low and you pay overage at a worse rate than the plan. Guess high and you have bought minutes you will not use, which is the whole reason the model exists.

Per-minute pricing has its own honest weakness, and it is this: a long, chatty, complicated call costs more than a short one. If your calls routinely run fifteen minutes — detailed intake, technical support, multi-property discussions — run the maths on a flat monthly plan before assuming per-minute wins. For most businesses whose calls average two to four minutes, it does not come close.

What is not included in the price?

With BotsDontSleep the answer is nothing, and that is unusual enough to spell out. These are the line items that commonly appear elsewhere and do not appear here:

• Setup and onboarding — $0. Mapping your call flows and tuning the agent is included.
• Integrations — $0. Calendar, CRM, and business-system connections are part of the build.
• Languages — $0. All 90+ are on by default; there is no bilingual surcharge and no second line.
• Concurrency — $0. Unlimited simultaneous calls, so a rush does not trigger an overflow charge.
• Per-seat or per-line fees — none. The price does not change with headcount.
• Cancellation — nothing to cancel. You forward your number back and you are done.

You pay for answered minutes. That is the entire invoice.

How does that compare to a live answering service?

Live answering services are typically billed per minute or per call, commonly quoted in the $1.50–$3.00 per minute range, usually with a setup fee and a monthly minimum attached. Rates vary by provider and change, so check each vendor's current published price rather than trusting an industry average — including ours. Our answering service cost breakdown works through the category in more depth.

On 600 monthly minutes, that spread is the difference between roughly $900–$1,800 and $360. Depending on which end of the range you compare against, an AI receptionist runs 60–80% lower on the same volume.

The comparison is not purely a rate comparison, though, and it would be dishonest to present it as one. A live service puts a trained person on every call. If you need that — because your callers are in distress, or because your industry expects a human voice — the rate difference is not the deciding factor and you should pay for the person.

What does a missed call cost?

The only number that makes the price make sense.

Take a business missing 30 calls a month, winning about 40% of the enquiries it does reach, at an average job value of $600. That is roughly $7,200 a month going to voicemail, or $86,400 a year. Those same 30 calls, at two minutes each, are 60 minutes of answered time — $36.

Recovering one of those calls covers the entire month, several times over. Run your own numbers with the calculator on our homepage rather than ours; the inputs that matter are yours.

Callers who reach voicemail are not waiting. They are dialling the next business on the list.

What does junk traffic cost you?

Something, but not much, and it is worth quantifying because it is the first objection every per-minute buyer raises.

A business taking 40 calls in a week where 14 are robocalls and wrong numbers is in fairly normal territory. Those 14 calls, at roughly thirty seconds each before the agent ends them, total about seven minutes — roughly $4.20. On a per-call plan, those same 14 calls bill as 14 calls.

When is an AI receptionist not worth the money?

Three cases, plainly.

If you take fewer than about twenty calls a month and you answer nearly all of them yourself, the phone in your pocket is already doing the job. The value here is in the calls you are not getting to.

If every single call genuinely needs professional judgment from the first sentence — a specialist practice where nothing is routine, nothing is bookable by rule, and there is no intake to capture — the agent has less to do and the arithmetic gets thinner.

And if your calls routinely run very long, price a flat monthly plan alongside per-minute before deciding. We would rather you did that check than switch and feel misled.

What does the switch itself cost?

Nothing, and this is the part that changes the risk profile of the decision.

There is no setup fee, no contract, and no minimum, so the cost of trying it for a month is the cost of the minutes it answers. Forwarding your existing number takes about ten minutes. Forwarding it back takes about ten minutes. Your number was always yours, and nothing on your business cards, website, or Google listing changes either way.