How much does an answering service cost a small business?

A small business in Canada should budget $24 to $270 CAD a month for an answering service, depending on how many calls actually reach the line. That is the BotsDontSleep figure: $0.60 CAD per answered minute, billed by the second, 24/7, with $0 setup, no contract and no monthly minimum. The same three volumes on a staffed North American service land between about $144 and $1,047 CAD a month once the US-dollar plan, the exchange rate and your card's foreign transaction fee are all on the bill. Competitor prices below were read from each company's own pricing page on 30 September 2026; check their sites for current figures.

What should a small business budget for an answering service?

Between $24 and $270 CAD a month, and the number is set by call volume rather than by staff count. Staff count is only a proxy, but it is the proxy most owners have to hand, so here are three brackets to plan against.

Those minute figures are planning assumptions, not measurements of your business. We use two minutes as the working length of an answered call, so a 40-minute month is about twenty calls. Your own logs will move the number in either direction, and step one below is how you replace the assumption with your figure.

What the brackets do show is the shape of the spend. At the bottom end an answering service is a phone-bill-sized line item. At the top end it is still less than a week of part-time front-desk wages. Nothing in the range needs a budget meeting.

What does each provider charge for the same fifty calls?

Here is one month, held constant: fifty answered calls, about a hundred answered minutes. Every figure is the published plan converted into what actually leaves a Canadian bank account.

Two notes on that table, because the fairest reading of it is not the one most flattering to us. Abby Connect counts an AI-answered call as half an Abby Minute, so a plan of 100 Abby Minutes can absorb rather more than 100 real minutes if the calls go to their AI rather than a person. And AnswerConnect is in the table because a small business shopping on price should know that they do not publish rates at all: their pricing page is a registration form, checked 30 September 2026. A quote you have to ask for is a quote that can be sized to you.

Over twelve months at that same volume, the gap stops being a rounding error: $720 CAD against $3,300 for PATLive, $5,736 for Abby Connect, $6,888 for Ruby and $9,252 for Smith.ai. If you want the same arithmetic run across every billing model rather than one volume, what an answering service costs across each billing model does that, and the answering service cost page carries the current rate card.

Why is the Canadian number higher than the price on the page?

Because almost every staffed service on that list bills in US dollars, and two things happen between their invoice and your statement.

The Bank of Canada's daily average exchange rate for the US dollar was 1.4188 CAD on 29 September 2026. Then most Canadian credit cards add a foreign currency conversion fee: National Bank of Canada states 2.5%, applied after the network's conversion, and the major issuers sit at the same figure. Multiply the US price by about 1.45 and you have the landed number.

That is why a $165 USD entry plan reads as $240 CAD, and why a $300 USD starter plan reads as $436 CAD before a single overage call. The rate moves, so the multiplier is a snapshot rather than a constant. It has not been below 1.30 in some time, and pricing a US-dollar plan at par is the most common way a Canadian owner under-budgets this.

BotsDontSleep bills in Canadian dollars. There is no conversion step, which is worth exactly the 2.5% and whatever the dollar does next.

How many answered minutes does a small business actually use?

Fewer than owners guess, and the gap is mostly robocalls. A month of forty answered calls sounds thin until you subtract the ones that were never going to be work.

What counts as billable also differs by provider, and it is the quietest thing on a rate card. We bill answered minutes by the second, so a twenty-second wrong number is about twenty cents. A service that bills per call charges the same for that wrong number as for a booked appointment. A service that rounds to the minute turns that same twenty seconds into a full minute. On a hundred short calls those rules diverge by more than the headline rate does.

Some services also bill for after-call work. AnswerConnect's own FAQ says minutes are calculated on "the total time required to handle the call, including any after-call work our receptionists do to take your messages," which is honest of them and worth knowing before you compare a number of theirs to a number of ours.

An estimate calls line for a cleaning company and a service desk at an auto shop will land in different brackets even at the same staff count, because one takes three-minute bookings and the other takes eight-minute diagnostics.

What does one answered call cost on each model?

$1.20 with us, at the two-minute planning figure. $5.50 to $15.42 on the staffed services in the table above.

The per-call view is the one that matters for a small business, because a small business does not think in minute blocks. It thinks in jobs. When a call costs $15.42, a shop owner starts wondering whether the line should be answering the tire-pressure questions at all. When it costs $1.20, that question disappears, and so does the incentive to route real customers to voicemail to protect a minute allowance.

Per-call billing also creates a tier trap worth knowing about. Smith.ai's Starter plan is $300 USD for 30 calls with $11.50 per call after that, and Basic is $810 USD for 90. Staying on Starter and paying the overage is cheaper until you reach about 74 calls in a month, at which point the bigger plan wins. Most owners move up a tier well before that point, because the overage line on an invoice is more alarming than a fixed plan price, and it costs them the difference. Our Abby Connect comparison runs the same check against their tiers.

How many recovered jobs does the line have to pay for?

Divide the annual bill by your average job value. That is the whole test.

At a hundred answered minutes a month, the annual bill is $720 CAD. If your average job is worth $200, the line has to recover 3.6 jobs a year to break even. At $500 a job it is 1.5 jobs. At $2,000, which is an ordinary roof repair or a mid-sized legal retainer, it is under half a job. Those job values are illustrative; put your own in.

Run the same division on a staffed service at the same volume and the answer changes character. Ruby at $6,888 a year needs 34 recovered $200 jobs, or 14 at $500. That is not an argument that Ruby is bad value. It is an argument that the break-even is a real number you can compute before you sign, and that it should be computed at your job value rather than at the one in the case study. Whether an answering service is worth it at all for a small business works through the same arithmetic from the other direction.

When is the cheapest answering service no answering service?

Four situations, plainly, and they are more common than the pricing pages suggest.

If you take fewer than about twenty calls a month and you answer nearly all of them, you do not have a coverage problem. You have a phone that rings rarely and a person who picks it up. Paying $24 a month to formalize that is not wrong, but it will not produce anything, and you should expect it not to.

If your callers are other businesses who ring between nine and five and are content to leave a message, the after-hours half of this is insurance against an event that does not occur. Price the daytime overflow on its own merits.

If the relationship is the product, a stranger answering in your place can cost you more than a voicemail would have. Some solo consultancies and family practices sit here. A recorded message in your own voice promising a callback by a stated hour beats a smooth answer from anybody else.

And if nobody reads the messages, none of this changes anything except your bill. Whoever works the morning list has to be named before you switch the line on, and it cannot be whoever happens to get in first.

What does a small business give up by paying per minute?

A ceiling. A plan with 100 included minutes tells you what March costs before March happens. Per-second billing does not: a storm week, a recall, a listing that goes viral, and the invoice moves with the call volume. For most small businesses that is the right trade, because the months that cost more are the months that earned more. For a business on a fixed grant or a tight monthly float, a capped plan is genuinely easier to live with, and that is a real reason to pay more per minute.

The other thing a per-minute AI line does not give you is a human voice on every call. If that is the requirement, Ruby and Smith.ai staff their lines with people and charge accordingly, and the right comparison for you is between them rather than with us. We are voice-only, and we say so on the pricing page as well as here.

How do you work out your own number this week?

Five steps, and about an hour of your time.

1. Pull one month of call logs from your carrier. Total inbound, answered, missed, and the ones that lasted under fifteen seconds. Most business phone providers export this from the admin portal without a support ticket.
2. Mark the robocalls and wrong numbers separately. Whatever is left is your real volume. This is the number every provider's plan should be sized against, and the one owners most often skip.
3. Multiply real calls by two minutes. That gives you a planning figure for answered minutes. If your calls are bookings rather than diagnostics, use ninety seconds; if they are intake interviews, use four.
4. Price that month on each model. Per second, per rounded minute, per call, and per included-minute block, in landed Canadian dollars using today's rate plus 2.5%. The order changes at different volumes, which is the point of doing it.
5. Divide the annual figure by your average job value. If the answer is under two recovered jobs a year, the decision is not close, and you should stop researching and test one.

Then run a live call through whatever you are considering before you sign anything. Ours answers on +1 437-494-9110, and an auto shop line in Calgary is the closest thing on the site to a small business with a busy service desk.