AI Receptionist Pricing in 2026: Every Billing Model Explained

Every AI receptionist ends up as a line on your bank statement, but the path from a pricing page to that line differs by vendor. Some publish a flat monthly figure with a minute allowance. Some sell blocks of calls. Some meter every minute and add the language model, the synthetic voice and the phone carrier on top. Some charge per agent with unlimited minutes and meter something else entirely. Some charge per location, and one now sells only annual enterprise contracts. This guide sets out each billing model with a verified example, shows how to turn it into a monthly estimate, and lists the questions that separate a real quote from a sales-call number.

The six billing models, with a verified example of each

1. Flat monthly with included minutes

You pay a fixed amount per month for an allowance of talk time. Go over it and either an overage rate applies or the vendor moves you up a tier. Most packaged receptionists use this model, and it is the easiest to budget. Two figures matter: the monthly price and the included minutes. The third, the overage rate, is the one vendors most often leave off the page.

Torklio is the plain version: Starter $99 for 300 minutes, Plus $149 for 600, Pro $249 for 1,000, and a quote-based Growth plan at 3,000. The page says overages apply but does not publish a per-minute rate. Dialzara is the same model with the overage on the page: Business Lite $29 for 60 minutes at $0.48 per extra minute, Pro $99 for 220 at $0.45, Plus $199 for 500 at $0.40, Elite $349 for 1,000 at $0.35. Rosie ($49 for 250, $149 for 1,000, $299 for 2,000, no overage published) and Frontdesk ($99 for 200 voice minutes, then $0.25 a minute) also bill this way.

2. Per-call bundles

You buy a block of calls, not minutes, for a monthly fee. A 20-second wrong number and a 9-minute intake conversation cost the same. This suits businesses with long, valuable calls and penalizes businesses with many short ones. Services with human receptionists behind the AI tend to bill this way, because a person's time is the underlying cost. Smith.ai's AI-first plans are the verified example: Starter $300 for 30 calls with $11.50 per call over, Basic $810 for 90 calls at $10.50 over, Pro $2,100 for 300 calls at $8.50 over. Appointment scheduling is an add-on at $1.50 per call, the first CRM integration is free and each additional CRM is $0.50 per call. Month-to-month, 10% off for a 12-month subscription, 30-day money-back guarantee, no free trial listed.

3. Per-minute usage, built from components

You pay for what you use, metered by the minute. On developer platforms the per-minute figure on the page is only the platform fee; the language model, the text-to-speech voice, speech recognition and the telephony carrier are each metered separately and stacked on top. Retell AI publishes the whole stack: $0.055 per minute for voice infrastructure, plus an LLM at $0.003 to $0.16, text-to-speech at $0.015 to $0.04 and telephony at $0.015, for an all-in range of $0.07 to $0.31 per minute. Phone numbers are $2 a month, 20 concurrent calls are free and each additional concurrency is $8 a month; $10 of free credit comes with signup. Vapi charges a $0.05 per-minute platform fee and passes speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech through at cost, or $0 if you bring your own API keys; telephony is billed by your provider. The Build plan includes 60+ minutes and 10 concurrent lines, then $10 per line per month. Compliance is where the fixed fees appear: Vapi's HIPAA add-on is $2,000 a month and zero data retention is $1,000 a month.

4. Per-agent with unlimited minutes, metered by customers

Goodcall removes the minute meter entirely and replaces it with two others. Plans are priced per AI agent: Starter $79, Growth $129, Scale $249 per month, or $66, $108 and $208 with 15% off for annual billing. Minutes are unlimited on every plan. The meter is unique customers per month, 100, 250 and 500 by tier, with $0.50 per additional customer. The second limit is retention: Starter keeps call and customer details for 7 days, Growth 30 days, Scale indefinitely. Long calls cost nothing extra; a wide customer base does.

5. Per-location

Slang AI prices restaurant phone answering per location: Core starting at $399 a month, Premium starting at $599, Enterprise custom. No minute, call or overage figures are published, so the only variable in the bill is the number of locations, and "starting at" means the quoted figure is a floor.

6. Enterprise contract or quote-based

The page says "Talk to us." Synthflow has gone entirely this way: its pricing page lists no monthly plan and states that enterprise contracts start at $30,000 annually, scoped to volume, concurrency, telephony and integrations, with no trial listed. Most other vendors keep a quote-based top tier: Torklio's Growth plan at 3,000 minutes, Smith.ai's Enterprise plan, Goodcall's Enterprise plan, Retell's Enterprise plan and Vapi's Scale plan. A quote is fine, but it cannot be compared until it is in writing, and it usually comes with an annual commitment.

Turning each model into a monthly estimate

Start with two numbers you can measure from your own phone records: calls per month and average call length. Multiply them to get minutes per month. Then apply the model:

1. Flat monthly: pick the cheapest tier whose included minutes cover yours. If none does, the bill is the top priced tier plus overage. Dialzara at 1,500 minutes is Elite $349 plus 500 × $0.35 = $524. Torklio at 1,500 minutes is Pro $249 plus an overage its page does not price, or a Growth quote.
2. Per-call: pick the bundle whose call count covers your calls, or the smaller bundle plus overage if that is cheaper. Smith.ai at 150 calls is Basic $810 plus 60 × $10.50 = $1,440, plus $225 if every call uses the $1.50 scheduling add-on. Check what counts as a call.
3. Per-minute components: add every metered layer into one all-in rate, then multiply by monthly minutes. Retell at 450 minutes is $31.50 to $139.50 depending on model and voice, plus $2 per phone number. Vapi at 450 minutes is $22.50 in platform fees plus whatever your models and carrier cost.
4. Per-agent, unlimited minutes: minutes drop out. Count the AI agents you need and the unique customers you serve per month. Goodcall with one agent and 150 unique customers is Starter $79 plus 50 × $0.50 = $104, or Growth $129 for 250 customers and 30-day retention.
5. Per-location: multiply the per-location price by locations. Slang AI with two restaurants is at least $798 on Core.
6. Enterprise or quote: state your minutes, calls, numbers and seats in writing, and ask for the overage terms in the same document. Synthflow's floor is $30,000 a year.

The cost calculator runs this arithmetic against the verified plans: it picks the cheapest covering tier for flat-minute plans, applies published overage rates where they exist (Dialzara, Frontdesk), flags the shortfall where they do not (Torklio, Rosie), treats Goodcall's unlimited minutes as covering any volume while reminding you about the customer cap, multiplies minutes by the lowest published rate for Retell and Vapi, and reports quote-required for Synthflow.

Worked example: 150 calls a month across every model

Take a single-location service business at 150 calls a month averaging 3 minutes, which is 450 minutes. Here is what each verified model produces for that volume:

The spread is not a ranking. Retell and Vapi's figures exclude the developer who builds the agent, Smith.ai's includes access to human receptionists, and Goodcall's assumes a single agent and depends on how many distinct people call rather than how long they talk. What the table does show is that the billing unit decides the bill before any feature does: the same 150 calls cost $79 on a customer meter, $149 on a minute meter and $1,440 on a call meter.

Torklio's published plans in full

Because the publisher of this site has a financial interest in Torklio, its plan table is shown in full so nothing is summarized favorably. As verified on 2026-09-07:

A business at 360 minutes a month (120 calls at 3 minutes) is not covered by Starter's 300, so Plus at $149 is the tier. A business at 900 minutes lands on Pro at $249. A business at 1,400 minutes exceeds Pro by 400 minutes, and here Torklio hits the wall shared with Rosie: it does not publish a per-minute overage rate. Its page says overages apply without a figure, so the bill is $249 plus an unknown amount, or a Growth quote. Dialzara, by contrast, would price the same 1,400 minutes at Elite $349 plus 400 × $0.35 = $489, with no phone call needed. Other verified Torklio terms: no setup fee listed, month-to-month with no annual discount shown, a 7-day free trial on Starter, Plus and Pro, a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, and text messaging listed as coming soon.

What "verified" means on this site

Dollar figures for AI receptionists are easy to find in roundups. Most are copied from other roundups, undated, and out of step with the vendor's current page; Synthflow, for instance, is still widely listed with self-serve monthly tiers that its page no longer shows. Every figure in our pricing table and on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-07 and stored with the URL and that date. Pricing pages change, so treat the check date as part of the number: if you are reading this months later, open the page before you sign. Where a vendor's page omits a figure we say so, and the comparisons work only from what was published.

Questions to put to a sales rep

A rep's job is to close on the headline figure. Yours is to reconstruct the real monthly bill. Ask for the answers in writing:

• What is the overage rate, and does it apply automatically or do you move me to the next tier? (Torklio and Rosie do not publish one; Dialzara and Frontdesk do.)
• Are minutes billed per second, per minute rounded up, or in six-second increments? Do unused minutes roll over?
• What counts as a call, or a unique customer: ringing, hold, voicemail, transfers, repeat callers, outbound callbacks?
• Is there a setup or onboarding fee, and is it refundable if I cancel during the trial?
• How many numbers, agents, users and locations does this tier include, and what does each additional one cost?
• Is there a charge to port my number in, or out if I leave?
• Is telephony included, passed through at cost, or marked up? (Retell publishes $0.015 a minute; Vapi bills it through your provider.)
• Does the quoted figure assume annual prepayment, or is it the month-to-month price? (Goodcall's $66 and Frontdesk's $79 are annual-billing prices; the monthly figures are $79 and $99.)

If the rep cannot answer, record it as unverified. A vendor that will not put its overage rate in writing is telling you how the bill will behave in month four.