If you've looked into AI receptionists, you've probably noticed that pricing is weirdly hard to pin down. Some tools advertise a low monthly fee, some charge per minute, some want a sales call before they'll tell you anything. So here's the straight version: what goes into the cost, what a realistic monthly bill looks like for a small business, and how it compares to the obvious alternative of hiring someone.

I'll use Velay's own pricing for the examples, because those are the numbers I can stand behind. The structure is similar across most of the industry, even when the labels change.

The short answer

For a small business with steady call volume, a done-for-you AI receptionist usually lands somewhere in the hundreds of dollars a month, plus a one-time setup fee. At Velay that's a setup starting at $1,500, usage starting at $0.49 per minute of calls the agent actually handles, and support starting at $249 a month.

The rest of this post is about which of those numbers moves, and why.

The three parts of the bill

1. Setup (one time). This is the work of turning a generic voice AI into your receptionist: writing out how calls should flow, loading in your services, hours, prices and policies, connecting your calendar and phone number, and testing it with real calls before it goes live. Done well, this is where most of the quality comes from. A receptionist that doesn't know your business is just a polite voice that says "I'm not sure."

2. Usage (per minute). You pay for the minutes the agent spends on calls. If your phone is quiet one month, the bill is small. If you run a promotion and the phone rings off the hook, the bill goes up, but so does the number of customers you didn't miss.

3. Support (monthly). Businesses change. Prices go up, a new service launches, holiday hours happen. Support covers keeping the agent accurate: reviewing calls, fixing the answers it got wrong, and tuning how it handles the edge cases that only show up once real customers start calling.

Some vendors bundle all three into a flat monthly fee. That can look cheaper on a pricing page, but it usually means either a cap on minutes or a setup you do yourself. Neither is wrong, just know which one you're buying.

A worked example

Let's make it concrete. Say you run a small HVAC company that gets about 400 calls a month, and the average call lasts 3 minutes. "My furnace won't start." "Can someone come out today?" "How much is a tune-up?" And say about a third of those calls come in after 5 PM or on weekends, which in heating and cooling is exactly when the urgent ones tend to happen.

  • Usage: 400 calls × 3 minutes = 1,200 minutes × $0.49 = $588
  • Support: $249
  • Monthly total: about $837
  • Plus a one-time setup starting at $1,500

Those are illustrative numbers, not a quote. Your call count and call length are the two inputs that matter, and most phone systems can tell you both. If you can pull those two numbers, you can estimate the usage part of your bill in about thirty seconds.

The after-hours share is the part worth thinking about. In this example that's roughly 130 calls a month that currently land in voicemail. Someone with no heat in January may not wait for a callback the next morning, and the next company on their search results is one tap away. An AI receptionist answers those calls, gets the details, and books the visit or flags it as urgent, instead of leaving it to whoever checks voicemail first thing.

How that compares to hiring a receptionist

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for a receptionist at $18.27 an hour, or about $38,010 a year, as of May 2025 (BLS). That's roughly $3,170 a month in wages alone, before payroll taxes, benefits, training, and covering sick days and vacations.

On cost alone, the AI is a fraction of that. But cost alone is the wrong comparison, if I'm being honest, because the two don't do the same job.

A human receptionist covers about 40 hours a week. The AI covers all 168, including the evenings and weekends when a lot of people actually get around to calling. It can take more than one call at a time, so nobody sits on hold. On the other hand, a good human reads the room in a way an AI still can't. They notice the regular who sounds upset, they handle the truly weird request, and they do a dozen other jobs between calls.

So the more useful question is usually what the person you already have should stop doing. For a lot of small businesses the answer is the repetitive calls. Hours, directions, prices, booking and rescheduling. Hand those off and the person you already have gets their afternoon back.

What makes the price go up

A few things push a quote above the starting numbers:

  • Integrations. Booking straight into a common calendar is standard. Connecting to an industry-specific system (a practice management tool, a custom CRM) takes more work.
  • Outbound calling. Reminder calls, follow-ups, and re-booking campaigns are a separate job from answering the phone, and they're priced separately.
  • Multiple locations. Different hours, staff, and services per location means more setup and more to keep accurate.
  • Long calls. If your typical call is 8 minutes instead of 3, the usage part of the bill nearly triples. Worth knowing before you start.

When it's probably not worth it

AI receptionists aren't for everyone, and I'd rather say that up front.

If your phone rings a handful of times a week, the setup cost takes a long time to pay back, and a simple voicemail-to-text service might be all you need. If most of your calls need real judgment (complicated quotes, sensitive conversations, upset customers), the AI will end up transferring most of them anyway. And if nobody on your team will look at call summaries now and then, you'll miss the feedback that makes the agent better over time.

The best fit is a business with steady call volume, lots of repeat questions, and appointments to book. Home services, salons, clinics, real estate offices, restaurants. That's where the math tends to work.

Final thoughts

An AI receptionist's cost comes down to three things: a one-time setup, the minutes it spends on calls, and ongoing support to keep it accurate. For a typical small business that adds up to hundreds of dollars a month, not thousands. That compares well against hiring, but the stronger case is coverage: every call answered, at 2 PM or 2 AM.

Before you talk to any vendor, pull two numbers from your phone system: calls per month and average call length. With those you can sanity-check any quote you get, including ours.

If you want to hear what this sounds like before deciding anything, you can talk to Marissa, our own AI receptionist, on the Velay homepage. Or book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll work through your actual numbers together.