Answering service cost comparison
What each way of answering your phone actually costs at your call volume — a live answering service, Ruby, Smith.ai, hiring someone, or a flat-fee AI receptionist. Every price comes from the company's own published pricing page. Move the sliders and the cheapest option changes, which is rather the point.
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The calculator
Everything that reaches your line, not just the ones you miss.
Service intake calls usually run two to three minutes.
| Option | Per month |
|---|---|
| VoicemailCosts nothing and books nothing. Here as the baseline everything else is measured against. | Free |
| Live answering serviceCheapest150 minutes a month, against published bundle tiers. Overage applies past the bundle. | $330 – $525 |
| Smart Lead RecoveryFlat, whatever the volume. Plus $500 once, at setup. | $500 |
| Smith.aiCheapest published plan for 60 calls, including per-call overage. | $645 |
| RubyTheir smallest bundle that covers 150 minutes. | $720 |
| In-house receptionistUS median wage over a 2,080-hour year, base pay only — no payroll tax or benefits. Covers business hours, not nights or weekends. | $3,103 |
At 60 calls a month, Live answering service is the cheapest option that actually answers the phone. We are showing you that because it is true. Drag the volume up and the ranking changes.
What this does not capture.
Price is the easiest thing to compare and rarely the thing that decides it. A live service puts a person on the call, which is genuinely better for someone distressed or describing something odd. A receptionist does the office work too. An AI answers instantly at three in the morning and costs the same in a busy month as a quiet one. These are different products with similar invoices.
The other thing the table cannot show is what happens after the call. A message still needs someone to act on it, and at 1 AM that someone is you — which is why the fuller comparison spends more time on booking than on billing.
If you do not yet know whether any of this is worth paying for, the missed call calculator is the better starting point — it works out what the unanswered calls are worth before you start pricing ways to answer them.
Questions about the numbers.
Live answering services run $135–$450 a month for most small businesses, billed as minute bundles with overage of $0.75–$1.50 a minute beyond the bundle. Published bundle pricing runs $135–$250 for 100 minutes, $330–$525 for 250, $495–$925 for 500. What you actually pay depends on your call volume and average call length, which is what the calculator above works out.
It depends entirely on volume, and anyone who answers without asking your call count is selling rather than advising. At low volume a minute bundle or a small per-call plan is cheaper than a flat monthly fee. Past roughly 250 to 300 minutes a month the flat fee usually wins, and it stops moving after that. Drag the sliders above and the ranking changes in front of you.
Each company's own published pricing page, checked in July 2026, not from third-party round-ups — those were wrong often enough to be useless. Ruby's bundles, Smith.ai's per-call plans and the generic bundle tiers all come from the sources linked below the tool. The receptionist figure is the US median wage from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2024.
No — it compares monthly running cost only, because that is the number that repeats. Smith.ai and Ruby both publish no setup fee. We charge a one-time setup, which is stated on our pricing page and is not folded into the monthly figures above.
Because the comparison is not like-for-like, and it is worth being clear about that. A receptionist also does invoicing, ordering, paperwork and the walk-in, and builds relationships with your regulars. What the figure does show honestly is that hiring someone purely to answer a phone is an expensive way to solve that specific problem — and it only covers business hours.
Then ring the one you are considering.
A price comparison tells you what something costs, not whether it is any good. Our demo line is the sixty-second version of the second question.