A pricing page gives you one number. Your invoice has several, and the one that surprises contractors is rarely the plan fee. It is overage in a storm month, a per-call add-on for the integration you assumed was included, or a number that turns out to belong to the vendor.
This guide collects published prices from vendor pricing pages, each dated and linked, then walks through the costs that sit around them. It names vendors only because their prices are public. It does not rank them. For what the product must do before price matters, start with the buyer's guide to AI receptionists for contractors.
Published prices, as of October 2026
Prices change often. Each figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page in October 2026, and you should check the link before you budget.
| Vendor | Billing unit | Published plans | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rosie | Included minutes | $49 per month (250 min), $149 (1,000 min), $299 (2,000 min) | heyrosie.com |
| Goodcall | Unique customers per month | $79 (100), $129 (250), $249 (500), then $0.50 per extra customer | goodcall.com |
| Smith.ai | Calls per month | $300 (30 calls), $810 (90), $2,100 (300) | smith.ai |
| Ruby | Included minutes | $250 (50 min), $395 (100), $720 (200), $1,725 (500) | ruby.com |
Three things stand out.
The units are not comparable. Rosie bills included minutes. Goodcall states it charges for unique customers who actually speak to the agent, with no cap on calls or minutes, and excludes robocalls and blocked numbers. Smith.ai bills per call. A 90-second call, a 9-minute call and a caller who rings back three times look very different under each model.
Some pages are silent on what matters. Rosie's page asks what happens if you exceed your minutes and shows no answer. Ruby's page states no overage rate. Goodcall's page does not mention ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber. Rosie names only Zapier as an integration. Silence on a pricing page means you have to ask, and get the answer in writing.
Human-assisted plans cost more. Smith.ai lists overage at $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per call depending on plan, and charges extra for add-ons: its page lists $1.50 per call for appointment booking on supported scheduling tools, $0.50 per call for each additional CRM beyond the first free one, and $0.50 per call for SMS or Slack notifications. Note which CRMs and schedulers it names. A field service platform may not be among them, which turns the integration into custom work.
The per-minute route: building on a voice platform
Some contractors, or the agencies that serve them, build on voice AI platforms instead of buying a packaged receptionist. Their prices are also public and show the raw cost of a minute.
- Retell lists pay-as-you-go pricing of $0.07 to $0.31 per minute, with a default estimate of $0.11 per minute made up of $0.04 for the language model, $0.055 for voice infrastructure and $0.015 for text to speech. Twenty concurrent calls are included, extra concurrency is $8 per month each, and add-ons include $0.005 per minute for the knowledge base, $0.01 per minute for PII removal, and $0.10 per minute for AI quality assurance after the first 100 minutes. Phone numbers are $2 per month (Retell pricing).
- Vapi lists a $0.05 per minute hosting fee, with speech-to-text, the model and voice billed separately at provider cost. Its own estimate for hosting plus those three runs about $0.082 to $0.129 per minute before carrier fees (Vapi pricing).
At roughly $0.08 to $0.13 per minute in platform cost, 1,200 minutes a month is roughly $100 to $155. That is not a price you can buy. It is the raw material. It excludes everything that makes the product work on a contractor's line: the prompts, the triage rules, the booking integration, the QA and someone to fix it when it breaks. The gap between that raw cost and a packaged plan is mostly labor and risk, which is not an argument against either route. It is why you should ask what you are paying for.
The costs the pricing page leaves out
Setup and onboarding
Several vendors say there are no setup fees, and that is worth confirming. Ruby's page says there are no fees for activation, onboarding or setup, and Smith.ai says no setup fees. That covers the vendor's side. It does not cover your time to write triage rules, test, train staff on the handoff and fix the first month of mistakes. Budget internal hours, or a person to do it. A team that does this work for you will price it separately, and scoping it takes a call.
Integration
This is the largest hidden line item. A receptionist that cannot write to your field service software forces a person to re-enter every booking. Ask:
- Is there a native integration with ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber, and is it included in the plan?
- If it connects through Zapier or an API, who builds and maintains it?
- Is there a per-booking or per-call charge for it?
ServiceTitan's AI Virtual Agent page lists no price and says to request a demo, and Housecall Pro's page says its CSR AI is sold separately with no figure (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro). If you run either platform, get a written quote before comparing against anyone else.
Overage and surge
The plan covers an average month. You get paid on the surge month: a heat wave, a freeze, a hail event. Ask for the overage rate in writing, whether there is a cap and whether concurrency is limited. On a per-call plan, a spike of 120 extra calls at $10.50 each is $1,260 in a month. That figure is illustrative arithmetic, not a vendor quote, but it shows why the overage line deserves the same attention as the plan fee.
Texting and phone numbers
An AI receptionist that sends confirmation or follow-up texts needs a registered texting setup and may carry per-message fees. Retell lists SMS at $0.01 per message plus a $20 monthly SMS fee. Texting also has registration and consent requirements, covered in A2P 10DLC registration for contractors.
Quality assurance
Someone has to listen to calls. Whether that is a platform feature, a paid add-on or your own office manager, put a number on it. An unreviewed receptionist will repeat the same mistake every night.
Exit costs
Ask what it costs to leave: a notice period, a number port-out fee, an export of your recordings and transcripts, and any contract term. Smith.ai's page says month-to-month with billing through the end of the cycle. Many vendors do not publish this. If the vendor holds your phone number, you can lose the line your marketing points to.
A worked example (illustrative)
These numbers are made up to show the method. They are not from a real company.
A two-location HVAC shop gets 600 calls a month and wants after-hours and overflow coverage on about 40% of them: 240 calls, averaging 2.5 minutes, so 600 minutes.
- Plan fee: depends on the unit. 600 minutes fits a Rosie 1,000-minute plan at $149. The same calls on a per-call plan at 240 calls would fall between Smith.ai's 90-call and 300-call tiers, so $2,100 for the 300-call plan.
- Integration: zero if native and included, otherwise a per-call add-on or a build cost.
- Texting: a registered number and per-message fees.
- QA: two hours a week of someone's time.
- Surge: one bad month at 1.5 times volume.
The point is not which line is cheapest. It is that the comparison only works when all lines are priced for your volume. Then compare the total against what the calls are worth. Our missed-call cost formula shows how to value them, and the comparison with human answering services shows the human-staffed price point.
Five questions to ask every vendor
- What is the total monthly cost at my call count and average length, with overage?
- What does the integration to my software cost, and who maintains it?
- What happens to my number, recordings and data if I cancel?
- What does a surge month look like on the invoice?
- Can I see a real invoice from a customer in my trade, redacted?
If you would like help sizing the problem before you buy anything, the AI Readiness Audit looks at your call flow and software first. For ongoing implementation, see the Booked-Jobs Recovery System and our AI customer support service.
Frequently asked questions
What is the typical monthly cost of an AI receptionist?
Published plans on the pages above run from $49 to $2,100 per month as of October 2026, but the billing units differ, so the figures are not directly comparable. Price your own call count and average call length.
Are there setup fees?
Ruby and Smith.ai both state no setup fees on their pricing pages. Integration work, number porting and your own configuration time are separate, and Goodcall and Rosie do not state setup fees either way.
Is per-minute or per-call pricing better?
Per-minute plans reward short calls and punish long ones. Per-call plans do the opposite. Per-customer plans like Goodcall's reward repeat callers. Model your real mix before choosing.