AI Receptionist Pricing: What You Actually Pay in 2026

Disclosure: we make EazyAgent, which appears below marked (ours). The pricing mechanics apply to every vendor equally.

The three pricing models

1. Flat monthly. One price with a fair-use pool. Predictable, but you pay the same in a quiet month as a busy one.
2. Per-minute. A low entry price ($49-ish) plus $0.20–$0.40/minute. Looks cheap, scales badly: a busy month is a surprise invoice, and surge weeks, when you need answering most, are exactly when minutes explode.
3. Per-call or hybrid. A base plan with an included call allowance, then a set price per extra call. This is the model we use, and the one where the definition of “call” matters most: ask every vendor whether spam, wrong numbers and hang-ups are billed.

The market in 2026

Provider type	Typical price	Watch for
Budget per-minute AI (e.g. Trillet-class)	$49/mo + ~$0.20/min after ~150 min	The real bill lives in the overage
Flat-rate AI receptionists	~$109–$300/mo	Minute pools and industry depth vary
EazyAgent (ours)	$39/mo USD (30 calls) → $89 (100) → $179 (200); extra calls $1.50–$0.90	If you take under ~20 calls a month, per-minute rivals are genuinely cheaper
Human virtual receptionists (Ruby-class)	$200–$700+/mo for small minute bundles	You’re buying human minutes; see the comparison
Traditional answering services	~$1–2/minute	Per-minute human billing at scale. Details

The hidden costs checklist

Ask every vendor: Is there a setup fee? Are spam calls billed? What happens past the included allowance? Is texting/SMS included (A2P registration matters in the US)? Can you cancel monthly or is there a contract? A vendor that answers all five plainly is telling you something; so is one that doesn’t.

Since we ask you to hold vendors to that, here are our own answers. EazyAgent bills only qualified business calls. Spam and wrong numbers are credited back automatically rather than counted against your allowance. Past the allowance you draw on prepaid credits at a published per-call rate ($1.50 on Starter, falling to $0.90 on Growth), so overage is priced before you hit it, not after. Plans are monthly, annual billing takes two months off, and the trial runs 14 days or your first 10 business calls, whichever comes first. Canadian plans are priced separately in CAD, starting at $59/month for 30 calls.

The only comparison that matters

Whatever the sticker price, compare it to the leak it plugs: the calculator turns your missed calls into a yearly dollar figure. For most service businesses the answer lands between “one saved job pays the month” (plumbing) and “one saved matter pays the year” (law).