What does an AI receptionist cost?
The honest answer is that it depends on how your business runs, and anyone who quotes you a number before understanding that is guessing. That is not a dodge — it is the single most useful thing to know before you start shopping. A one-truck shop that needs after-hours calls answered and a ten-truck shop that needs dispatch, reception, and back-office follow-up working together are buying completely different systems. A price that fits both is a price that overcharges one of them.
What you can do before you talk to anyone is understand the shape of the bill. There are only a few ways this gets priced, and knowing which one you are being offered tells you more than the number on the page.
How does each option actually bill you?
Every trade business covers the phone one of three ways, and each has a different cost structure. The structure matters more than the sticker, because it decides what happens to your bill as you grow.
Hiring office staff
A salary, plus payroll taxes, benefits, and the cost of turnover when they leave. What you get is a person who does far more than answer the phone, which is exactly why this comparison gets misused — a good office manager is not replaceable by software. But if the main reason you are hiring is that calls keep getting missed, you are paying for a full-time role to cover roughly forty hours of ring time, while the phone keeps ringing at seven in the evening and on Saturdays.
Human answering services
Usually billed per minute or per call. Your costs scale directly with volume, which means your busiest months produce your biggest bills — and busy months are exactly when you can least afford a surprise. The bigger limitation is what most of these services do: take a message and pass it along. The caller still waits for a callback, and after-hours callers often book with whoever answers first.
AI receptionists
Typically either a monthly subscription with limits on calls or minutes, or a custom build scoped and priced as a project. The economics differ from the first two in one important way: the bill does not climb with every extra minute of talk time, and coverage runs around the clock instead of stopping at five.
What drives the price up or down?
Whatever the pricing model, four things move it more than anything else. These are the questions to ask on any sales call:
- Call volume. Most subscriptions cap calls or minutes and charge overage past the cap. Find the cap before you find the price.
- Voice versus text. Answering live phone calls costs more to run than handling text messages, so voice-capable plans price higher than text-only ones.
- Integrations. A receptionist that only takes messages is cheap. One that reads your real calendar, books actual jobs, and writes to your CRM costs more — because that connection work is where the value actually lives.
- Customization. Generic scripts are included in everything. Teaching a system your service area, your pricing questions, which calls count as emergencies, and when to hand off to a human takes setup work, and setup work gets paid for somewhere — either in the price or in your own evenings.
What are the hidden costs nobody puts on the pricing page?
Comparing monthly prices misses most of the picture. Four costs tend to surprise people.
- Missed-call revenue. This is the cost of doing nothing, and for most trade businesses it is the largest number in the whole comparison. A single missed emergency call can be worth more than a month of any option here. Whatever you decide, this belongs in the math.
- Per-seat pricing creep. Some tools price per user or per technician. The quote looks fine today, and then every hire quietly raises your software bill. Read the pricing model, not just the starting number.
- Long contracts. Annual agreements are common, and some carry cancellation fees. If the tool turns out to be a bad fit in month two, you find that out with ten months left on the bill.
- Onboarding time. Self-serve tools push setup onto you: recording greetings, writing scripts, connecting calendars, correcting the mistakes it makes in week one. Your hours are not free, and unfinished setup is the most common reason these tools quietly get abandoned.
How does TradeBaseAI price it?
We do not publish a price, for the reason at the top of this page: we do not sell a one-size product. Every build is scoped from an audit of your actual business, so the price is unique to what you actually need.
That is not the same as hiding the number. The process is built so you see your price before you commit to anything:
- It starts with a free discovery call — a straight 20-minute conversation about how your business runs. If there is nothing worth building, we say so, and that is the end of it.
- Next is a paid AI audit, with its price agreed up front before you commit. The audit maps where you are losing work and what fixing it is worth.
- The build is priced from the audit, before anything gets built. No surprise line items.
- There is no per-tech pricing. Growing your crew does not grow your bill.
- Everything runs month to month. We earn the work every month.
- You own the system we build. It is yours, not a rental.
If you want to feel what the receptionist side is like before talking to anyone, text Donna, our demo assistant, at (833) 309-7019. She books jobs the same way yours would.
What should I actually do?
Before you buy anything from anyone, run one comparison: what missed calls are already costing you, against what the coverage would cost.
Pull your phone records for the last thirty days. Count the calls that went unanswered or hit voicemail, especially after hours. Estimate how many were real jobs rather than spam, and multiply by your average ticket. That is your monthly missed-call number, and it is the only figure in this whole decision that is genuinely yours.
Then get real quotes for your specific situation and put them next to it. If you are missing a handful of real jobs a month, almost any competent coverage pays for itself, and the question becomes which bill you would rather carry: a salary, a per-minute meter, or a system built to fit. If your missed-call number is genuinely small, you may not need any of this yet — and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling, not advising.