Answering service cost calculator: compare per-minute, per-call and in-house

How to use the calculator

1. Your calls. How many calls you get in a month and how long an average call lasts. If you don’t know the length, keep the example of 2.5 minutes.
2. The service you’re comparing. Its monthly fee, the minutes (or calls) included and the price of each extra one. The fields start with example values; replace them with the numbers on your bill or on the quote you have.
3. A receptionist on payroll. Hours per week, hourly wage and the cost of benefits and payroll taxes on top of the wage.

The AIReceptionistGo column fills in by itself: it picks whichever of our plans costs least for your number of calls.

What the example values are based on

The example values for a per-minute service come from the published pricing pages of US live answering services, checked in October 2026: the middle value of seven 100-minute plans and of the four extra-minute prices those plans publish. They’re a starting point, not anyone’s quote. Your own bill is always the better number.

For a receptionist on payroll, the example wage is the median hourly wage for receptionists from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics ($18.27 in May 2025). Benefits and payroll taxes add about 43% on top of wages for private-industry workers, according to the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (June 2026). That figure doesn’t include hiring, training or covering vacations and sick days.

Why answering service cost is hard to compare

Answering services don’t all charge for the same thing, and the unit changes the total more than the headline price does.

• Per minute versus per call. A per minute answering service charges more for long calls. A per-call price stays the same however long the caller talks.
• Rounding. Many per-minute services round every call up to the next full minute, so a 2-minute-10-second call is billed as 3. The calculator adds half a minute per call on average when rounding is switched on. Switch it off if your service bills by the second. If your average call length comes from a per-minute bill, it’s already rounded: switch it off too.
• Minimums and unused minutes. A plan with 100 minutes costs the same whether you use 100 or 20. If you use fewer, each minute you used cost more than the plan suggests.
• Extras. Some services charge separately for booking appointments, Spanish-speaking callers, transfers or holiday hours. Add them to the monthly fee if they apply to you.

AIReceptionistGo charges per answered call, never per minute. A long call costs the same as a short one, and appointments, transfers, English and Spanish, recording, transcripts and summaries are included on every plan.

Answering service cost per month: what changes the total

Three numbers drive almost every result:

• Call length. Short calls favor per-minute billing; long calls, intake questions and appointment booking favor per-call pricing.
• Volume. At very low volumes, a plan with no monthly fee usually wins. As volume grows, a plan with calls included lowers the cost of each call.
• Hours covered. A receptionist working 40 hours covers 40 of the 168 hours in a week. Calls at night, at lunch or on weekends go to voicemail unless someone else covers them.

Change one at a time and watch the result. If a per-minute service or a receptionist comes out cheaper for your numbers, the calculator says so.

Our plans, in one paragraph

On Pay As You Go there’s no monthly fee: you pay $0.99 per answered call. The 50-Call Plan is $29 a month with 50 calls included and $0.69 per extra call. The 100-Call Plan is $49 a month with 100 calls included and $0.49 per extra call. Every plan answers 24/7 in English and Spanish. The full breakdown is on pricing.

What the number doesn’t show

Price is only half of the comparison. The other half is what happens on the call. Our AI receptionist follows a call protocol built for your industry: it asks what matters, knows when to transfer the call to you and never promises what you haven’t approved. Our call protocols come from nearly two decades of running phone reception for small businesses. You can read the method behind them, see how it works, or hear a sample call before you decide.

Want to know what unanswered calls cost you instead? Try the missed call calculator. If you’d like the side-by-side argument rather than a calculator, AI receptionist vs. answering service covers it.