Answering service pricing, compared plan by plan.

It depends on the billing shape and on whether a human or an AI answers. In the table above, published human-answered plans start at $44 a month and run past $10,000 a month at the highest published volume tier; published AI-answered plans start at $0 (Smith.ai’s Free tier) and run to about $650 a month at the highest published tier. Most published human-answered plans sized for a single location land between $150 and $800 a month.

The same published plans in the table above apply, whether the vendor calls itself a virtual receptionist or an answering service. Human-answered plans run $44 to five figures a month depending on volume; AI-answered plans run free to about $650 a month.

Check three things before the sticker price: whether the bundle is measured in minutes or calls, what the overage rate is once the bundle runs out, and whether the plan bills per receptionist minute or per unique customer. Callable skips the bundle model and itemizes every call by layer instead, at the rate under Callable’s own receipt below.

None of the vendors in the table above publish a separate rate for medical practices. A medical office generally buys the same tiered plan a general answering service sells, sized to its call volume. See /answering-service/medical-practices for how Callable handles a medical practice’s calls.

Most published phone-answering-service plans in the table above run $150 to $800 a month for a single location, more at high call volume. Pay-as-you-go plans with no bundle start around $44 to $49 a month plus a per-minute rate.

None of the vendors in the table above publish a separate after-hours rate. The published monthly price already covers whatever hours the vendor answers. See /answering-service/after-hours for how Callable handles calls after you close.

The published plans in the table above price by the month or by a bundle of minutes and calls, not by time of day. A plan that answers around the clock costs the same whether the call lands at 2pm or 2am; check the vendor’s own page for which tier includes that coverage.

Averaging across the 58 published plans above: pay-as-you-go tiers start around $44 to $49 a month plus a per-minute rate, most single-location plans land between $150 and $800 a month, and high-volume plans run into the thousands.

Every price above was read directly from the vendor’s own public pricing page on 2026-09-24, or a text-proxy fetch of that page where the vendor’s site blocks automated readers. See the methodology note above for the vendors we couldn’t verify and left out rather than estimate.

No. Callable has no published monthly plan. You pay for usage, itemized by layer at the rate under Callable’s own receipt below, about $0.062 a minute on the default stack. New accounts start with $5 of free credit, no card required.