How much does an AI receptionist cost?

Published 27 September 2026 · Michael Lee

Anything from about $49 a month to several hundred, plus a setup fee, depending on who sets it up and what it is connected to. The software is the cheap part. What you are really paying for is everything around it: your number, your calendar, the rules for urgent calls, and someone noticing when it stops working.

The three ways to buy one

Option	Typical price	What you do yourself
An app	From about $49 a month	Forward your number, type in your information, connect your calendar if it supports yours, and decide what happens to urgent calls.
An agency reselling a platform	Published price guides put plans at roughly $300 to $1,000 a month, plus a setup fee of $500 to $2,500	Usually less, but many resell one platform and fit your business to it.
Set up and managed for you	Quoted per business	Tell them how your calls should be handled. They connect it, write the rules and check it each month.

What drives the price

Minutes. Most platforms charge by the minute on top of a monthly fee, so a busy line costs more to run than a quiet one.
What it books into. Answering questions is simple. Booking into a real calendar, CRM or job system means connecting to it, and some systems make that easier than others.
The rules. Who gets an urgent call at 2am, what happens if they don't answer, and what the receptionist says after hours all have to be decided and written down.
Texting. In the US, a business that texts customers from a local number has to register with the carriers first, or texts such as missed-call replies can be blocked.
Looking after it. Hours change, prices change and services change. Someone has to update what the receptionist knows, or it starts giving out old answers.

When a $49 app is enough

If you mainly need the phone answered and a message taken, you are happy to set it up yourself, and nothing needs booking into another system, an app on its own may be all you need. It is worth trying one before paying anyone to set anything up.

It stops being enough when calls need to turn into bookings in the system you already run, when some calls must reach a person at any hour, or when nobody has the time to check that it is still answering the way it should.

How to tell whether it pays for itself

Start from your own calls rather than an industry average. Two weeks of your call log shows how many calls come in, how many are missed and when. Then the arithmetic is short:

missed calls a month × share that would have booked × average job value

As an example, not a client's figures: a business that misses 20 calls a month, where a third of those callers would have booked a $300 job, is leaving about $2,000 a month on voicemail. Compare that with the monthly cost of whichever option you are considering.

How Kodura prices it

Kodura's receptionist is $1,500 to set up and $995 a month, which includes 1,000 AI call minutes, monitoring and a monthly health check. Minutes over that are $0.35 each, paying for a year up front gets two months free, and more complex setups can cost more. The pricing page has an estimator. If an app on its own would do the job, we will say so.