Every small business owner Googles "AI receptionist pricing" and finds two things: vague "starting at" numbers with no breakdown, and enterprise quotes that assume you have a call center. This post is neither. We run an AI receptionist on our own firm's phone line, we sell the same system to other businesses, and we are going to show you the actual math.
The baseline: what a part-time human costs
Before we talk about AI, here is what you are comparing it against. A part-time human receptionist working 20 hours a week at $15-20 an hour runs you $1,200-1,600 a month in wages alone. Add payroll taxes, workers' comp, and benefits and you are at $1,500-2,000. Most owners we talk to put the real all-in number between $2,000 and $3,000 a month once you account for training, turnover, sick days, and coverage gaps when that person is not at their desk.
That is for 20 hours a week. Your phone rings the other 148 hours, and 80% of callers who reach voicemail hang up without leaving a message. They don't call back later - they call the next business on Google.
What an AI receptionist actually costs
Our AI Front Desk packages are published and flat-rate. Here is the breakdown:
AI Front Desk Starter: $497 setup + $297/month. Answers every call 24/7, captures the caller's name, number and reason, texts you every lead instantly, and answers your business FAQs. This covers the most common need: no call goes unanswered and no lead disappears.
AI Front Desk Pro: $997 setup + $497/month. Everything in Starter, plus booking straight onto your calendar, call routing and live transfer, a custom knowledge base, and English/Spanish. For businesses where the conversation needs to do more than take a message.
AI Front Desk Premium: $1,500 setup + $797/month. Everything in Pro, plus outbound follow-up and reminders, lead-nurture texting, and monthly tuning and reporting. For businesses that want the AI chasing leads, not just catching them.
Setup is one-time and the monthly fee is flat, with call usage passed through at cost. No long-term contract, and no "contact us for enterprise pricing" wall.
The math, side by side
Take the Starter package, which is what most service businesses need. You pay $497 once and $297 a month. In the first year that is $497 + ($297 x 12) = $4,061 total. A part-time receptionist at the low end of the range ($2,000/month) costs $24,000 a year.
That is not the whole picture, though, because the AI receptionist also works 168 hours a week, not 20. It answers at 2am on a Saturday. It does not take vacation. It does not quit and leave you retraining someone six weeks later. And every missed call triggers an automatic text-back, so the leads that used to vanish into voicemail are now captured conversations.
The 14-day pilot: test before you commit
Every package starts as a 14-day pilot for $497. We build the AI agent, wire it to your real phone line, and let it run for two weeks. You hear actual calls and watch actual bookings come in. If it works, the $497 is credited toward your package. If it does not, you walk away having spent less than the cost of one job.
This is the part most AI vendors skip. They want a 12-month contract before you hear the product. We let you hear it first because we did the same thing - we built the AI for our own firm, ran it on our own phones, and only started selling it after it was booking our clients.
What you actually get for the money
This is not a chatbot that pretends to answer questions. The AI receptionist:
- Answers every inbound call in a natural voice and holds a real conversation
- Qualifies the caller: name, what they need, how urgent
- Books the appointment from your live calendar inside the call
- Triggers missed-call text-back automatically when you can't pick up
- Logs every interaction so you have a record, not a sticky note
On the Pro and Premium tiers, it does all of that bilingually - English and Spanish on the same line, no separate number.
The honest caveat
An AI receptionist is not a human. It does not sit in your office, sort your mail, or make small talk about the weather. If you need someone physically present for walk-ins, you still need a person. What the AI handles is the phone - the part that rings at dinner, goes to voicemail on weekends, and costs you customers you never knew you had.
Try it before you read another pricing page
Stop comparing dashboards and feature lists. Call our AI line right now and have a real conversation with the same system we install for our clients. It will answer, ask about your business, and try to book you in.
Or see full pricing and learn more about our voice AI. Every package starts with a 14-day pilot, and the setup fee is credited toward your plan if you keep it.
All State AI Solutions builds AI voice agents, websites, custom dashboards, and business automation - and runs its own firm on the same stack it sells. Based in Los Angeles, working everywhere.
All State AI Solutions builds AI voice agents, websites, custom dashboards, and business automation - and runs its own firm on the same stack it sells. Based in Los Angeles, working everywhere.