How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost?

Most vendors publish a monthly figure and leave the per-minute economics vague, which makes comparison hard. Here is what actually drives the number.

The three pricing models

Flat monthly. A fixed fee for a call or minute allowance, then overage. Easiest to budget, and usually the best value if your volume is steady. Watch the overage rate — it is often several times the included rate.

Per minute. You pay for talk time only, typically $0.08–$0.20 per minute. Honest and scales with use, but a busy month costs more exactly when you're busiest.

Per resolved call. You pay when the AI completes a task. Aligned with outcomes in principle, but check the definition of "resolved" carefully. If a transfer to your staff counts as resolved, the incentive is backwards.

For a typical single-site dental practice at 1,000–1,500 inbound calls a month averaging around 2 minutes, expect $200–$600 a month. Multi-site or high-volume specialist practices run $600–$2,000.

Where the per-minute cost comes from

Useful to understand, because it tells you which vendor claims are plausible. Every minute of conversation stacks four costs:

• Speech to text — roughly $0.01–0.02/min
• The language model — $0.01–0.05/min, depending on model and how much context it re-reads each turn
• Text to speech — $0.02–0.08/min, the widest variable; natural-sounding voices cost meaningfully more than robotic ones
• Telephony — $0.01–0.02/min

That floor is around $0.05–0.13 per minute in raw cost. Any vendor priced near or below that is either using the cheapest available voice, subsidising with venture funding, or counting on you not calling much. All three are worth knowing about.

Fees that don't appear on the pricing page

Ask about each of these explicitly:

• Setup and onboarding. $0–$2,500. Often waived if you ask.
• Integration with your practice management system. Sometimes the largest line item, and sometimes not offered at all for your specific software. Confirm your system by name before signing.
• Per-number fees. Each phone number carries a small monthly cost.
• Outbound calls. Reminders and waitlist callbacks are frequently billed separately from inbound.
• Overage rate. The number that decides whether a cheap plan stays cheap.
• Minimum contract. Annual lock-ins are common. Push for monthly until you've seen it work.

Compared with the alternatives

A part-time receptionist at 20 hours a week runs $1,400–$2,200 a month fully loaded, and covers 20 of the 168 hours in a week. No evenings, no weekends, no simultaneous calls, plus holiday and sick cover.

An answering service costs $1.00–$2.50 per call, or $150–$400 monthly for modest volume. Cheap until volume rises, and in most cases you get a message rather than a booking.

An AI receptionist at $200–$600 covers all 168 hours with unlimited concurrency. It is worse than a person at anything sensitive and should hand those calls over.

The honest comparison isn't AI versus your receptionist. It's AI versus your voicemail — because voicemail is what is currently handling the calls nobody answers, and it converts at under 20%.

Judging the return

You don't need precision. From the cost of missed calls, a practice recovering even a handful of new patients a month from previously-missed calls is looking at several thousand in lifetime value against a few hundred in cost.

The threshold question is simpler than an ROI model: how many new patients per month does this need to recover to pay for itself? At $400/month and $1,200 lifetime value, the answer is one every three months. If you're missing 300 calls a month, that is not a demanding bar.

Which is why the number to interrogate isn't the price. It's whether the thing actually books appointments correctly — because a cheap system that mis-books is more expensive than an expensive one that doesn't.

Before you commit

• Get the overage rate in writing.
• Confirm your practice management software by name.
• Insist on monthly billing for the first three months.
• Make one test call and check what it wrote into the calendar.

That last step disqualifies more vendors than price ever will. You can try ours in the browser — no phone number, no sign-up.