What does an AI receptionist cost for a small contractor?
Ours is $500 to set up and $300 a month, with a 6-month minimum, billed monthly. Across the market you will see anything from $30 a month for self-serve software to $1,500 for a managed build.
The spread is real and it is mostly about who does the work. At the bottom are self-serve widgets: you paste a script, you write the answers, you maintain them, and the price reflects that you are the one doing it. At the top are agencies building a bespoke system, usually with a setup fee in the thousands.
We sit in the middle deliberately: $500 to set up and $300 a month. The setup covers reading your site, writing the answers it does not cover, and testing it against the questions you actually get. The monthly covers the part nobody mentions — an assistant left alone gets worse, because your business changes and its answers do not.
The comparison that matters is not against other software. It is against what you already pay for the same job. A live answering service runs $1 to $2 a minute, and a receptionist is a salary. Against either, the question is not whether this is cheap but whether it catches enough of what you are currently missing.
For most small trades businesses one extra job a year covers the whole year. Whether you get that extra job depends on your traffic, and if we think your site is too quiet for this to pay we will tell you so rather than sell it to you.