How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost? Complete Small Business Pricing Guide

Why the cost of a missed call matters more than the cost of answering it

Every small business already pays for missed calls — it just never shows up on an invoice. Someone hits voicemail after hours, mid-shift, or while your one receptionist's at lunch, and most of them don't leave a message; they just call whoever picks up next. That's the real comparison behind a search like "AI receptionist cost": not $0 against some monthly fee, but the ongoing cost of calls nobody answers versus the cost of answering every one of them.

Before you start comparing prices, it's worth knowing exactly what you'd be paying for.

What is an AI receptionist?

An AI receptionist is software that answers your business calls the way a trained front-desk person would — greeting callers, answering the usual questions about your services, hours, and pricing, taking down a lead's name and number, handing off anything complicated to a person, and for appointment-based businesses, booking straight onto your real calendar. It's on 24/7, so a call at 11pm gets the same response as one at 11am.

Letconvo works exactly this way: set up your business details once, and every call after that gets answered using them — no staffing decision required per call.

How much does an AI receptionist cost?

There's no standard price tag in this category, so it helps to know what you're actually comparing. You'll run into flat monthly subscriptions that bundle a set number of minutes, pay-per-minute or pay-per-call rates with no base fee, usage tiers that scale with volume, setup or onboarding fees, charges for extra numbers or overflow calls, and premium add-ons like CRM syncing or custom voice cloning.

As a concrete example: Letconvo's Starter plan runs $120/month and includes 400 minutes of AI-answered calls, with anything past that billed at $0.09/minute — no setup fee, cancel or change anytime from the dashboard. Pricing climbs from there if you want calendar booking, CRM integration, or multi-location support.

AI receptionist vs. human receptionist cost

A single full-time receptionist usually runs well past $2,500–$3,500 a month once you factor in wages, payroll tax, and benefits — and that's still only one shift's coverage. An AI receptionist typically costs a fraction of that, with no second hire needed to cover evenings, weekends, lunch breaks, or sick days.

What should a small business look for in an AI receptionist?

Price alone won't tell you whether an AI receptionist will actually hold up on your calls. Worth checking first: does it hold a real conversation instead of reading off a script, does it book and reschedule actual appointments rather than just taking a message, can it hand a call to a person when it needs to, does it follow up by text after a missed or finished call, how fast can you train it on your specific services and FAQs, and do you get logs and analytics that show what's really happening on your line.

Setup time counts too — a system that takes weeks to configure defeats the point of fixing a problem you have today.

Is an AI receptionist worth it for a small business?

It tends to pay for itself fastest at businesses where a missed call means a missed booking, not just a missed chat — barbershops, salons, dental and medical offices, plumbers and HVAC crews, repair shops, real estate agents, restaurants juggling reservations, and other lead- or appointment-driven work. If most of your revenue hinges on someone actually picking up the phone, an AI receptionist usually costs a lot less than the bookings a voicemail greeting quietly loses you.

Try it free before you pay for it

A lot of people searching for AI receptionist pricing are really asking something simpler: can I try this for free before I pay for anything? Letconvo gives every new signup 15 minutes of free AI calling credit — no card, no commitment — so you can send it a handful of real calls and hear exactly how it handles them before picking a plan.

That's usually a faster way to answer "is this worth it" than reading yet another pricing page. A few real, answered calls will tell you more than any comparison chart.

Getting started

If missed calls are already costing you bookings, the quickest way to put a number on that is to claim your 15 free minutes, send Letconvo a few real calls, and compare what it catches against what used to disappear into voicemail.