AI receptionist
How much does an AI receptionist cost in the UK, and when is one not worth it?
Two numbers, whichever way you buy it. Run an off-the-shelf app yourself and the subscription is typically £30 to £60 a month at the basic end, £99 to £299 for something a real business can lean on, and up to £500 where call volume is high, with the setup left to you. Have it designed and run for you, which is how we do it, and it is a one-off setup from £999 and then a managed service at £250 a month covering the platform, the phone line, a usage allowance and the ongoing changes.
The break-even sum is short. On the garage figures below, a missed call is worth about £66, so £250 a month is covered by about four missed calls, before the £999 setup. Miss fewer than that and you should fix your phone cover instead.
Why the price comes in two parts
Almost every article on this subject quotes one number, and that is the first sign it was written by somebody selling a product. An AI receptionist is a piece of software plus the work of making it fit your business and keeping it fitting, and those are two different costs.
The running cost is the platform: the voice, the phone line and the minutes. Pricing is usually per minute or per seat, and the two behave very differently in a busy month. Per minute is honest and occasionally alarming. Per seat is predictable and wasteful when you are quiet. Run it yourself and that bill is yours to watch. Have it managed and it sits inside one monthly fee, with a usage allowance agreed in writing, so a busy week does not turn into a surprise invoice.
The setup is the part people underestimate. A vendor demo answers a call. A working receptionist knows which questions qualify a job, what to say when it cannot help, when to take a booking and when to take a message, where that message lands, and what happens at 6pm on a Friday. That is a configuration job of a day or two, and it is where the value is.
What the setup fee actually buys
From £999 depending on complexity, the work is: designing the call flow around your actual calls rather than a feature list, writing and testing it, connecting it to the calendar and the customer records you already use, deciding the escalation rules, and writing all of it down so the call design stays yours whoever runs it.
The lower end is a single-location business with one service and a simple diary. The upper end is multiple locations, several services with different qualifying questions, or an integration into a system that was not designed to be integrated with.
What the monthly fee buys
The £250 a month is what stops it quietly getting worse. The platforms underneath change their voices, prices and models, callers find the question nobody planned for, and your hours and services change too. The fee covers the platform and the line, the usage allowance, monitoring, a monthly look at real calls, and the changes that come out of it.
The maths that decides it
Work out what a missed call is worth, then how many you miss. Most businesses have never done this and are shocked by both halves.
Take your average job value and your conversion rate from enquiry to job. A garage at £220 a job converting one in two is £110 of expected value per genuine enquiry. Twenty missed calls a month, of which perhaps twelve were real enquiries, is £1,320 of expected value walking to whoever answered. Against £250 a month and a one-off £999, that pays for itself inside the first quarter and then keeps paying.
Run the same sum at four missed calls a month on a £40 job and it is obviously nonsense. That is the point of doing the sum.
Who should not buy one
If your calls are mostly existing customers with complicated, specific questions, an AI receptionist will annoy them and you will turn it off within a month. If your work is emotionally sensitive, a machine answering first is a bad first impression whatever it costs. If your volume is low enough that a diverted mobile and a decent voicemail would fix it, do that instead: it costs nothing and it works.
And if the real problem is that nobody chases the enquiries you already have, the phone is not your bottleneck. That is a follow-up problem, it is cheaper to fix, and it usually returns more.
What good looks like in practice
The test is not whether it sounds human. It is whether the message that reaches you is one you can act on without ringing the caller back to ask what they meant. Name, number, what they want, when they want it, and anything that disqualifies the job. If the handover is good, the technology behind it is irrelevant.
The second test is what it does when it is out of its depth. A good configuration fails to a human quickly and says so plainly. A bad one keeps trying, and the caller hangs up.
Where this sits alongside everything else
An AI receptionist answers the calls nobody could reach. It does not find you the callers in the first place, and it does not chase the quote afterwards. If you are buying all three, the order that returns fastest is usually follow-up, then search, then the phone, because the enquiries you already have are the cheapest ones to win. The systems audit, normally £495 and free for a limited time, is how we work out which comes first for a particular business.
The full setup detail and what is included sits on the AI receptionist page. If you would rather see roughly where you land before speaking to anyone, the seven-question scoping tool gives you a recommendation and a price range without asking who you are.
If your question is whether it is worth bothering with rather than what it costs, the short answer is here.
Questions we get asked about AI receptionists
How much does an AI receptionist cost per month in the UK?
Off-the-shelf subscriptions run roughly £30 to £60 a month at the basic end, £99 to £299 for a plan a real business can rely on, and up to about £500 where call volume is high, with the setup left to you. Ours is a managed service: from £999 to set up, then £250 a month including the platform, the phone line, a usage allowance and ongoing changes.
Is an AI receptionist worth it for a small business?
Only if missed calls are already costing more than it does. At about £66 a missed call (a £220 job, converting one enquiry in two, with three in five missed calls being real enquiries), £250 a month is covered by about four missed calls, before the £999 setup. Miss fewer than that and better phone cover or an automatic call-back is the cheaper fix.
Who owns what if it is managed for me?
Your phone number stays with your own phone provider and forwards to the receptionist when you choose. Your call recordings, transcripts and messages are yours, and are handed over in full if you leave. The platform account is ours, which is what lets us be responsible for it working, and the call design is written down so another provider could rebuild it without starting again.