How we compare AI phone answering
We list 9 AI phone answering services sold to US businesses, and a published rate card exists for 9 providers. Where a vendor will only give a figure on a call, we show that rather than inventing one.
The calculator takes two inputs, calls per month and average call length, because the second half of this market bills on minutes and minutes are the product of those two numbers. Ranking is arithmetic on the published rate at the volume and call length you enter. Commission never moves a provider, we do not sell position in the table, and the row at the top is whatever the arithmetic puts there.
Prices are what each vendor publishes to a US buyer, in US dollars. Clara, for example, records its currency basis as Yes, a genuine USD rate card on the vendor's US locale path, and Simple Phones as Yes, native USD, confirmed in the vendor's own live pricing feed, so there is no exchange rate sitting between the advertised figure and your card.
Pure software, or people behind it: two shapes of AI phone answering
Start with one row, because it decides which market you are shopping in.
Most of this table is software and nothing else. Rosie records human fallback as No, this is AI only, Goodcall as No and Clara as No. Others spell out what that means in practice. Dialzara: No vendor-supplied humans. Transfers reach your own team. Simple Phones: No vendor-supplied humans. Transfers reach your own team. LucroVox: No. Calls are transferred to your own team rather than to staff supplied by the vendor. My AI Front Desk records None published.
Smith.ai is the listing that breaks that pattern. Its human fallback row reads Yes, its own North America based receptionists through a Live Agent Network, as a per-call add-on, and its capability row reads AI scheduling, lead qualification, call routing, recording, transcription and native integrations, on every plan including the free one. That is a staffed answering service with AI in front of it, not an AI product with a support desk, and it is metered accordingly: its included allowance reads 25 live calls a month on the free plan. Pro and Enterprise publish no included-call count at all. The per-call charge is stated as $3.00 a call above the free plan's 25 calls. Pro is $2.00 a call and Enterprise $1.67 a call, and neither publishes an included-call count, so we cost them as the fee plus every call..
The practical difference is what happens on the call that matters. An AI-only service can take a message or ring your cell phone. A service with staff behind it can keep a caller talking while somebody works out who should handle them, which is why it is sold as a per-call service rather than a subscription with an allowance to spend.
Decide that before you compare price, because the two shapes are not competing for the same dollar. If your callers mostly want your hours, your address and a slot in the calendar, the software-only half of this table does that job and the staffed option is money you do not need to spend yet.
Why two businesses with the same call count get different AI phone answering bills
Vendors here have not agreed on what to count, and the disagreement is not cosmetic. It changes which one is cheap for you.
Metered on minutes. Dialzara includes 60 minutes (Business Lite), 220 (Pro), 500 (Plus), 1,000 (Elite). Live talk time only, tracked to the second with partial minutes not rounded up. Rosie includes 250 minutes (Professional), 1,000 (Scale), 2,000 (Growth), ai-receptionist.com includes 60 minutes (Essential and Starter), 200 (Solopreneur), 400 on the top tier, and My AI Front Desk includes 200 voice minutes a month on Business-in-a-Box, metered as 25 credits a minute.
Metered on calls. Simple Phones publishes Up to 100 calls a month (Basic), 500 (Advanced), 2,500 (Premium), and LucroVox publishes Up to 100 AI-handled calls a month (Starter), 500 (Pro), 2,000 (Enterprise). Length does not enter into it.
Metered on distinct callers. Goodcall counts 100 unique callers a month (Starter), 250 (Growth), 500 (Scale). Talk minutes are unlimited. Its overage line makes the trade explicit: $0.50 per unique customer above the plan allowance, on every plan. Talk minutes are never charged: "We DO NOT charge any fees for number of calls, call minutes, or tokens."
Not metered at all. Clara publishes None. The vendor publishes no allowance and states "We do not currently enforce fixed numeric caps". Consistent with that, its overage row reads None published. There is no allowance to exceed.
Now take two businesses that both field the same number of calls a month. One is a dental practice whose callers reschedule in under a minute. The other is a general contractor whose callers describe a job. On the call-metered and flat listings those two pay the same. On the minute-metered ones they do not, and the gap widens every month the contractor's calls run longer.
That is the mechanic to carry into the table: how long your calls run decides which meter is kind to you, and it is a fact about your business that no vendor's marketing page can tell you.
Your own phone records hold the number that decides your AI phone answering shortlist
Nobody knows their average call length off the top of their head, and guessing it is how people buy the wrong plan. You already have the data, in the call detail record on your carrier or VoIP account.
Export one full month. A month, not a week, because seasonality and one bad Monday will both distort a short sample.
Filter to the calls the robot would actually take. If you are buying this for after hours and overflow, your daytime calls answered by a person are not in scope, and including them will inflate your estimate.
Divide total answered duration by the number of answered calls. Unanswered and abandoned calls carry no talk time on most meters, so leaving them in the denominator understates your average. Dialzara is worth reading closely on this point, since its allowance is defined as 60 minutes (Business Lite), 220 (Pro), 500 (Plus), 1,000 (Elite). Live talk time only, tracked to the second with partial minutes not rounded up.
Count distinct phone numbers separately. If you are considering Goodcall, the number that matters is not how many calls arrived but how many different people made them. A business whose customers call three times about the same job is measured very differently from one where every call is a stranger.
Two numbers come out of that exercise: calls per month and average minutes per call. Put both into the calculator. If your average call length is close to a boundary, run it again a minute higher, because a minute of average call length applied across a month of calls is a real amount of money on the minute-metered half of the table.
Past the allowance: charge, upgrade or cutoff in AI phone answering
Every vendor has an answer for the month you go over, and the answers differ in kind rather than in price. This is the row people skip and then get surprised by.
A per-unit charge. Dialzara publishes $0.48 a minute (Business Lite), $0.45 (Pro), $0.40 (Plus), $0.35 (Elite). Live talk time only, tracked to the second, with partial minutes not rounded up. ai-receptionist.com publishes $0.25 a minute on every plan, sold as prepaid Booster Packs: "Add extra minutes to any plan with a Booster Pack. Only $0.25/minute, and they never expire." My AI Front Desk publishes $0.25 a voice minute, metered as 25 credits a minute at $0.01 a credit. Credits auto-reload at $10 per 1,000 and never expire, so calls are not cut off. Smith.ai charges per call rather than per minute, at $3.00 a call above the free plan's 25 calls. Pro is $2.00 a call and Enterprise $1.67 a call, and neither publishes an included-call count, so we cost them as the fee plus every call.
An automatic move to a bigger plan. Rosie states None. Past the allowance Rosie moves you up to the next plan at that plan's standard price, and above the top band it asks you to get in touch. Nothing is charged by the minute, but your subscription changes without you agreeing to it that month.
A stop. Simple Phones states None. Exceeding your tier's call count releases your phone numbers, which is a cutoff rather than a charge. That is the one to model carefully, because the failure mode is not a larger invoice, it is a phone that no longer answers.
Nothing published. LucroVox states Not published, anywhere, while the vendor's own terms say you will be billed one: "Usage above the included call/minute allowance is billed at the published overage rate." No such rate appears on either of LucroVox's sites, so a buyer cannot find out what exceeding their plan costs before they agree to pay it. Treat an unpublished rate as an open question to put to the vendor in writing before you sign, not as an absence of charges.
While you are in this part of the table, read the exit terms too. Trial lengths are not standardized: ai-receptionist.com offers Yes, 3 days, "cancel anytime", LucroVox offers Yes, 14 days, and 30 days on the top plan, and Smith.ai instead offers Yes, a free forever plan rather than a time-limited trial: "Not a trial. Real capability, every month, for free." Contract terms are mostly monthly: Goodcall lists Monthly, or an annual term at 15% off, My AI Front Desk lists Monthly, or an annual term at 20% off, and Simple Phones lists Monthly. The vendor's own pricing feed publishes no annual term.
Transfers, bookings and languages are tier gated in AI phone answering
The feature list on the marketing page is rarely the feature list on the plan you can afford. In this category the entry rung is where transfers and bookings most often go missing.
Reaching a person. Rosie's transfer row reads Yes, warm and live transfers on Scale and above, waterfall transfers on Growth. Not on Professional. Clara's reads Not on either purchasable plan. The only routing line on the pricing page, "Call routing to the right person", sits on the Teams tier, which the vendor marks "Coming Soon". Dialzara's reads Yes, blind transfers on every plan; warm transfers on Pro and above, ai-receptionist.com's reads Yes, to nominated transfer contacts: owner only on Essential, up to 20 on the top tier, and My AI Front Desk's reads Yes, but capped: transferring a call is an "Agent Action", and the plan allows 2 of each action (1 on the excluded cheaper plan). Goodcall treats it as the normal outcome: Yes, and it is the default: "your agent will transfer the call to your business line", or to a named person, department, message, self-service link or callback. Directory contacts are capped at 3 on Starter, 25 on Growth and 500 on Scale.
Putting something in the calendar. Rosie books on Yes, on Scale and above. Not on Professional. ai-receptionist.com states Yes, from Starter: "Google Calendar Integration, connect your Google Calendar for automated appointment scheduling". Not on Essential. Dialzara offers Calendar sync on Pro and above, Simple Phones offers Yes, on every plan, and Clara records Not published on any plan. Clara publishes its product as answering calls and taking messages.
Spanish. This decides whether the service can take a call at all in a lot of the country. Rosie handles English and Spanish on every call, Smith.ai English and Spanish, Dialzara Bilingual English and Spanish on Pro and above, and My AI Front Desk 20+ languages. Simple Phones publishes a broader list: English in US, British and Australian accents, among others. The tier buys 1, 5 or 20 languages.
Work out which of those three you cannot operate without, then check it against the rung your call volume puts you on rather than against the top of the vendor's page. A service that transfers on a plan you will not buy transfers nowhere.
Recording, consent and outbound calling: the US questions to ask about AI phone answering
An AI receptionist works by capturing what the caller said. Smith.ai names it in its capability row: AI scheduling, lead qualification, call routing, recording, transcription and native integrations, on every plan including the free one. Every product in this category does some version of the same thing, because the transcript is how the message reaches you.
That makes call recording consent a live question rather than a formality. Federal law and most states allow a call to be recorded with the consent of one party to it. A meaningful minority of states require the consent of every party, which is why so many businesses simply announce the recording at the start of the call and let the caller decide whether to continue. The complication for a phone line is that your callers are not necessarily in your state, and the stricter rule can be the one that follows the caller. Before you turn one of these on, confirm which rule applies where you operate and where your callers are, check what greeting the vendor can be configured to play, and take that question to your own attorney. We describe the mechanism; we are not in a position to advise you on it.
Answering an inbound call and starting an outbound one are also different regulatory propositions, and some of these products do both. Clara's capability row reads 24/7 answering, custom greetings and questions, and outbound calling on the base plan. Pro adds business-trained AI, automated text follow-ups and personal contact exclusion. My AI Front Desk's reads Answers calls from a knowledge base (2 pages on the excluded cheaper plan, 20 on Business-in-a-Box) and runs agent actions, SMS, chatbot and form-fill channels off the same credit meter. Outbound calls carry a hard cap of 20 a day. Where a service dials out or sends texts on your behalf, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the National Do Not Call Registry come into scope, and the consent you need for that is a good deal harder to establish than the consent involved in picking up a call somebody chose to make to you. If your intended use is follow-up rather than reception, treat that as its own compliance question and get advice on it.
Finally, the number itself. A callback from an unfamiliar area code often goes unanswered, so it matters where the line comes from. Goodcall states Yes, included, and you choose the area code. United States only: "Do you have local phone numbers outside the US? We're currently available in the US." Rosie states Yes, a Rosie number is included and you pick the area code, and Smith.ai states Yes, a dedicated number on every plan including the free one. Dialzara is the one to read line by line: Yes, but charged separately: $3/mo for a US or Canada local number, $5/mo for a US toll-free number. The plan card contradicts the FAQ by listing the number as included. ai-receptionist.com states Yes, in the United States and Canada only: "Currently, we provide phone numbers and service in the United States and Canada." LucroVox states Not stated either way. LucroVox describes forwarding calls from the number you already have ("No new number to advertise") rather than provisioning one, and its top tier references multi-number plans without saying whether it supplies the numbers.
The safest arrangement for most small businesses is to keep advertising the number your customers already know and forward it, so that a change of vendor never becomes a change of number on your trucks, your signage and your listings.