PAYG or Monthly: What an AI Receptionist Really Costs

The three numbers

Calls per week. Count the inbound calls you would want answered when you cannot pick up. Not every call your business gets, just the ones that currently go to voicemail, ring out, or get answered badly from a ladder. For most sole traders that is somewhere between five and twenty a week.

Minutes per call. A receptionist call that takes a message or books a job runs two to four minutes. Use three. Calls where someone asks a quick question and hangs up are shorter; calls where a caller spells an address and an email are longer. Three is a fair average across a real week.

Weeks per month. 4.3, not 4. A month is longer than four weeks, and the missing 0.3 adds up over a year.

The Pay As You Go calculation

Pay As You Go on AnswR is 75 cents a minute as calls come in, with no monthly fee. So the estimate is calls per week × 3 minutes × 4.3 weeks × $0.75.

On day one you pay $44 at checkout. That is a $19 one-off setup charge plus $25 of call credit, and the $25 is yours to spend at the per-minute rate. The balance is prepaid, so it is also your spending cap: top-ups are $25 at a time and automatic top-up can be turned off. An Australian or New Zealand number is included; there is no separate number rental.

Pay As You Go runs for a three-month term. After that you move to a monthly plan, which is the right time to do the sum again with three months of real numbers instead of estimates.

Where a monthly plan takes over

The Starter plan is $99 a month for 200 minutes, with extra minutes at 60 cents. $99 divided by $0.75 is 132 minutes. So if your estimate lands above about 130 minutes a month, which is roughly ten calls a week, Starter is already cheaper than Pay As You Go, and you get 200 minutes of headroom for the same money.

Professional is $199 for 500 minutes (50 cents over) and Business is $399 for 1,500 minutes (40 cents over). The per-minute cost falls as you go up: 49.5 cents on Starter if you use it all, 40 cents on Professional, 27 cents on Business. Unused minutes do not roll over, so pick the plan your real usage fills rather than the one that sounds safe.

Monthly plans are month to month, cancelled from the dashboard, and come with a 7-day free trial. Pay As You Go has no trial, because the $25 credit is the trial: you are paying for calls, not for the month.

The cost that is not on our bill

Most businesses keep their existing number and divert it to the AnswR number. That diversion leg is carried by your own phone provider and billed by them, not by us. On most business mobile plans it is included; on landlines it can be a few cents a minute. Check your plan before you set up a hard divert for every call. A conditional divert, which rings your phone first and only forwards when you do not answer, keeps that cost to the calls you actually missed.

Two ways to bring minutes down

A greeting that sorts the call. "Are you after a quote, or is it about an existing job?" gets the caller to the right questions in the first ten seconds. A generic "how can I help" adds half a minute of back-and-forth to every call.

Message-only mode where it fits. If your website already prices and books jobs, the receptionist does not need to run a booking conversation. Taking the details and texting you a summary is a shorter call and, for many trades, a better outcome. We wrote about when that makes sense in When your AI receptionist should take details, not quote prices.

The short version

Under about ten calls a week, start on Pay As You Go: $44 on day one and roughly $50 to $100 a month after that. Above ten calls a week, start on Starter at $99 and move up only when you see the minutes. Either way you can see every call, its length and what it cost in the dashboard, so the second month's decision is made on real numbers. Current rates are on the pricing page.