Best AI receptionist for small business: compare cost by calls, minutes and outcomes

Picture a plumber working under a sink when the phone rings. Stopping the job is awkward; letting the call go to voicemail may lose the next job. An AI receptionist sounds like the obvious fix—until four vendors quote four different units. One charges by caller, another by call, another by minute. The cheapest-looking plan can be the most expensive one for the way your customers actually phone.

Comparison: normalize the billing unit first

Service	Published entry point	Billing model to watch	Best starting fit
Goodcall	$79/month	Unique customers; unlimited minutes	Repeat callers and variable call length
Smith.ai	Free for 25 calls; Pro from $150/month	Calls	Firms that want predictable per-call math
Rosie	$49/month for 250 minutes	Minutes	Low-volume local businesses
My AI Front Desk	$99/month; $79 billed annually	Included voice minutes plus channel limits	Businesses wanting voice, chat, SMS and CRM together

These prices were read on 2 November 2026. Taxes, annual commitments and overages can change the total.

Goodcall: best when call length varies

Goodcall’s Starter plan lists 100 unique customers a month and unlimited minutes. That is useful when the same customer calls several times or conversations vary in length. The catch is retention and workflow depth: Starter lists seven days of call and customer details and one logic flow. Price the plan that supports the routing and record history you need, not just the number of calls.

Rosie: best low entry price

Rosie Professional lists 250 minutes for $49 a month, message-taking scenarios, appointment links by text and spam detection. Scale adds 1,000 minutes, custom FAQs, English and Spanish, routing and Zapier. Minute billing is easy to understand, but long conversations consume the allowance quickly.

Smith.ai: best for per-call planning

Smith.ai offers a free tier with 25 calls and Pro from $150 a month for 75 calls. Its documentation lists qualification, routing, scheduling, recordings, transcriptions and summaries. Per-call pricing makes a forecast straightforward: count last month’s answered calls, add seasonal headroom and compare the resulting total.

My AI Front Desk: best multichannel front office

My AI Front Desk lists voice, chat, SMS, CRM and automation in one plan, with 200 voice minutes at the published monthly entry point. That can reduce integrations, but it also means you should test more than calls. Verify chat handoff, SMS consent, CRM record creation and what happens after included usage runs out.

The test that separates a demo from a reliable receptionist

Run ten calls covering a new lead, existing customer, price question, appointment request, cancellation, wrong number, noisy caller, strong accent, urgent issue and a question outside the knowledge base. Score factual accuracy, correct next action and clean human handoff. Do not score voice realism alone.

Use last month’s call log to calculate each bill. Separate unique callers, total calls and total minutes. Then add overage and any integration cost. That single worksheet makes unlike plans comparable and is the angle most generic “best AI receptionist” lists miss.

What we would shortlist

For a small service business, we would put Goodcall and Rosie into the first trial because their billing models are easy to contrast. Smith.ai belongs in the test when per-call support and onboarding matter; My AI Front Desk earns its place when voice, chat and SMS genuinely need to live together.

Do not hand over the main number on day one. Forward a test line, read every transcript for a week and listen for the awkward moments: a caller changes the subject, asks for a person or describes something urgent. The best system is not the voice that sounds most human in a demo. It is the one that knows when to stop pretending and hand the call to a human.