Is an AI receptionist cheaper than hiring a receptionist?

Yes, for answering phones, and by a wide margin. A full-time receptionist paid the national median wage costs about $38,000 a year before benefits, and our Starter plan is $99 a month. But a person does a lot more than answer calls, so the real question is how much of that job is the phone.

We sell an AI receptionist, so read our numbers with that in mind. They're all here so you can redo them with your own.

What does a receptionist cost once you add everything up?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median receptionist wage at $18.27 an hour as of May 2025. Multiply by 40 hours and 52 weeks and you get about $38,000 a year in pay. Your area may run higher or lower.

Pay isn't the whole cost of an employee. For private-industry office and administrative workers, BLS counted $25.22 an hour in wages and $11.51 in benefits in June 2026, so about 46 cents of benefits for each dollar of pay. Add that to the receptionist figure and you're near $55,000 a year. That's a rough estimate of ours, not a BLS number, and a small shop with thinner benefits will land lower.

Part time is the option most small businesses really weigh. Twenty hours a week at that same wage is about $1583 a month before payroll taxes, for coverage of 20 of the 168 hours in a week. Hiring has its own time cost as well: writing the ad, the interviews, the training, and finding cover when someone's out sick.

What would an AI receptionist cost for the same calls?

It depends on minutes, so here are two made-up shops, each with calls averaging three minutes. A quiet shop with 60 calls a month uses 180 minutes, which fits inside Starter at $99.

A busy front desk with 20 calls a day over 22 working days uses 1320 minutes. On Growth that's $249 plus $142.50 for the minutes past 750, or $391.50, once you've raised the limit on extras above the standard $25. Scale is $499 for 2,000 minutes, if you'd rather have room to spare. So the honest comparison isn't always $99. It's still a fraction of a paycheck.

What can a person do that an AI receptionist can't?

There's also the part that doesn't fit in a table. Someone who's been at your desk for six years knows Mrs. Alvarez hates mornings and that the Tuesday delivery always runs late. Software knows what you wrote down. You can write down a lot, and it won't guess at what it doesn't know, but that isn't the same thing as six years. On the other hand, if the desk sits empty most of the day, or the same questions come in over and over, the phone is the easy part to hand off.

When should you hire a person anyway?

Hire if people walk through your door and need to be greeted. The same goes when the role is mostly admin with some phone on the side, or your calls run long and need someone's judgment. A busy auto repair shop with a counter may be better off with a person there at the counter, however good the software on the line.

Plenty of owners don't need to pick. Keep the person you have, and forward calls only when the line is busy or only after hours. They stop juggling a ringing phone and a customer standing in front of them, and nights stop going to voicemail. Our comparison of an answering service vs. an AI receptionist covers the other choice you may be weighing.

Know the limits of the cheap plan before you decide, too. Starter takes booking requests for you to confirm and has no live transfer. Google Calendar booking and live transfer start on Growth. Texting customers isn't available yet on any plan, and a person with a phone can obviously do that today.

Questions owners ask about AI vs. hiring

Try the tally first

Before you write a job ad, count the calls at your desk for a week and note how long they take. Then call Ava at (856) 595-0295 and judge the voice yourself. If the phone is most of what you need, try it with 30 free minutes and no credit card.