10 Best AI Answering Services for Small Business in 2026 (Prices Compared)

Ten AI answering services are worth a small business owner's time in 2026. They range from a free plan to $300 a month, and the gap between them is less about whether the AI can talk (they all can) and more about minutes, what happens when you run out, whether a second caller gets a busy tone, and how far you get before the price jumps. We lined all ten up on the same questions and priced each one at 100, 350 and 1,000 minutes a month.

We make one of these services, so read the list with that in mind. We put ourselves first because our $14 plan is the cheapest paid plan on it and because our price per minute stays near the bottom at every volume we checked. Where another service does something better, we say so in the same words we use for ourselves. Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on October 6, 2026. We re-check monthly.

The ten at a glance

Reviews are the vendor's Trustpilot score on the day we read it. Zoom and RingCentral have thousands of reviews, but they rate the whole company, mostly the video and phone products, so we left the numbers out instead of attaching them to a receptionist nobody reviewed. We have four reviews, all five stars, which is a small number and we say so.

What you pay at 100, 350 and 1,000 minutes

Entry prices mislead. A $29 plan with 60 minutes and a $0.48 overage costs more than a $39 plan with 100 minutes once you pass about 80 minutes. The table below takes three typical volumes for a small business and picks the cheapest way to cover them on each service, overage included. Per-call plans are converted at three minutes a call, and plans that sell minutes in blocks are rounded up to the next block.

Phonely is free up to 100 minutes and nothing else comes close to that. Beside's $99 flat plan is the cheapest way to handle 1,000 minutes if you take a lot of calls and never want minutes counted. Our plans are the cheapest paid option at 100 minutes (Essential plus a booster) and within $25 of the cheapest at 350, which is why we put ourselves first. At 1,000 minutes Rosie's Scale plan beats our Business plan by $50 and Reception's Premium plan matches it, with the limits described in each entry below.

How we compared them

We read every pricing page ourselves on the date above and copied the numbers, not the marketing. Where a page did not state a limit, the table says "not published" instead of guessing. We ran Dialzara through a full trial in March and April 2026 with recorded test calls, and we obviously know our own product. For the other eight, the plan and feature claims come from the vendors' pricing pages and documentation, and we are working through their trials one a week through December. We update each entry when a trial finishes, and we bump the date at the top of this page only when something on it changes.

What we score every service on is the same list we use in our own plan comparison: price at 100, 350 and 1,000 minutes, what happens when you run out, how many callers it can take at once, whether it transfers to a person and how, calendar booking, languages, phone numbers outside the US, the trial terms, and third-party reviews. Voice quality is in the entries where we have heard it and left out where we have not.

The ten services

1. AI Receptionist (us)

We built AI Receptionist for one-person and small businesses that miss calls while they work. Four plans, all month to month, all with a 7-day free trial that does not ask for a card: Essential at $14 for 75 minutes, Starter at $39 for 100, Solopreneur at $99 for 350 and Business at $199 for 1,000. Those minute counts went up in October 2026, by as much as two and a half times, at the same prices. Run out and extra minutes are $0.25 each through a booster pack that never expires, which is about half what most of the services below charge. In the UK, plans start at £19.

Every plan, including Essential, answers 24/7 in 55+ languages, filters spam, books into Google Calendar, takes a message, transfers to a person with warm transfer and extension dialing, and sends text, audio and real-time transcripts. Every plan also includes Boss Mode, which lets you call your own receptionist to hear a briefing of the day's calls or change its instructions by voice. Essential takes two calls at the same time, Starter five, Solopreneur and Business ten. Starter adds a file and website knowledge base in 27 formats, post-call actions and personality settings. Business adds five team accounts, transfers to multiple numbers and SIP inbound with REFER for businesses on a VoIP system. Local numbers are available in the US, Canada and the UK, or you can forward your existing number.

• Where it wins: the price at 60 to 350 minutes, $0.25 overage, transfers and booking on the cheapest plan, numbers in three countries, and a founder who answers support email.
• Where it falls short: Essential runs on our smaller AI model, which is fine for messages and FAQs and a step behind our main model in long conversations. No Zapier or webhooks yet. Numbers are limited to the US, Canada and the UK. Four public reviews is not many.

Best for: anyone taking up to about 300 calls a month who wants transfers, booking and spam filtering without paying for a plan tier to get them.

2. Reception by ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs, the company behind the best-known AI voices, launched Reception in September 2026. Basic is $29 plus tax for 75 minutes, Plus is $79 for 275 and Premium is $199 for 1,000, with annual billing saving two months. Overage runs $0.45, $0.38 and $0.30 a minute by tier. Every plan books appointments on a hosted booking page, routes calls with up to 10 transfer rules, switches between 70+ languages mid-call, includes a web chat receptionist that draws from the same minute pool, and connects to Google Calendar, Calendly, Zapier and webhooks. You can clone a voice on every paid plan: one on Basic, three on Plus, five on Premium. The trial is 14 days with 30 minutes and no card, and it is labeled "Free" on the pricing page even though there is no free plan after it ends.

Basic takes one call at a time, so a second caller gets a busy signal; Plus takes three and Premium ten. The knowledge base is capped at three sources on Basic and seven on Premium, and it is built by scanning your website. Phone numbers are US area codes only; a non-US business has to bring its own Twilio or SIP number. ElevenLabs holds ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 and says plainly it is not HIPAA certified, which we respect, because neither are we.

• Where it wins: voice quality, cloned voices from the $29 plan, 70+ languages, Zapier and webhooks on every tier, and the Premium plan's 1,000 minutes for $199 with ten simultaneous calls.
• Where it falls short: one call at a time on Basic, a small knowledge base, US numbers only, $0.45 overage at the entry level, and no reviews anywhere yet.

Best for: US businesses that take one call at a time and care most about how the receptionist sounds.

3. Zoom Virtual Agent Receptionist

Zoom made its receptionist a standalone product in July 2026, so you no longer need Zoom Phone to use it. It costs $29.99 a month for 100 minutes, $24.99 billed annually, and more minutes come in 100-minute blocks, so there is no per-minute overage. It schedules, routes callers to a person, transcribes live and handles 10+ languages, and there is a free trial for new and existing customers. The block pricing is simple on paper and gets expensive at volume: 1,000 minutes is ten blocks, or about $300, more than any other service on this list except RingCentral and Smith.ai.

• Where it wins: works with any phone system, a big company behind it, $29.99 for 100 minutes is a fair entry price.
• Where it falls short: $0.30 a minute effective at every volume, 10+ languages is the fewest here, and the product pages do not state concurrency or knowledge base limits.

Best for: businesses that already run a phone system and want to bolt AI answering onto it without changing anything else.

4. RingCentral AI Receptionist

RingCentral's AI Receptionist (it calls it AIR) is $49 a month standalone or $39 for existing RingEX customers, with 100 minutes included. Overage is $0.50 a minute billed in half-minute steps, so a call of 1 minute 10 seconds costs 1 minute 30, and the trial is 14 days. It ranks first on Google for "ai receptionist" and it is a solid product if you are already on RingCentral. On its own it is the most expensive 100 minutes here apart from Smith.ai and has the highest per-minute overage, and RingCentral does not publish larger minute bundles on the product page, so our 350 and 1,000 minute figures assume the overage rate. An EU version is sold at €38 for 100 minutes.

• Where it wins: one bill with your phone system, international availability, and the name.
• Where it falls short: $0.50 overage in half-minute increments, no published path past 100 minutes, and the company's own review profile is dominated by billing and cancellation complaints for its other products.

Best for: existing RingCentral customers who want AI answering without adding a vendor.

5. Rosie

Rosie is built for home-service businesses and prices by the plan, not the minute: Professional is $49 for 250 minutes, Scale is $149 for 1,000 and Growth is $299 for 2,000, each with a 7-day trial and no card. If you go over, Rosie moves you up a tier instead of charging per minute, which makes Scale the cheapest 1,000 minutes on this list. The Professional plan texts callers a booking link instead of booking into your calendar, and live call transfer only starts at Scale. Languages are English and Spanish.

• Where it wins: 250 minutes for $49 and 1,000 for $149, a no-card trial, and a product shaped around plumbers, HVAC and the trades.
• Where it falls short: no live transfer or calendar booking until $149, two languages, US only, and no published overage rate.

Best for: a trades business with steady call volume that can wait on live transfer or pay $149 for it.

6. Phonely

Phonely is the only service here with a free plan that never ends: 100 minutes a month, a phone number, call transfer, a knowledge base built from your website, and unlimited simultaneous calls, for $0. The free plan has no transcripts, no analytics, no premium voices and community-only support, and when the 100 minutes run out it stops answering until you move to Starter at $50 for 250 minutes ($33 billed annually), with overage at $0.25 a minute on monthly billing. Pro is $150 for 750 minutes and adds AI text messaging, CRM and API integrations and SIP. Phonely is a Y Combinator company that raised a $22 million Series A in 2026, so it is not going anywhere soon.

• Where it wins: free is free, unlimited simultaneous calls on every plan, and a $0.25 overage from Starter.
• Where it falls short: no transcripts on the free plan, which means you cannot read what callers said, and the free plan stopping mid-month is a real risk for a business that depends on the phone.

Best for: trying an AI receptionist on real calls before paying anyone, and businesses under 100 minutes that can live without transcripts.

7. Beside

Beside sells a flat price instead of minutes. Baseline is $29 a month for 30 AI-answered calls and starts billing immediately with no trial; Unlimited is $99 a month with no cap on calls and a 7-day trial that requires a card. Both include one phone line, team access for up to 20 seats, booking, lead qualification, transfer, transcripts, voice cloning, a website knowledge import and HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho and Zapier integrations. Extra lines are $4.99 a month. The AI handles English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Web plans are for US iPhone customers; Android and Canadian customers get a separate per-seat plan at $29.99 a month or $199.99 a year. Beside raised $32 million in late 2025 and is building a wider small-business toolkit around the phone product.

• Where it wins: $99 for unlimited calls is the cheapest high-volume option on the list, and every feature is on every plan.
• Where it falls short: 30 calls on Baseline is about an hour and a half of talk time, there is no trial on it, the Unlimited trial needs a card, and the four reviews on Trustpilot split evenly between five stars and one star over billing.

Best for: owners who want one flat number and never want to think about minutes.

8. Upfirst

Upfirst prices per call. Starter is $24.95 for 30 calls and $1.50 a call after that, Premium is $59.95 for 90 calls at $1 over, Pro is $159.95 for 300 at $0.75 over and Scale is $299 for 600 at $0.70, with 20 percent off for annual billing. Every plan includes transfers, call screening, spam blocking, scheduling into Google, Outlook, Calendly and Acuity, texting during a call, 35+ languages and a long list of CRM integrations. The trial is 14 days with no card. Per-call pricing is kind to businesses with long calls and unkind to those with many short ones: a 30-second wrong number costs the same as a 10-minute quote.

• Where it wins: 35+ languages, booking and screening on the entry plan, and long calls cost nothing extra.
• Where it falls short: $1.50 a call overage on Starter, no published concurrency or non-US numbers, and no reviews yet.

Best for: a business with a handful of long calls a week that wants booking included at the entry price.

9. Dialzara

Dialzara has been selling AI answering longer than most of this list and its prices have not moved in a year: Business Lite is $29 for 60 minutes with $0.48 a minute overage, Pro is $99 for 220 at $0.45, Plus is $199 for 500 at $0.40 and Elite is $349 for 1,000 at $0.35, each with a 7-day trial. An AI SMS agent comes free with any voice plan ($19 a month plus five cents a message on its own) and a website chatbot is $39 standalone or bundled for the first 100 sessions. We ran Dialzara through a full trial in spring 2026 and wrote it up on our Dialzara comparison page: the receptionist took messages competently but asked for a phone number it already had and pressed for details after the caller declined, and it played no AI or recording disclosure unless we wrote one into the greeting ourselves.

• Where it wins: a known vendor, a reasonable $99 tier, SMS included, and 4.2 stars from 20 Trustpilot reviews.
• Where it falls short: 60 minutes for $29 is 15 fewer than our $14 plan, the overage is the second highest here, and the vendor has not replied to its negative reviews.

Best for: businesses that want an established vendor and expect to grow into the $99 plan.

10. Smith.ai

Smith.ai is the premium option and the only one with humans in the loop. The pricing page now shows one price list whether your calls are handled AI-first or human-first: Starter is $300 a month for 30 calls at $11.50 a call over, Basic is $810 for 90 at $10.50 and Pro is $2,100 for 300 at $8.50. Appointment booking ($1.50 a call), call recording and transcription ($0.25), SMS notifications ($0.50) and a dedicated Spanish line ($1 a call) are add-ons priced per call, there are no setup fees, annual billing is 10 percent off, and every plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee capped at $1,000. Smith.ai says it serves 5,000+ businesses and has the deepest review history on this list, 4.4 stars from 374 Trustpilot reviews, with the recent complaints centered on AI accuracy and billing.

• Where it wins: a human can take the call, the integrations list runs to Clio, HubSpot and Salesforce, and the reviews are real and plentiful.
• Where it falls short: $10 a call. At 33 calls a month it costs $334.50, about 8 times our Starter plan and 24 times our Essential plan.

Best for: law firms and professional practices that need a person available and bill enough per client to pay $10 a call for it.

One more: XBert by Nextiva

XBert was not part of our October 6 check, so it is not ranked with the ten above. We read Nextiva's XBert pricing page on October 10, 2026. XBert costs $99 a month for 100 conversations and $0.99 for each conversation after that, with a 14-day trial, no contract and a 30-day money-back guarantee. A conversation is a phone call longer than 30 seconds, or a text or web chat thread with three or more messages; shorter calls and single messages do not count. It answers calls, texts and website chat, books appointments, connects to calendars and CRMs, and hands calls to your team. It works on its own or as an add-on to a Nextiva phone plan.

At three minutes a call, XBert costs $99 at 100 minutes, about $116 at 350 and about $330 at 1,000. That makes it one of the pricier options for phone answering alone and a better fit if you want the same assistant on text and website chat too. The pricing page does not state languages, countries served or how many calls it takes at once.

Six things to check before you pay

• Minutes or calls. Per-minute plans (us, Reception, Zoom, RingCentral, Rosie, Phonely, Dialzara) favor short calls; per-call plans (Upfirst, Beside, Smith.ai) favor long ones. Count last month's calls and their average length before you compare prices.
• The trial. Reception, Rosie, Upfirst and we let you try without a card. Beside's cheapest plan has no trial at all and its Unlimited trial bills automatically unless you cancel. A trial that needs a card is a subscription with a delay.
• Calls at the same time. Reception Basic takes one. Phonely takes unlimited on every plan. We take two on Essential and five or ten above that. If two customers ever phone at once, the one-line plans send the second one to a busy tone.
• Transfer to a person. Rosie holds live transfer back to $149. Reception transfers by rules. Smith.ai includes one transfer destination and sells more at $15 a month. We include warm transfer and extension dialing on the $14 plan.
• Numbers outside the US. Reception and Rosie are US only. Zoom and RingCentral serve international customers. Beside covers Canada. We provide local numbers in the US, Canada and the UK and nowhere else yet.
• The overage. It ranges from $0.25 a minute (us, Phonely) to $0.50 (RingCentral) and $11.50 a call (Smith.ai). A busy month on the wrong plan can double the bill, so read the overage line before the headline price.

How to choose

If you take fewer than 25 calls a month and want transfers, spam filtering and booking, our Essential plan at $14 is the cheapest way to get all three. If you want to spend nothing, Phonely's free plan works until the minutes run out. If you take 300 to 1,000 minutes a month and most of it is one caller at a time, compare our Business plan, Reception Premium and Rosie Scale on the features you need, because the prices are within $50 of each other. If your calls are long and few, Upfirst's per-call pricing will come out cheaper than any per-minute plan. If you already pay Zoom or RingCentral, their receptionists are a reasonable add-on and a poor standalone buy. If a client expects a human to answer sometimes, Smith.ai is the only one that offers it, at a price that makes sense for a law firm and for few others.

Whichever you pick, make the same five calls during the trial: ask something that is on your website, ask to book, ask for a person, ask something off-topic, and switch languages halfway through. The services separate more on those five calls than on anything in the tables above. You can make the first one on our demo line right now, and if your budget is under $50 we compared the nine cheapest plans in more detail in Cheapest AI Receptionists in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI answering service?

A phone service that answers your business line with an AI voice instead of a person or a voicemail. It greets the caller, answers questions from information you give it, takes messages, books appointments and transfers calls to you or your staff, around the clock. You either get a new number from the service or forward your existing one to it. The ten services above all do this; they differ on price, limits and extras.

How much does an AI answering service cost for a small business?

Between $0 and about $50 a month for a light-volume plan of 60 to 250 minutes, $79 to $199 for 275 to 1,000 minutes, and $300 and up for services that include human receptionists. Our plans run $14 to $199 for 75 to 1,000 minutes. Our cost guide walks through what drives the price and when upgrading beats paying overage.

Is there a free AI answering service?

Phonely has a free plan with 100 minutes a month and no end date, with no transcripts or analytics and no answering once the minutes are used up. Everyone else offers a trial: 7 days with us and Rosie, 14 days with Reception, Upfirst and RingCentral, 30-day money-back with Smith.ai.

Can an AI answering service transfer calls to a real person?

Most can, with limits by plan. We transfer on every plan, including warm transfer where the receptionist announces the caller before connecting. Reception routes with up to 10 rules. Phonely includes transfer on its free plan. Rosie's live transfer starts on its $149 plan. Smith.ai includes one transfer destination on Starter.

Which AI answering services work outside the US?

We provide local numbers in the US, Canada and the UK, with UK plans priced in pounds from £19. Zoom and RingCentral sell internationally, with RingCentral's EU version at €38 for 100 minutes. Beside covers Canada on a per-seat plan. Reception and Rosie provision US numbers only, though Reception lets you bring your own Twilio or SIP number.

Are AI answering services HIPAA compliant?

Most are not, and the ones that are say so on a specific plan. We are not HIPAA, SOC 2 or PCI certified. ElevenLabs states that Reception is not HIPAA certified. Phonely and Upfirst mention a HIPAA business associate agreement on their enterprise or custom tiers. If you handle patient information, ask the vendor for a signed BAA before you forward a single call, and do not take a comparison page's word for it, including this one.

How long does setup take?

Minutes, on every service here. You answer questions about your business, paste or upload what the receptionist should know, pick a voice and either take a new number or forward your existing one. Ours is answering calls in about five minutes from signup; Reception's website scan takes one to five. The part that takes longer is the week of listening to transcripts and fixing the answers it got wrong, which is the same on every service.

We re-check every price on this page monthly and we are testing the services we have not trialed yet, one a week. If you find a number that has changed or a claim that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it the same week.