Smith.ai Charges $255/Month for 20 Calls. Here's What I Built for $199.

I spent way too long researching answering services before I decided to build my own. The pricing across the industry is genuinely bizarre when you look at it closely.

Smith.ai is one of the more well-known options. Their starter plan is $255 per month. For that you get 20 receptionist calls. Twenty. If you need more, you're paying $12.50 per additional call.

Ruby, another popular choice, charges $245 per month for 50 receptionist minutes. Not calls, minutes. A 5-minute conversation with a potential customer costs you roughly $25 in receptionist fees. And their reviews are full of complaints about quality and inconsistency.

This pricing model made sense maybe 10 years ago when the only option was a human in a call center. But in 2026, it feels like the industry is deliberately staying behind.

The Per-Minute Trap

Heres what bothers me most about per-minute billing. The calls where customers talk the longest are usually the highest value calls. Someone asking detailed questions about your services, explaining their specific situation, comparing options, these are your best leads.

Under per-minute billing, those are also your most expensive calls to handle. So the answering service is literally charging you more for better leads. Your incentive structure is completely misaligned, you almost want callers to hang up faster which is insane.

I talked to a dentist who was using an answering service and paying $800+ some months because new patient intake calls tend to run 8-10 minutes each. She was spending more on answering services then on her marketing that generated the calls in the first place.

What 20 Calls Actually Looks Like

Lets put Smith.ai's 20-call plan in context. The average small business recieves 40-100 calls per week depending on industry. A busy dental office might get 40 calls per day.

20 calls per month means you've burned through your entire allocation by lunch on the first business day. Everything after that is overage at $12.50 per call. A business getting 60 calls a month would pay $255 plus $500 in overages, so $755 total. For a service that basically reads from a script and takes a message.

This isnt a starter plan. Its a teaser plan designed to get you in the door so you upgrade to their $735/month tier.

Why I Built Something Different

I run several software products and I kept hearing the same frustration from small business owners. They knew they needed phone coverage. They tried the answering services. The pricing was unpredictable, the quality was inconsistent, and they had no control over the experience.

So I built ChirpReply as a flat-rate AI receptionist. $199 per month at the base tier. Unlimited calls. No per-minute charges, no overage fees, no surprises on your bill.

The AI handles everything Smith.ai's human receptionists do. It answers calls, asks qualification questions, books appointments, sends confirmation texts, and follows up. The difference is it does it 24/7, it never has a bad day, and it costs a fraction of the price.

The Feature Gap

Beyond pricing, theres a significant feature gap between traditional answering services and what AI can do now.

Speed of response. 78% of customers choose whichever business responds first. A 391% conversion increase happens when you respond within 1 minute. AI picks up instantly. Human call centers have hold times.

Consistency. Every AI interaction follows the same script perfectly. Human receptionists have bad days, get distracted, forget to ask key questions. I've read dozens of Ruby reviews where people complain about receptionists giving wrong information or sounding disinterested.

After-hours coverage. 28.5% of calls come after business hours. Most answering services charge premium rates for nights and weekends. AI doesnt know what day it is. It answers the same way at 3am Saturday as it does at 10am Tuesday.

Bilingual support. 8% of US business calls are in Spanish. Smith.ai charges extra for bilingual receptionists. I built Spanish support natively because it should just be included.

Automated follow-ups. Traditional services take a message and email it to you. Thats it. AI can send the caller a confirmation text immediately, follow up the next day if they didn't book, and keep the lead warm automatically.

The Real Comparison

Lets run the actual numbers for a typical small business getting 80 calls per month:

Smith.ai: $255 base + $750 in overages (60 extra calls at $12.50) = $1,005/month

Ruby: For 80 calls averaging 4 minutes each (320 minutes), you'd need their $1,640/month plan

Human receptionist: $38,500-$54,000/year ($3,200-$4,500/month), only covers business hours

ChirpReply: $199-$899/month flat rate, depending on features. Unlimited calls. 24/7 coverage.

The math is not subtle. Even at the highest tier, your saving thousands per year compared to alternatives that cover fewer hours and handle fewer calls.

What AI Gets Wrong (For Now)

I'm not going to pretend AI is perfect at everything. There are edge cases. Extremely complex legal intake, highly emotional crisis calls, situations that genuinely need human empathy. For those, you want a human.

But 85-90% of business calls follow predictable patterns. "What are your hours?" "Do you service my area?" "I need to book an appointment." "How much does X cost?" These calls dont need a $54K employee or a $12.50-per-call service. They need fast, accurate, consistent answers.

The smart play is AI handling the 90% and routing the complex 10% to a real person. Thats way more cost-effective then paying premium rates for a human to handle every single "what time do you close" call.

The Industry Is Moving

Smith.ai and Ruby know this shift is coming. Smith.ai actually launched their own AI features recently. But they're bolting AI onto a pricing model designed for human labor. The per-minute charges still apply. The overage fees still exist.

When you build AI-first from day one, the economics are completely different. The marginal cost of handling one more call is basically zero. So you can offer flat-rate pricing that actually makes sense for the business using it.

$255 for 20 calls made sense when each call required a human sitting at a desk. It doesn't make sense when the technology can handle unlimited calls for a fixed infrastructure cost.

The answering service industry is overdue for disruption. I think flat-rate AI receptionists are going to make per-minute billing look as outdated as it actually is within the next couple years.

If your paying per-minute for phone answering in 2026, run the numbers. You might be surprised how much its actually costing you.