Most Australian businesses pay between $149 and $699 a month, plus a setup fee of anywhere from nothing to about $1,000. Where you land in that range comes down to how often your phone rings, far more than which features you tick.
The advertised price and the price you actually pay are rarely the same number.
What You Get at Each Price Point
At the bottom, $99 to $149 a month buys call answering and message taking. The AI picks up, gets a name and number, texts it to you. That is the whole product. If your only problem is calls going to voicemail while you are under a sink, it might be all you need.
The $200 to $300 band is where most trade and service businesses end up. This is where appointment booking appears, along with a connection to your CRM or job software. The AI can look at your calendar and put a job in it rather than just telling you someone rang.
Past $350 you are paying for customisation, multiple lines, and integrations built around how your business actually runs. Worth it once you have staff and a booking process with some complexity to it.
You will see cheaper numbers advertised, often around $49 a month. Those are almost always American plans converted across, and they rarely survive contact with an Australian phone number, local support and per-minute charges.
The Cost Nobody Advertises
Most providers charge for call minutes on top of the monthly fee, and this is where the cheap plans stop being cheap.
Say a plan charges 50 cents a minute. Twenty calls a week at four minutes each is about 320 minutes a month, which is $160 in usage sitting on top of your base rate. A $99 plan has just become $259, and you have paid more than the $249 all-inclusive option you passed on.
So ask every provider the same question. What is my total monthly bill at my actual call volume? Not the base rate, the total. If they cannot give you a straight answer, that is your answer.
Other things that show up on the invoice: a setup or onboarding fee, phone number rental, charges for calls the AI transfers through to you, and sometimes a premium for after hours. Ask what happens when you go over your included minutes, because that is where the surprise usually lives.
Work Out What Missed Calls Are Costing You
Drag the sliders to match your business. The numbers update as you move them.
Missed call calculator
Rough guide only. It assumes every missed call was a real enquiry and that you would have closed them at the rate you set. Your own close rate and job mix will move these numbers.
To put that in context, a plumber on $400 average job value missing six calls a week is losing around 78 jobs a year at a 25 per cent close rate. Call it $31,000 in work that went to whoever picked up instead. A $249 a month plan runs just under $3,000 a year, so eight jobs and you are square.
Run your own numbers though. If you miss one call a fortnight and your average job is $120, the answer is no, and no amount of feature comparison changes that. The tool only works at volume.
AI Receptionist Versus a Human Answering Service
There are three ways to get your phone answered, and the price gap between them is wide.
An offshore human service, working from a script, runs $200 to $400 a month. Roughly AI money for a human who does not know your business.
An Australian pay-per-call service charges $1 to $3 a call, which lands most businesses between $300 and $800 a month once after-hours surcharges are counted.
A full Australian answering service with a named receptionist trained on your business runs $1,000 to $2,500 a month. Expensive, and genuinely better at the hard calls.
Against that, a part time in-house receptionist costs north of $30,000 a year once super is in.
The AI wins on cost, and it wins on never sleeping. It will take the 7pm call and the Sunday call without complaint.
Where it loses is judgement. It will not pick up that a customer is upset and adjust, and it will not make a call your business needs a person to make. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
Most businesses that get this right run the AI as the first layer rather than the only one. It catches everything and passes the awkward ones to a human.
What Actually Drives Your Price
Two things do most of the work.
Call volume is the first, because every provider prices around minutes in one form or another. Know your number before you start comparing.
Integration depth is the second. An AI that takes messages is cheap to run. An AI that reads your calendar, books the job, updates your CRM and fires off the confirmation costs more to build and more to maintain, because it has to be wired into your systems.
Voice options, script tweaks, reporting dashboards. All of that moves the price much less than people expect.
Questions to Ask Before You Sign
- What is my total monthly cost at my real call volume, including everything?
- Is there a lock in, and what does leaving look like?
- What happens to my phone number if I go elsewhere?
- Where is call data stored, and does it meet Australian privacy requirements?
- Can I hear it handle a call like mine, not a polished demo?
- Who fixes it when it gets something wrong, and how quickly?
That last one gets skipped and it should not. An AI receptionist quietly mishandling calls for three days costs more than it saves.
Common Questions About AI Receptionist Cost
What is the cheapest AI receptionist in Australia? Genuine Australian plans start around $99 a month for message taking. Anything advertised well below that is usually an overseas plan, or a base rate with per-minute charges waiting behind it.
Is there a setup fee? Usually. Anywhere from nothing to about $1,000, depending on how much integration work your setup needs. Ask upfront.
Do I need to change my phone number? No. Any provider worth using forwards your existing number.
How long does setup take? A basic message taking setup can be running the same week. Calendar or CRM integration takes two to four weeks.
Can it book jobs into my calendar? Yes, from about $200 a month up, as long as your calendar or job software plays nicely.
Is it worth it for a one person business? Depends entirely on missed calls. Several a week on decent job values and the maths works fast. A quiet phone and it does not.
Working Out What Suits Your Setup
Pricing is the easy part. The harder question is matching the thing to how your business actually takes work: which calls matter, what needs to happen when one lands, and where it needs to end up afterwards.
We build AI receptionists for Perth trade and service businesses and wire them into the rest of your local search presence, so the calls you start catching turn into jobs instead of just data. If you want the wider picture first, read our guide on automating your Google reviews.
Tell us your call volume and average job value and we will tell you straight whether it stacks up. Simply contact us and we will get back to you promptly.
