What Does Answering Your Phone Actually Cost?

What does answering your phone actually cost?

Most small businesses never price this deliberately. The phone gets answered by whoever is free, or it doesn't get answered at all, and the cost shows up somewhere else entirely — in jobs that went to the competitor who picked up.

Here is what the options actually cost in 2026.

What does it cost to not answer?

Only about 38% of calls to small businesses are answered by a person, according to a 411 Locals study of 85 businesses. Of the callers who don't get through, roughly 85% never call back, and 62% contact a competitor immediately.

The cost per missed call varies enormously by what you do:

The figure that gets quoted most often is $126,000 a year in lost revenue for an average small business. Treat that as directional rather than precise — it depends entirely on your call volume and what a customer is worth to you. The useful version of that number is the one you calculate yourself, which takes about two weeks of paying attention.

What does an in-house receptionist cost?

A full-time receptionist in most US metros runs $38,000–$52,000 a year in salary, and $45,000–$65,000 once you include payroll taxes, benefits and the cost of covering them when they're sick or on holiday. Call it $3,500–$5,000 a month.

For that you get judgment, warmth, and someone who can handle anything. You also get someone who works forty hours a week, which means roughly two thirds of the week is uncovered, and every call outside those hours still goes to voicemail.

What does an answering service cost?

Human answering services price per call or per minute. Smith.ai's entry tier is $300 a month for 30 calls, with overage at $11.50 per call. Higher volumes bring the per-call cost down — their 300-call tier works out around $7 a call.

You get real people, 24/7, and no hiring. What you don't get is someone who knows your business. They work from a script you supply, and they generally take messages rather than doing the work — they won't write into your CRM or move things around in your calendar unless you've paid for that specifically.

What does an AI receptionist cost?

This is the widest range, because "AI receptionist" covers two genuinely different things.

Self-serve software runs $16–$99 a month. Allo starts around $16, Upfirst around $25, Marlie $49, EchoWin around $50, My AI Front Desk around $99. You sign up, write the prompt yourself, connect your own calendar, and adjust it when it gets something wrong. Most go live in under an hour.

Vertical products run higher because they integrate deeply with one industry's systems: Loman around $199 for restaurants, Ringly around $349 for Shopify stores, Greetmate $1,000+ for healthcare.

Managed AI sits in between — someone else configures it for you. Locally, Answer NOVA runs $59–$150 a month depending on call volume.

So which is cheapest?

Self-serve AI, by a wide margin, and for a lot of businesses it's genuinely the right answer. If your call volume is low, your calls are simple, and you're comfortable writing the prompt and connecting the integrations yourself, $25 a month will serve you well and anything more is waste.

The honest version of this comparison is that price isn't the interesting variable. What matters is whether the thing gets configured correctly for how your business actually works, and who does that configuring. Cheap software where nobody does the configuration produces an assistant that handles the easy calls and mangles the important ones — which costs more than the subscription saved.

Where does ThryvHQ fit?

We're the managed end: $297 a month, with a one-time setup from $1,497, because a person maps your call flow, builds the assistant against it, connects it to the systems you already use, and stays accountable when it misbehaves.

Against self-serve software we're expensive. Against a receptionist at $4,000 a month, or an answering service at $300 for thirty calls, we're not. And against a typical small-business AI implementation project — which runs $5,000–$15,000 over about six weeks — we're a fraction of the cost and about two weeks to live.

If you want to hear the difference rather than read about it, our demo line is (703) 423-0203. It'll ask what kind of business it should answer the phone for. Tell it yours, then call in the way your customers do.

Sources: 411 Locals 2024 study; Clio Legal Trends Report; published vendor pricing as of September 2026.