What an AI Receptionist Actually Costs Per Included Minute

An AI receptionist costs roughly $0.15 to $0.50 per included minute in 2026, while human answering services run $3.45 to $5.00. Ona charges $0.25 per included minute at its 400, 600 and 800 minute tiers, with $0.20 per minute beyond them. Some standalone vendors publish a lower headline rate.

Quick answer:

• Divide the plan price by the included minutes. That one number strips out plan names and marketing tiers, and it is the only way to hold a $49 plan and a $1,725 plan up against each other.
• Ona is $0.25 per included minute at 400 minutes ($100), 600 minutes ($150) and 800 minutes ($200), and $0.27 at 1,500 minutes ($400). Overage is $0.20 per minute, which sits below the included rate.
• $100 a month is not the real entry price. The receptionist is an add-on on top of a $130 practitioner seat, so a solo clinician starts at $230 a month, or $207 billed annually, and $299 once an Ona Clearing House plan is added for insurance billing.

Why price per included minute is the only honest unit

Every vendor in this category prices differently on purpose. One sells calls, one sells minutes, one sells "unlimited" and then meters something else, one sells seats. The plan names are worse: Starter, Pro, Growth and Scale mean four different things across four price sheets, and the same word sits on different rungs of two different ladders: Growth is Rosie's top plan at $299 and Goodcall's middle one at $129, while Scale is Rosie's middle plan at $149 and Goodcall's top one at $249.

Dividing the published monthly price by the published included volume collapses all of that. It is not a perfect unit, and further down this page there are two vendors it genuinely cannot describe. But it answers the question a practice owner is actually asking, which is not "which tier am I on" but "what does one answered minute cost me."

The second thing it exposes is the gap between AI pricing and human pricing. That gap is not 20 percent. On the numbers below it is more than tenfold, and it is the reason this market exists at all.

What the market charges today

Prices were read off each vendor's own live pricing page in September 2026. Ranking is by cost per included minute, cheapest first. It is a price ranking, not a quality ranking, and the last column is what the ranking is missing.

Rank	Vendor	Published plan	Included volume	Cost per included minute	Overage	What the minute buys
1	Retell AI	Pay as you go, $0.07 to $0.31 per minute	Metered, nothing included	No included minutes; $0.07 to $0.31 per metered minute	Not applicable	Raw voice agent infrastructure you assemble and maintain yourself. Speech to text, voice, model and telephony are itemized separately. No booking logic, no chart.
2	Rosie	Scale, $149	1,000 minutes	$0.15	Not published	Standalone answering and booking. Entry plan is $49 for 250 minutes, which is about $0.20 per minute.
3	Ona	$150 tier	600 minutes	$0.25	$0.20	Answers 24/7, books against your live Ona calendar honoring service duration and buffers, and writes transcript, recording and structured intake into the patient chart before the call ends. Same $0.25 at 400 and 800 minutes.
4	Dialzara	Business Elite, $349	1,000 minutes	$0.35	$0.35	Standalone answering, booking, routing. Entry plan is $29 for 60 minutes, which is about $0.48 per minute.
5	Goodcall	Growth, $129 per agent	Unlimited minutes, capped at 250 unique customers	Not measured in minutes	$0.50 per extra unique customer	Unlimited talk time, metered instead by how many different people call you.
6	Smith.ai	Pro, $2,100	300 calls	Priced per call, $7.00 per included call	$8.50 per call	Live agents plus AI, 24/7. Entry plan is $300 for 30 calls, which is $10.00 per included call.
7	Ruby	500 minutes per month, $1,725	500 minutes	$3.45	Not published	Human receptionists. Ruby publishes no plan names, only minute tiers. Its smallest is $250 for 50 minutes, which is $5.00 per minute.
8	Assort Health, Arini, Weave	No per-minute price published	Not published	Not published	Not published	Healthcare and dental phone products that require a demo before a number. Weave publishes exactly one number for its own platform, "starting from $199 per month", without per-plan figures.

Reading the table honestly

Three things in there deserve saying out loud.

Ona is not the cheapest number on the page. Rosie publishes about $0.15 per included minute at 1,000 minutes, which is 40 percent below Ona's $0.25. Retell AI can go lower still. If the only question is what a minute of answered phone costs, Ona loses that comparison and there is no point pretending otherwise.

The per-minute unit breaks on two rows. Smith.ai prices per call, and converting that to minutes requires guessing an average call length, which we will not do. Goodcall sells unlimited minutes and meters unique callers instead, so its per-minute cost falls the more each caller talks and rises the more different people ring. Both are legitimate models. Neither belongs on a per-minute axis, so they are placed by what they cost, flagged for what they are.

Human answering is a different price class. Ruby's cheapest published plan is $250 for 50 minutes. That is $5.00 a minute, twenty times Ona's included rate. Human agents are worth paying for in some practices. They are not worth pretending to be a close comparison.

The honest version of $100 a month

Ona's AI receptionist starts at $100 a month for 400 included minutes. That is the add-on price, on the published pricing page, and it is the number most comparisons stop at.

It is not what a solo clinician pays.

The receptionist is an add-on, and add-ons sit on top of seats. A solo practitioner needs one practitioner seat at $130 a month. So the real floor is $230 a month, or $207 with the 10 percent annual discount. If you price Ona against a standalone answering service on the $100 figure alone, you are comparing two different purchases and you will get a wrong answer.

What the $130 buys matters to that comparison, though. It is not a phone line fee. It carries the chart, scheduling, telehealth, intake, consents, billing, the insurance and eligibility workflow and the patient portal, with every feature available on every plan. The eligibility checks, claims and ERAs themselves are metered by an Ona Clearing House plan from $69 a month, which a cash-pay practice does not need. Ona is a general ambulatory platform that scales from a solo clinic to enterprise systems, and a practice buying it is buying the record, not the receptionist. The $100 is the increment that puts the phone on top of the record it already owns.

Two smaller line items round out the picture. Calling, transcription and recording inside Ona is a separate $25 a month add-on. Omnichannel messaging across SMS, email and chat is $150 a month and free for practices with two practitioners or fewer, which means a solo or two-practitioner clinic does not pay it at all.

Ona's tiers do not sell a volume discount. They sell a predictable bill.

Look again at the four tiers: 400 minutes at $100, 600 at $150, 800 at $200, 1,500 at $400. The first three are all exactly $0.25 per included minute. The 1,500 tier is about $0.27, slightly worse.

Compare that to how the rest of the market builds a ladder. Rosie drops from about $0.20 to about $0.15 as volume rises. Dialzara's overage falls from $0.48 to $0.35 across its four plans. Smith.ai's per-call rate falls from $10.00 to $7.00. Those are volume discounts. Ona's ladder is flat, and a buyer who expects the price per minute to improve as they grow should know that in advance.

What Ona does instead is put the overage rate below the included rate. Every vendor here that publishes an overage rate charges more for a minute you did not pre-buy: Dialzara's Business Elite meters overage at $0.35 against an included $0.35, and Smith.ai charges $8.50 for a call past its 300 against $7.00 included. Rosie and Ruby publish no overage rate at all. Ona charges $0.20 against an included rate of $0.25. Practically, a clinic on the 400 minute tier that has a bad flu week and runs 600 minutes pays $100 plus $40 of overage, so $140 rather than an alarming number. The tier is a budget, not a trap, and that is the design choice to weigh against the missing volume discount.

Larger volumes than 1,500 minutes are quoted on request.

Why the cheap headline rates are cheap

Rosie and Retell AI are genuinely less expensive per minute, and it is worth understanding what the difference pays for.

Retell AI is the clearest case. It publishes an itemized stack: voice infrastructure, text to speech, the language model and telephony, each billed separately, adding to $0.07 to $0.31 a minute depending on the model you pick, plus per-month fees for phone numbers and concurrency. That is a toolkit, not a receptionist. Someone has to build the booking logic, connect it to a calendar, decide what counts as urgent and write the result into a clinical record. If you have that engineering team, the floor really is seven cents. Synthflow, at the other end of the same market, publishes enterprise contracts starting at $30,000 annually.

Rosie and Dialzara are finished products, and for a business whose phone job ends at "take a message and book a slot," they do the job at a lower rate. The difference in a clinical setting is where the minute lands. Ona's AI receptionist books against the same live calendar the clinicians work from, honoring service duration, clinician preference and buffer times, and writes the transcript, the recording and a structured intake into the patient's chart before the call disconnects. Urgent symptoms and sensitive calls route to a human instead of the agent. First-time callers land in the leads pipeline. Ona says most clinics are answering live calls within about a week, and number porting or parallel running are both supported.

None of that shows up in a per-minute number. It shows up in whether someone has to re-key the call afterwards. A $0.15 minute that produces a notification your front desk retypes into the chart is not obviously cheaper than a $0.25 minute that arrives already filed.

The healthcare-specific vendors mostly decline to publish anything. Assort Health lists no prices and no pricing page, only demo requests. Arini, in dental, does the same and points buyers at an ROI calculator instead. Weave publishes exactly one number for its own platform, "starting from $199 per month", plus a Get Pricing button on every plan. That is a pricing posture worth noticing when you are building a shortlist, because it usually means the number moves depending on who is asking.

Work out your own minute count before you shop

Do this before you read another price sheet, because the tier you need changes which vendor wins.

Pull last month's call detail record from your phone carrier and total the inbound talk minutes. Add roughly 20 percent for calls that currently hit voicemail and never get returned, since those become answered minutes the moment you turn an agent on. Then check the shape of your volume: a clinic with predictable call load should buy close to its number, while a seasonal practice should look hard at the overage rate rather than the tier price, because that is what a spike will actually cost.

Only then divide. A practice at 350 minutes a month and a practice at 1,400 minutes are shopping in two different markets, and the second one should be asking every vendor on this page for a custom quote rather than taking the published ladder.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AI receptionist cost per minute?

Published AI receptionist plans work out to roughly $0.15 to $0.50 per included minute. Human answering services are far higher: Ruby's published receptionist plans run $3.45 to $5.00 per included minute. Raw voice agent infrastructure that you build and maintain yourself is the floor, with Retell AI publishing $0.07 to $0.31 per minute. Ona's AI receptionist is $0.25 per included minute at the 400, 600 and 800 minute tiers.

Is $100 a month actually cheap for an AI receptionist?

It depends on what the $100 includes. Ona's $100 tier includes 400 minutes, which is $0.25 per included minute, and those minutes answer the call, book against the live calendar and write a transcript, recording and structured intake into the patient chart. Standalone vendors publish lower rates per minute, but their minutes end in a notification rather than a chart entry, and the $100 is not Ona's real entry price for a solo clinician.

What does Ona's AI receptionist cost in total for a solo practitioner?

$230 a month, or $207 a month billed annually. The AI receptionist is an add-on at $100 a month for 400 minutes and it sits on top of a practitioner seat at $130 a month. The seat is not a phone fee: it carries the chart, scheduling, telehealth, billing, the insurance and eligibility workflow and the patient portal, with every feature on every plan. If the practice bills insurance, the eligibility checks and claims themselves meter on an Ona Clearing House plan from $69 a month, which takes the floor to $299. Anyone quoting you $100 flat has left the seat out.

Which AI receptionist is cheapest per included minute?

Among the prices published on vendor sites in September 2026, Rosie is the lowest at about $0.15 per included minute on its $149 plan with 1,000 minutes. Ona follows at $0.25, then Dialzara at $0.35 on its $349 plan with 1,000 minutes. Cheapest per minute and cheapest per outcome are different questions, because the lower-priced vendors do not write into a clinical record.

What happens if I go over my included minutes with Ona?

Overage is $0.20 per minute, which is below the $0.25 per included minute rate of the tiers themselves. Two hundred minutes past the 400 minute tier adds $40, so a heavy month costs $140 rather than spiking. Ona's tiers are there to make the bill predictable, not to sell a volume discount, and larger volumes are quoted on request.

How many phone minutes does a practice actually use in a month?

There is no honest industry average to quote, because it swings with specialty, panel size and how much of your booking already happens online. Pull last month's call detail record from your phone carrier, total the inbound talk minutes, and add about 20 percent for the calls that currently hit voicemail and never get returned. That number, not a vendor benchmark, is the one to price against.

Next step

Bring your own minute count and run the arithmetic against the published tiers on the pricing page before you talk to anyone. If the number lands between 400 and 1,500 minutes, book a 15-minute demo and ask to watch one call go from ringing phone to filed chart entry, because that is the part the per-minute price does not tell you. Or start the 14-day free trial, full access, no credit card.