How much does an AI receptionist cost? Real pricing for home services

The short answer, before the sales call

AI receptionist pricing comes in three shapes: per-minute, per-seat, and flat monthly. The number on the pricing page is rarely the number on your invoice, because most of the cost hides in setup fees, platform fees, and overages that only show up after you sign.

FrontDeskPro starts at $1,000 per month per brand, flat. No onboarding fee, no platform fee, and no per-minute fee in the base model. Keep that anchor in mind while we walk through how the rest of the market prices.

The three pricing models you will run into

Per-minute. You pay for talk time. It looks cheap on the pricing page because the quoted rate assumes short calls and slow months. But your bill scales with call volume, which means it spikes in exactly the months your phones are busiest. A per-minute vendor also has no reason to make calls efficient, because longer calls are more revenue for them. You cannot budget it, and you cannot forecast it.

Per-seat. Some vendors price the AI like office software, per user per month. This usually tells you the AI receptionist is a feature bolted onto a bigger platform they really want to sell you. A phone line does not have seats. If the pricing model does not match how a front desk actually works, ask what else you are paying for.

Flat monthly. One fixed number per location or brand. This is the only model where you can do payback math on a napkin, because the cost stays fixed while the value scales with call volume. Busy season makes the math better, not worse.

The hidden costs that do not show up on the pricing page

Ask every vendor these questions before you compare stickers:

Is there an onboarding or setup fee? Many vendors charge a separate implementation fee up front, sometimes larger than the first month of service. That is real money before you have booked a single job.

Is there a platform fee? Some quote a low per-minute or per-call rate, then add a monthly platform charge on top. The advertised rate is not the price. The invoice is the price.

What happens when volume spikes? Plenty of "flat" plans include a minute cap with overage billing behind it. If the answer to "what does a busy July cost me" is "it depends," you do not have a flat plan.

Does the ServiceTitan integration cost extra? A receptionist that cannot write the job into your scheduling system is an answering machine. If the integration is a paid add-on, price it in from day one.

Where FrontDeskPro lands

Starting at $1,000 per month per brand. No onboarding fee. No platform fee. No per-minute fee in the base model. The number you see is the number you budget, in January and in July.

The real question is not the cost of the receptionist

It is the cost of the missed call. You already paid marketing to make the phone ring. Every ring that goes to voicemail is a job you funded and then handed to whoever answers next, which is usually your competitor.

The scale of that leak is bigger than most owners think. In production across a ServiceTitan home-services portfolio, about 40 percent of calls arrived outside business hours. FrontDeskPro handled 8,712 inbound calls, booked 1,201 jobs at a 67.2 percent adjusted booking rate, and 478 of those bookings came from after-hours calls that would otherwise have hit voicemail. Over 9 months, that added up to roughly $480K in captured revenue.

That is the number to weigh $1,000 a month against. Not the vendor's minute rate.

Run your own payback math

You do not need a spreadsheet. Take your average ticket. Count the calls that currently land after close, on weekends, or while your CSR is already on the line. Multiply.

Then compare that number to $1,000 a month. For most HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and garage-door shops, a small handful of booked after-hours jobs covers the entire month, and everything past that is margin you were previously donating to voicemail.

That is the honest way to answer "how much does an AI receptionist cost." The subscription is the small number. The missed calls are the big one.

See the math on your own call volume

If you run ServiceTitan, we can walk through your call volume and show you what the after-hours leak looks like in your shop. Book a 30-minute walkthrough and bring your average ticket.