How much does an AI receptionist actually cost?

2026 pricing · by Marc Pineault, Lightwork · updated August 2026

Most pricing pages in this industry say "book a demo." This one has numbers, because we run an AI receptionist on our own business every day and we publish our prices. Here's what the market actually charges in 2026 — and what the quotes leave out.

The three ways to buy one

1. DIY software — $95 to $350 a month

Platforms like the current wave of AI answering tools sell subscriptions where you set everything up yourself. Cheap to start, but the price isn't the real cost: the setup is. You write the scripts, connect the calendar, handle the phone number, and maintain it when your business changes. Most owners get it 70% working and leave it there — which callers can tell.

2. Agency-managed — $500 to $3,000 a month

An agency configures a white-labelled tool and manages it for a monthly fee. In the trades, the going benchmark is roughly $800–$1,500 per month per location. At the bottom of this market are resellers charging $300–$600 a month for a template setup they touch once. The question to ask any agency: "what number do you report to me every month, and what happens when it drops?" If there's no answer, you're renting a template.

3. Done-for-you install — $2,500 to $10,000 up front, then a retainer

An engineer builds the system into your business: your phone lines, your booking calendar, your CRM, your follow-up sequences, with approval rules for anything sensitive. Installs in this class run $2,500–$10,000 depending on scope, plus $500–$1,500 a month to keep it tuned. This is the only tier where the system gets smarter about your business over time — and the only tier that usually pays for itself on a single recovered job.

What the quotes don't mention

• Phone and text costs — carrier fees and registration for business texting run $20–$100/month and someone has to manage compliance (in Canada, CASL; in the US, TCPA). Ask who owns this.
• The 24-hour reply window — social platforms only allow replies within a day of a customer's message. A system that goes down on a weekend silently loses those leads forever. Ask what monitoring exists. (We page a human when anything goes quiet — we learned this one the hard way and wrote it into every install.)
• Who answers the weird ones — every good system has an escalation path to a human. If a vendor claims the AI handles 100% of conversations, they're describing a system that annoys 20% of your customers.

What it's actually worth

The math that matters isn't the subscription — it's the leak it plugs. Industry studies consistently find about 62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and 78% of customers buy from the business that responds first. If your average job or client is worth four figures, one recovered enquiry a month pays for any tier on this page.

Our pricing, published

Full menu and live proof — including our own dashboards and real captured conversations — on the home page.