What an AI receptionist actually costs in Australia

1. The advertised range, and why it misleads

Search for what an AI receptionist costs in Australia and you will find the range quoted as roughly $149 to $1,299 a month. That is accurate as far as it goes. It is also the least useful true thing anyone could tell you, because those two figures are not the ends of a quality scale. They are the ends of a volume scale, and the cheapest plan in the market has a lower cost per month and a much higher cost per minute than the dearest one.

One provider we looked at advertises $149 a month for 100 included voice minutes, and $1,299 a month for 3,000. The monthly price rises by about nine times. The minutes rise by thirty. Anyone who picks the entry plan because the number is small, and then takes a busy month, will pay a far higher effective rate than the business that went in on the large plan and used it.

So the question “what does an AI receptionist cost” has no answer until you know how many minutes of phone calls your business actually produces. That number is on your phone bill, and most owners have never looked it up.

2. The three numbers that make a price

Every quote in this market is built from the same three components, and vendors differ mostly in which one they put on the pricing page.

• The one-off setup fee. Nothing, or $499, or $990 and up, depending on the provider. It pays for configuring the agent against your business: your job types, your hours, your escalation rules. The providers who charge nothing for it have either simplified that work or moved its cost into the monthly rate. Neither is wrong. They are just not comparable at the headline.
• The monthly fee and what it includes. This is the figure everyone advertises, and on its own it says almost nothing. $299 buys 250 included minutes from one provider and 500 from another, and one of those two adds GST on top and a $499 setup fee underneath.
• The overage rate. What a minute costs once the allowance is gone. Published rates we found run from about $0.40 to roughly $0.92 a minute. This is the number that decides your bill in the months that matter, and it is usually the one written smallest.

A fourth component exists and is almost never priced: what happens to the calls the agent cannot handle. Section 6 comes back to it.

3. What four providers actually publish

Read from each provider’s own public pricing page in September 2026, reproduced as advertised. Effective cost per included minute is our arithmetic on their published figures, not a claim of theirs.

Three things fall out of that table that no single pricing page shows you.

The cheapest entry plan has the dearest minute. $149 for 100 minutes is about $1.49 a minute. $1,299 for 3,000 is about $0.43. If your business makes 100 minutes of inbound calls a month you are a very small operation, and if it makes more, the entry plan is not the cheap option, it is the one that sends you into overage every month.

Setup fees are not noise. A $990 setup on a $299 plan is $82 a month spread across the first year, which is a 27% increase on the advertised price. Two providers in the table charge nothing for it.

One provider does not publish minutes at entry at all. That is not a trick, but it does mean you cannot compare that quote to the others until you ask, and it is the first question to put to them.

4. The storm week

An average month is not what you are buying this for. You are buying it for the week the weather turns, or the week a competitor shuts down, or the week your ad finally works. The whole argument for answering every call is about the week when the calls arrive faster than a person can pick up.

That is exactly the week the included-minute allowance runs out. Take a plumbing business on a $299 plan with 250 included minutes, averaging four-minute calls. That is about 62 calls a month before overage. A storm week that produces 60 extra calls, at four minutes each, is 240 extra minutes. At $0.70 a minute the bill for that month is $299 plus about $168. At $0.92 it is $299 plus about $221.

That is still money well spent if those calls were jobs. The point is not that overage is a rip-off. The point is that the plan you chose on the basis of $299 a month is a plan whose real cost only shows up in the month you most needed it, and the provider knew that when they set the allowance.

Ask every provider one question: what did your median tradie customer actually pay last month, all in. If the answer is the advertised number, ask what their busiest customer paid.

5. Working out your own number

Four steps, and the first one is the only one that takes effort.

1. Find your real inbound minutes. Your telco portal has this per month. Take three months, not one, and note the worst of the three as well as the average.
2. Decide what share the AI actually takes. It is not all of it. If you only want after-hours and overflow, you may be buying a fifth of your total minutes, which changes which plan you need by two tiers.
3. Price every quote against your worst month, not your average. Monthly fee, plus overage on the minutes above the allowance, plus setup divided by twelve.
4. Then compare it to what the calls are worth. Not to the other quotes. A $500 month that books four extra jobs is cheap and a $149 month that books none is expensive.

Our two-minute calculator does step four on your own figures. It asks for nothing and sends nothing anywhere.

6. What none of them price

Three things decide whether the thing works, and none of them appear on any pricing page in this market.

Whether it writes into your job system correctly. “Books into ServiceM8” can mean it creates a job with an address and a job type against the right client, or it can mean it drops a note in an inbox for someone to retype on Monday. Those are different products at the same price. Ask to watch it happen on a real account.

What happens to the calls it cannot handle. Every agent meets a caller it should not be dealing with: a complaint, an emergency it misread, a question about a price it does not know. The handover rule is a product feature and almost nobody advertises theirs. A quiet failure here costs more than the whole subscription.

Whether there is a log. When a customer says they were told the job was booked for Tuesday, you want a recording, a transcript and a record of what the agent actually did. This matters for more than arguments: Australian calling rules expect disclosure and consent, and the compliance paper sets out what applies.

7. How it compares to a person

Most vendor pages in this category make the comparison by quoting a full-time receptionist salary and inviting you to feel the difference. We are not going to reproduce a salary figure we have not verified, and neither should you accept one.

The honest version of the comparison is that they are not substitutes. A part-time person who knows your customers, prices small jobs on the phone and handles an unhappy client is doing work an agent cannot do. An agent answering at 11pm on a Sunday is doing work the person is not there for. Most businesses that get this right end up with both, and the agent takes after-hours, overflow and the second simultaneous call.

The genuine third option is a human answering service, which in Australia is usually priced per call rather than per minute. That is a different comparison and it deserves its own page: AI receptionist, answering service, or a person.

8. What we charge, and why it is shaped differently

We should declare our position, because this paper compares people we compete with.

Our call answering is Front Desk, $119 per month, with a 30-day free trial and $29 to set up the number, which comes off the first bill. On headline price that sits at the bottom of the table above. It answers your own number all day, or only out of hours if that is all you want covered.

What the price buys is the layer underneath the voice: the address checked, every call sorted into emergency, routine or quote rather than guessed, the job written into ServiceM8 or Simpro during the call through the API instead of decided by a model, the on-call phone woken only for an actual emergency, and the log that exists when someone asks why.

One difference is worth stating plainly, because this whole paper has been about it. Our products have no call caps and no per-minute overage. There is no included-minute allowance to run out of, because there is no per-call or per-minute metering in our billing at all. The monthly figure is the figure, including in the storm week described in section 4. That is a deliberate decision about how the product is built rather than an introductory offer, so the bill does not find out about the storm before you do.

We say it here because it would be dishonest to spend eight sections explaining that allowances and overage are where the money hides and then leave you to wonder whether we do the same thing. We do not, and you should ask every provider in section 3 the same question.

Technical? The build standard is open. Take it.

9. Sources and method

Every figure in section 3 was read from the named provider’s own public pricing page on 17 and 18 September 2026 and is reproduced as advertised. No provider was contacted and none has reviewed this page. Cost per included minute is our arithmetic on their published numbers: monthly fee divided by included minutes, nothing else folded in.

Where a provider does not publish a figure, the table says so rather than estimating one. GST treatment differs between providers and is noted where the page states it.

Prices in this market change without notice, and several of these providers have been trading for under two years. Treat this page as a method for comparing quotes rather than as a current price list, and re-check the four pages before you decide anything. If you find a figure here that is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.

What we have deliberately not done is quote a national average for the cost of a missed call. That number appears on several competitor pages, always without a source, and we are not going to launder it by repeating it.