What is an AI receptionist, and what does it actually cost?

If you run a small business, you have probably had the same thought twice this week: someone called, you were busy, and you never found out who it was. An AI receptionist is software that picks up in that moment. It answers the phone or the chat, knows your prices and your opening hours, books or takes a message, and sends you the details.

That is the short version. The longer version is worth reading, because "AI receptionist" is being used to describe about five different products right now, and the price gap between them is enormous.

What it actually does

Think of it as a very well briefed new hire who never sleeps and never has a bad day, but who also has no common sense beyond what you told it.

A working setup handles four things:

• Answering. Phone, website chat, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs — whichever channels you turn on.
• Knowing. It answers from your own information: services, prices, hours, address, parking, cancellation policy, whether you take card, whether you come to the customer or the customer comes to you.
• Capturing. Name, phone number, what they want, when they want it. That is the part that actually makes you money.
• Handing over. When something is out of scope — a complaint, a weird custom job, a person who just wants you — it says so and passes it on instead of improvising.

The last point is the one people underestimate. A receptionist that confidently invents a price is worse than no receptionist at all. Ours is built to say "I do not have that information, let me pass you to the team" rather than guess, and if you build your own, insist on the same behaviour.

What it does not do

It does not replace you. It will not talk an unhappy customer down, it will not judge whether a job is worth doing, and it will not notice that the caller sounds like your best client. What it does is stop the boring 80% from eating your day and stop the after-hours 20% from disappearing.

It also will not fix a business with nothing to say. If your prices are "it depends" and your hours are "when I am around", the AI will sound as vague as your website does. Garbage in, polite garbage out.

The real cost, in numbers

Here is where the marketing gets slippery, so let us be specific.

A human receptionist, part-time, in most of Europe, lands somewhere between 900 and 1,600 EUR a month once you include employer costs. Full-time, more. That person is excellent — and they work about 40 hours out of the 168 in a week.

A traditional answering service typically charges per call or per minute. Somewhere between 0.80 and 2 EUR a minute is common, plus a monthly minimum. Fine at low volume. Painful the month you run an ad campaign.

An AI receptionist is usually a flat monthly subscription. Our own plans start at 29 EUR a month for the Starter tier, 79 EUR for Pro, and 199 EUR for Business, which is roughly where the market sits for products that actually connect to phone numbers rather than just a chat bubble.

There are two costs people forget to ask about:

• Telephony. If the AI answers a real phone number, someone pays for that number and those minutes. Ask whether it is included or billed separately.
• Setup time. Not money, but hours. Expect to spend one afternoon writing down what your business does. Every provider that promises "zero setup" is either guessing on your behalf or handing you a generic script.

So is 29 EUR a month worth it?

Do the arithmetic with your own numbers rather than mine. Take your average job value — say it is 120 EUR. Ask yourself, honestly, how many calls you missed last month. Three? Four? If one of those four turns into a booking, the subscription paid for itself four times over.

That is the whole business case. It is not "AI transformation". It is "the phone gets answered".

Where it does not pay off: if you get two calls a week and you always answer them, buy nothing. If most of your work comes from repeat clients who text you directly, buy nothing. Be suspicious of anyone who tells you every business needs this.

What to look for when comparing

• Does it answer your phone number, or only a chat widget?
• Can you see the full transcript of every conversation afterwards?
• Does it refuse to invent information it does not have?
• Can you change your prices yourself in two minutes, without emailing support?
• What happens outside opening hours — does it say "we are closed" or does it take the booking?
• Is your data yours, and can you export it?

If a demo cannot show you those six things in ten minutes, keep looking.

Getting started without committing

The sensible order is: write down your information first, test the AI in a chat window where nobody can see it, then connect it to a real channel once you are happy with the answers. That way the worst case is you wasted an afternoon, not that a customer got a wrong price.

That is exactly how RecepAI is set up — you build the Business Brain, you test it privately, and you only switch on the phone or WhatsApp when it sounds like you.

Try it free and see what your receptionist sounds like before anyone else hears it.