Most answering services are priced for office hours, then sell you the night separately. Understanding that one fact makes the market far easier to read.
The night is usually an add-on
Human answering services run on rotas, and a rota at 3am costs more than a rota at 3pm. So round-the-clock cover is typically sold on top of the base package rather than inside it. Moneypenny, for instance, publishes an extra £35 a month for 24/7 on top of its base fee (from £55 a month, as published on their site. They do not publish a full rate card, so treat "from" prices as a starting point for a conversation rather than a quote).
That is not sharp practice. It reflects a real cost. But it does mean the price you see on the front page is usually a weekday-daytime price, and you should assume nights are extra until told otherwise.
AI services work differently, because there is no rota. Cover is generally included and the cost is driven by minutes used, not by the hour those minutes fall in. Whether that is better depends entirely on what kind of calls you get at night (see below).
When 24/7 actually pays for itself
This is a short calculation and worth doing honestly rather than aspirationally.
- What is one job or booking worth to you? Use your average, not your best.
- How many out-of-hours enquiries do you currently get? Your call log has this. Count calls outside opening hours that you never returned, or returned the next day.
- How many of those would have converted if someone had picked up?
Multiply and compare to the monthly cost. For a trade business where one boiler replacement is worth several hundred pounds, catching a single job a month settles the argument. For a business whose customers only ever ring between nine and five, it will not, and you should not buy it.
The pattern that surprises people: the biggest leak is often not 3am. It is the middle of a busy Tuesday, when the phone rings and everyone is with a customer. If that is your situation, you do not need 24/7. You need someone to answer at all, which is a cheaper problem to solve.
The four things that quietly stop working at night
This is the part the pricing pages do not cover, and it is where out-of-hours cover most often disappoints.
1. Booking turns back into message-taking. Plenty of services book appointments during the day and only take messages after hours, because the daytime booking depends on a person with access to your diary. Ask specifically: can it book at 11pm, into my actual calendar? If the answer is that someone will call back in the morning, you have bought a slower voicemail.
2. The transfer target is asleep. "Transfers to a human" means something different at 2am. Find out what actually happens: is there a night team, does it go to your mobile, or does it quietly fall back to voicemail?
3. Nobody notices when it breaks. A service failing at 3pm gets spotted immediately. Failing at 3am, it may go unnoticed for days. Ask how you would know.
4. The out-of-hours caller is often the most valuable one. Somebody ringing a plumber at midnight, or a hotel from another time zone, has higher intent than the average daytime caller. Treating those calls as second-class (message only, callback tomorrow) inverts the value.
What to check before you buy
- Is 24/7 included or an add-on, and what is the surcharge?
- Can it book out of hours, or only take a message?
- What happens when a caller asks for a person at night?
- Is there a different rate for out-of-hours minutes?
- How do you find out it stopped working?
Test it yourself. Ring the number at 10pm during the trial and behave like an awkward customer. Everything above becomes obvious in ninety seconds.
Where Remi sits
Remi answers at the same standard at 3am as at 3pm, because it is software rather than a rota: no night surcharge, and booking works out of hours exactly as it does in the day, straight into Google Calendar, Acuity or Cliniko. It answers WhatsApp as well as calls, which matters more at night than it does at noon: people who will not leave a voicemail will happily send a message. £149 a month ex VAT, 1,000 talk-minutes included, then 15p a minute, with a 1-week free trial.
The honest limit: Remi is AI. It hands over to a person when a caller asks or when it cannot help, and you should test that handover before relying on it. For genuinely unusual or emotionally difficult night calls, a human service is better and worth its surcharge.
Related reading: what a telephone answering service costs in the UK, AI receptionist vs a human answering service, and what an AI receptionist costs.