Every AI receptionist looks cheap on the pricing page. RingCentral's UK plan is £32 a month. IONOS starts at £39. Hey Jodie starts at £49. Then the calls start arriving, and the bill stops looking like the pricing page.
This guide does the arithmetic the vendors leave out: what a clinic or service business actually uses in minutes, what each pricing model does to your bill at that volume, and the questions worth asking before you sign. All competitor figures are as published on their own pages, checked on 24 August 2026 — rate cards change, so verify before you buy.
The £32 that becomes £520
RingCentral's AI Receptionist is the first result most UK buyers see, and its UK page publishes £32 per account per month. What the headline does not say is that the plan includes 100 minutes. After that it is 40p a minute, billed in 30-second increments rounded up.
One hundred minutes is not very much. At an average call of three minutes, that is roughly 33 calls a month — a little over one a day. A small clinic taking twenty calls a day burns through it in the first week.
This is the shape of the problem. The headline price buys a small allowance; the per-minute rate is where the real cost lives, and it scales with exactly the thing you were hoping to fix.
The four ways UK providers bill
Once you know the model, you can predict the bill. There are four in common use.
| Model | How it works | Who uses it | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per minute | Small included allowance, then a rate per minute | RingCentral (100 min, then 40p), Zoom (100 min), Ivy by Verbalise (£197 + 55p/min) | Cost rises with every call. No ceiling. |
| Per call | Charged per answered call regardless of length | IONOS (£0.49/call Starter, £0.39 Professional) | Cheap for long calls, expensive for lots of short ones |
| Per interaction | A shared pool across calls, texts and chats | Nextiva (100 “resolutions”, then $0.99 each) | 100 resolutions is not 100 calls |
| Capacity | A large bundle of included minutes, low overage | Remi (£89 for 500 min, £149 for 1,000, then 15p), Hey Jodie (unlimited minutes, fair use 1,000 calls a month), 3CX (flat licence) | You pay for headroom you may not use |
Note the honest one in that last row: on a capacity plan, a very light user pays for headroom. Remi's entry tier is £89 for 500 minutes, and RingCentral's £32 plan stays cheaper than that until roughly 242 minutes a month. If you take three calls a week, the per-minute plan is the right buy.
How many minutes you actually use
The number that decides everything is the one nobody puts on a pricing page: your monthly minutes. Published primary-care data puts inbound calls at roughly 53 per physician per day — about 50 a day for a solo practitioner, and over 200 for a four-partner practice. Practice-management data puts the average call at three to five minutes, with about 30 seconds of overhead per call on top.
Multiply that out across a 22-day working month:
| Business | Calls/day | Avg call | Minutes/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sole trader (plumber, electrician) | 8 | 2.5 min | 440 |
| Small clinic or salon | 20 | 3 min | 1,320 |
| Solo GP practice | 50 | 3 min | 3,300 |
| Four-partner practice | 200 | 3 min | 13,200 |
Work out your own figure before you compare anything: calls a day, times your average call length, times your working days. It takes two minutes and it is the only number that matters.
What that costs, in real money
Now put those volumes through the published rates. Remi sells capacity in three sizes, with the same 15p overage on all of them:
| Remi tier | Per month, ex VAT | Included talk-minutes | Beyond that |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | £89 | 500 | 15p/min |
| Standard | £149 | 1,000 | 15p/min |
| Complete | £329 | 2,500 | 15p/min |
Because the overage rate is identical on every tier, growing out of the entry tier is not a cliff. Lite bills £119 at 700 minutes, and by about 900 minutes it reaches £149, which is what Standard costs with 1,000 minutes included. By the time moving up makes sense, the bigger tier is already the cheaper of the two. Complete is the wider bundle rather than simply more minutes, so the table below prices Lite and Standard, which are the like-for-like comparison with a per-minute plan.
The rest of the field: RingCentral UK is £32 with 100 minutes, then 40p. Ivy by Verbalise is £197 plus 55p a minute. A human answering service runs £0.30 to £1.20 a minute; the column below uses 70p, the middle of that range.
| Volume | Remi | RingCentral UK | Ivy by Verbalise | Human @ 70p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 440 min (sole trader) | £89 (Lite) | £168 | £439 | £308 |
| 1,320 min (small clinic) | £197 (Standard) | £520 | £923 | £924 |
| 3,300 min (solo GP) | £494 (Standard) | £1,312 | £2,012 | £2,310 |
| 13,200 min (4-partner) | £1,979 (Standard) | £5,272 | £7,457 | £9,240 |
The pattern is worth sitting with. Very light users are genuinely better off on a per-minute plan: below roughly 242 minutes a month, RingCentral's £32 plan costs less than Remi Lite, and if you take a handful of calls a week you should buy it. Past that crossover the arithmetic turns, and at clinic volume the per-minute plans are two to three times the capacity plan, with the gap still widening. The cheapest plan on the pricing page becomes the most expensive plan on the invoice.
Two caveats, in fairness. RingCentral's 30-second rounding means its real figure runs slightly above the table on short calls. And Remi's prices are quoted excluding VAT, as are IONOS's — check which basis any quote uses before comparing.
The thing the price does not tell you
Cost is the easy half. The harder question is whether the thing can finish the job, and here the published capabilities diverge more sharply than the prices.
- RingCentral lists appointment scheduling as “coming soon” on its own UK page — booking is not verifiably live.
- Zoom needs a separate Zoom Scheduler licence to book, and callers cannot cancel or reschedule during the call.
- 3CX caps each AI call at three minutes, which is short for a booking conversation.
- GoTo Connect publishes no booking, calendar or reminder capability at all.
- IONOS and Hey Jodie both put booking on their second tier, not their entry tier.
And across all ten providers reviewed, none publishes invoice chasing, deposit collection or no-show handling. Only Zoom publishes SMS appointment reminders.
That matters because answering the phone was never the goal. The goal is a booked appointment that the patient turns up to, and an invoice that gets paid. A service that answers and takes a message has moved the work, not removed it — someone still has to ring back, open the diary and type it in.
The add-on trap
Several of the headline prices are not standalone products. They are add-ons to a phone system you also have to buy, and the pricing page rarely leads with that.
- Nextiva publishes $99 a month for its AI receptionist, but it sits on top of a Nextiva seat at $15 to $75 per user per month. And the $99 buys 100 “resolutions” shared across calls, texts and chats, so it is not 100 calls.
- RingCentral's UK plan is presented as a RingEX add-on; the standalone SKU published in the US is not published for the UK.
- GoTo Connect's AI receptionist is an add-on to a GoTo Connect plan, and neither the add-on nor the base plans have published prices.
- 3CX bundles its AI receptionist into the AI edition licence, but you also supply your own paid OpenAI account, billed separately by OpenAI and capped only by a budget you set.
None of that makes them bad products. It does mean the number you compare has to be the number you will actually be invoiced: base plan, plus add-on, plus usage, plus VAT where it applies.
What it looks like over a year
Monthly figures flatten the difference. Annualised, at the small-clinic volume of 1,320 minutes a month, the same choices look like this:
| Option | Per month | Per year | Difference vs Remi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Remi (Standard, £149 + 15p/min) | £197 | £2,364 | — |
| RingCentral UK (£32 + 40p/min) | £520 | £6,240 | +£3,876 |
| Ivy by Verbalise (£197 + 55p/min) | £923 | £11,076 | +£8,712 |
| Human service @ 70p/min | £924 | £11,088 | +£8,724 |
For context, a UK receptionist costs roughly £29,200 a year once employer's National Insurance, the pension minimum and holiday cover are counted, and still goes home at five. Every option in that table is cheaper than a hire. The question is which one stays cheap as you get busier — and that is decided by the billing model, not the headline.
Five questions before you sign
- How many minutes or calls are included, and what is the overage rate? Then multiply by your real volume from the table above.
- How is a call measured? Per minute, per call, per interaction — and is it rounded up? Thirty-second rounding is common and adds up.
- Can it actually book into my diary, and which systems? Ask whether it is live today, not on the roadmap.
- What happens after the booking? Reminders, deposits, no-shows, unpaid invoices — or does that stay on your desk?
- Is the price inc or ex VAT, and is it standalone or an add-on? Several are add-ons that need a base phone plan on top.
If you take one thing from this: ignore the headline and price your own volume. A plan at £32 and a plan at £89 are the same money at about 242 minutes, and over £300 apart by 1,300. The pricing page is written for the smallest possible customer. Do the sum for the business you actually run.