"How much is an AI receptionist" is a fair question with an annoying answer: it depends on how it is priced, and there are three completely different ways to price it. A number that looks cheap on one model is the expensive one once your phone actually rings.
So before the pounds, the models — because that is where the real cost lives. Then the published UK rate cards, including the human answering services people usually compare against, with links to the pages the numbers came from.
The three ways AI receptionists are priced
Per-minute. You pay for talk time. Cheap if you take a handful of short calls a week, and genuinely the right choice at very low volume. The catch is that it is unpredictable, and it quietly punishes the calls you most want — a caller who needs a proper booking, or an elderly patient who takes their time, costs you more than a wrong number that hangs up.
Per-call. A flat fee for each answered call, regardless of length. Easier to forecast than per-minute, and fair when your calls are short and transactional. It gets expensive if you field a lot of quick "are you open?" calls that a human would barely count.
Flat monthly subscription. A fixed price, usually with a bundle of included talk-minutes and a per-minute rate above that. The most predictable, and usually the best value once you have steady call volume — you are buying a front desk, not metering a utility.
The pattern in the UK market is fairly clean: the AI-first providers publish flat monthly prices, and the human answering services meter minutes. That single difference explains most of the price gap below.
What AI-only services charge in the UK
Broadly, £20 to £300 a month, and the published rate cards bear that out:
- Entry tier, roughly £10–£20 a month. Team-Connect publishes £9.99/month for a UK number and 50 incoming minutes with no AI allowance at all, and £19.99/month for 250 incoming minutes with 30 AI minutes. At this price you are buying a phone number with a little automation attached, not a receptionist.
- The working middle, roughly £49–£199 a month. Hey Jodie publishes £49, £99 and £199 tiers, all advertised with unlimited minutes and no per-call charges, under a fair-use threshold of 1,000 calls a month in its terms. This is where a service that genuinely answers, qualifies and books tends to sit.
- The top of the AI-only band, roughly £200–£330 a month. Team-Connect's top published tier is £199.99/month for 1,500 incoming and 750 AI minutes with 24/7 human backup. Above about £330 you are usually paying for multi-site, deeper integrations, or a human team behind the AI.
Two things to hold on to. First, check whether minutes are metered or unlimited — an unlimited plan at £99 and a 30-minute plan at £99 are not the same product. Second, check whether the quoted price includes VAT: the UK standard rate is 20%, so a £149 plan is £178.80 gross if the provider quotes ex-VAT and you cannot reclaim it.
What the human alternatives cost
This is the comparison most people are actually making, and it is where the numbers separate.
AnswerConnect UK is the useful benchmark because it publishes a full rate card rather than a "from" price:
| Plan (AnswerConnect UK) | Included minutes | Per month | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budget | 25 minutes | £45 | £1.85/min |
| Budget | 50 minutes | £89 | £1.85/min |
| Entry | 150 minutes | £205 (+£49.99 setup) | £1.75/min |
| Standard | 350 minutes | £395 (+£49.99 setup) | £1.75/min |
| Mid | 1,050 minutes | £1,135 | £1.75/min |
Read the middle row again: £395 a month buys 350 minutes, which is under twelve minutes of talk time a day. Go over and it is £1.75 a minute. That is not a criticism of the service — you are paying trained people to speak to your customers, and that is what people cost — but it is the structural reason a metered human service and a flat AI subscription end up an order of magnitude apart at volume.
The other well-known names are harder to price because they do not publish:
- Moneypenny — no published rate card; pricing is quoted after a conversation about your call volume.
- alldayPA — its own "pricing packages" page carries no prices, only a quote request. Its stated model is pay per call or per minute, your choice.
- Smith.ai — US-based but widely used by UK firms, and it does publish: $300 a month for 30 calls, rising to $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300, with overage at $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 per call respectively.
If a provider will not put a number on a page, treat the quote as the start of a negotiation and ask for the per-minute rate, the included bundle, the setup fee, the minimum term and the notice period before you compare anything.
What the price should include — check the list
The sticker price means little until you know what is behind it. Before you sign up, confirm which of these are included rather than extra:
- Out of hours. The whole point is the 128 hours a week nobody is at the desk. Round-the-clock cover should be included, not a premium tier or a paid add-on.
- Included minutes and the overage rate. The two numbers that decide what you actually pay. Run them against your real call volume, not your best month.
- Your diary and tools. Does it book straight into your calendar or practice system, and can you keep your existing number?
- WhatsApp and missed-call text-back. Every missed call turning into an instant message is where a lot of the recovered revenue actually comes from.
- Reminders and rescheduling. The features that prevent no-shows rather than just answering the phone.
- Setup. Included, or a separate fee? AnswerConnect's published card, for instance, adds £49.99 on two of its tiers.
- Minimum term and notice period. A 30-day rolling contract and a 12-month tie-in are very different products at the same monthly price.
- UK GDPR. Call recordings and patient or client details are personal data, and you remain the controller. You need a written processor contract with the provider, and you should know where the data is stored and for how long. The ICO's guidance on controllers and processors is the place to check what that contract has to cover.
What Remi costs in the UK
For transparency, since this is our blog — here is our own rate card, on the same terms we have just asked you to demand of everyone else.
| Plan | Per month | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| PaidUp | £19 | Invoice chasing over WhatsApp and email. No phone answering. |
| Basic | £49 | On the desk — WhatsApp booking, reminders, missed-call recovery. |
| Lite | £89 | The AI receptionist for a lighter call load. 500 talk-minutes included (about 19 minutes a day), then 15p a minute. |
| Standard | £149 | The AI receptionist: answers the phone, books into your diary. 1,000 talk-minutes included (about 38 minutes a day), then 15p a minute. |
| Complete | £329 | Everything, plus the growth engine. 2,500 talk-minutes included, then 15p a minute. |
1-week free trial, no setup fee, cancel anytime.
The number worth comparing is the effective rate. Standard works out at about 15p a minute all-in across its included bundle, the same as the overage rate, so the bill scales smoothly rather than stepping. AnswerConnect's published 1,050-minute plan is £1,135, or roughly £1.08 a minute, with £1.75 a minute above it. Those are not like-for-like — theirs is trained people, ours is software — and for a caller who needs genuine human judgement, theirs is the better answer. For "can I move Thursday to Friday?", which is most calls, it is an expensive way to buy a diary change.
The comparison that actually matters
The instinct is to compare an AI receptionist with other AI receptionists. The more useful comparison is with the thing it replaces part of: a hire.
A UK receptionist costs about £29,200 a year once employer's National Insurance and the pension minimum are added to the £25,578 advertised average — before recruitment, holiday cover and turnover — and covers roughly 40 of the 168 hours in a week. An AI receptionist is not priced against that person. It is priced against the hours that person cannot work. That is why, for the phone specifically, the automated option wins on cost so clearly, and why it is a poor substitute for in-person, walk-in front-desk work.
So is it worth it?
If your problem is specifically the phone — calls going unanswered, out-of-hours enquiries dying in voicemail, no capacity to hold a caller while you are with someone else — then at £49 to £149 a month an AI receptionist usually pays for itself in the bookings it catches, often in the first fortnight. A practice, a salon, or a trade that lives by the diary is the clearest fit.
If your front desk is mostly in person, hire the person. If your calls genuinely need human judgement and there are not many of them, a metered human service at £45 to £205 a month is a perfectly sensible answer. And if it is both, do what most businesses land on: keep the human for the room, and put something on the phone so they are not interrupted every four minutes.
The one thing not to do is choose on the headline number alone. Ask for the per-minute rate, the included minutes, the setup fee and the notice period, run them against your real call volume, and compare the result — not with another AI, but with the hours a person cannot cover.
Third-party prices in this post were taken from each provider's own published pricing page in August 2026 and will change. Where a provider does not publish prices, that is stated rather than estimated. Remi's prices are ours and are shown excluding any applicable VAT.