Hey Jodie is a UK AI receptionist company with a London address and prices published in pounds. In a market crowded with US vendors quoting dollars and leaving you to guess at the exchange rate, that is worth something on its own.
Its headline is unlimited minutes across all three tiers, with no overage rate published anywhere. That is a genuinely strong offer, and it is the opposite of the per-minute trap most of this market runs on. We will credit it properly below rather than skate past it.
Remi is an AI front desk built for clinics: it answers calls, books over WhatsApp as well as by phone, sends no-show reminders, takes deposits at the point of booking, applies your no-show fee, refills cancelled slots, chases unpaid invoices and asks happy patients for reviews. It books straight into Google Calendar, Acuity and Cliniko. It starts at £89 a month excluding VAT with 500 talk-minutes, or £149 with 1,000, then 15p a minute on either.
The £49 tier cannot book appointments
This is the most important thing on the page, and it needs to come before any price comparison.
Hey Jodie's entry tier at £49 a month is message-taking. It cannot book appointments and it cannot transfer a call to a human. Both of those capabilities start at the £99 Professional tier. (As published on the Hey Jodie pricing page, checked 24 August 2026.)
So the honest comparison is Hey Jodie at £99 against Remi at £89 or £149, depending on your minutes, not against £49. Anyone putting £49 beside £149 is comparing a message pad with a booking system, and the gap they are showing you is not real. If a caller ringing your clinic needs to come away with an appointment in the diary, or needs to be put through to a human when something goes wrong, £99 is Hey Jodie's actual starting price.
Against Remi Standard that is a £50 monthly difference on published figures, not a £100 one, and against Remi Lite at £89 the £99 tier is the dearer of the two. It changes the argument considerably, and it is the sort of detail a comparison page should lead with rather than bury.
What each one actually does
Both products answer the phone with an AI voice. The difference is what happens next.
Hey Jodie takes the call and, from £99, books an appointment or transfers the caller to a person. Its pricing also describes WhatsApp follow-up on the higher tiers, which is a thread after a call rather than a channel a patient can book through from cold.
Remi treats the call as one entry point among several. A patient can book, reschedule, pay a deposit and get their reminder entirely over WhatsApp without ever ringing you. On the money side it does the jobs a receptionist usually runs out of time for: applying the no-show fee, offering a cancelled 2pm to the next person, and chasing an unpaid invoice with a payment link until it is settled.
That distinction, between answering the call and completing the outcome, is the same one we set out in AI receptionist vs answering service.
Published pricing, side by side
| Plan | Monthly | Included | Overage | Books and transfers? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hey Jodie entry | £49 | Unlimited minutes | None published | No, message-taking only |
| Hey Jodie Professional | £99 | Unlimited minutes | None published | Yes |
| Hey Jodie top tier | £199 | Unlimited minutes | None published | Yes |
| Remi Lite | £89 ex VAT | 500 talk-minutes | 15p per minute | Yes, plus WhatsApp booking, deposits, reminders and invoice chasing |
| Remi Standard | £149 ex VAT | 1,000 talk-minutes | 15p per minute | Yes, plus WhatsApp booking, deposits, reminders and invoice chasing |
VAT, now settled. Hey Jodie's pricing page states that its prices exclude applicable taxes (checked 13 September 2026), so £49, £99 and £199 are ex VAT, the same basis as Remi's £89 Lite and £149 Standard. With VAT at 20% they become £58.80, £118.80 and £238.80; Remi becomes £106.80 and £178.80.
"Unlimited" has a fair-use threshold. Hey Jodie's terms (last updated 2 September 2026) allow unlimited minutes subject to fair use of up to 1,000 Call Events per 30-day billing period, and count every connected call the same way, including spam, wrong numbers, silent and abandoned calls. Above that they may apply temporary metering or rate-limiting, and a customer who exceeds it materially or repeatedly may be asked to move to an Enterprise plan, which starts from £500 a month. Minutes are unlimited; calls are not.
This is a snapshot taken on 24 August 2026. Rate cards change, including ours. Check the current pages before you decide anything on these figures.
Unlimited minutes at real clinic volume
Here is where Hey Jodie's model is strongest, so let us do the arithmetic properly rather than hide from it.
Assumptions, stated so you can challenge them: a 22-day working month, an average call of 2.5 to 3 minutes (dental and practice-management data puts the average at 3 to 5, so this is conservative), and call volumes from primary-care phone statistics, where inbound calls run at roughly 53 per physician per day. Hey Jodie Professional is the comparison tier because the £49 tier cannot book. The Remi formulas are Lite = £89 + £0.15 × (minutes − 500) and Standard = £149 + £0.15 × (minutes − 1,000), whichever is the lower.
| Practice | Minutes/month | Hey Jodie Professional | Remi (best tier) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sole trader, 8 calls/day at 2.5 min | 440 | £99 | £89 (Lite) | £10 in Remi's favour |
| Small clinic, 20 calls/day at 3 min | 1,320 | £99 | £197 (Standard) | £98 |
| Solo GP practice, 50 calls/day at 3 min | 3,300 | £99, but ~1,100 calls is over the 1,000-call fair-use threshold | £494 (Standard) | £395 while fair use holds |
| Four-partner practice, 200 calls/day at 3 min | 13,200 | ~4,400 calls: Enterprise territory, from £500 | £1,979 (Standard) | Not calculable from published prices |
The first row is the exception. Remi Lite is a flat £89 up to 500 minutes and stays under £99 until about 567 minutes a month, so at sole-trader volume Remi is the cheaper of the two. Above that line Hey Jodie takes the lead and never gives it back.
Hey Jodie publishes no overage rate, so up to its fair-use threshold of 1,000 calls in 30 days that column stays flat however long the calls run. Beyond it, their terms allow metering or rate-limiting and a move to Enterprise (from £500 a month), which is why the last row cannot be priced from published figures. Between those two lines the gap is real, and pretending it away would be dishonest. If you take fewer than about 1,000 calls a month and what you need is calls answered and appointments booked, that flat line is a very strong argument and you should weigh it seriously.
Remi's per-minute charge is only worth paying if the extra jobs earn it back. At the four-partner volume, £1,880 a month is roughly the value of a handful of recovered no-shows, a few refilled cancellations and a chunk of aged debt collected. That is a calculation about your numbers, not a slogan. The same arithmetic across other vendors is in our guide to what an AI receptionist costs in the UK.
What Hey Jodie does not publish
These are gaps in the published information, not accusations. Each one is a question to put to them in writing before you commit.
- What happens above fair use. The terms set a threshold of 1,000 calls in 30 days and allow temporary metering or rate-limiting above it, but publish no rate or Enterprise allocation. If you are near that volume, ask what it means for you and get the answer in the contract.
- Which languages the AI speaks. Not published anywhere we could find. If you serve a multilingual patient list, this is not a detail. Remi handles 11 languages on text, with English and Afrikaans on voice.
- Which practice systems it books into. Booking is included from £99, but we found no published list of clinical diaries such as Cliniko or Nookal. Remi books into Google Calendar, Acuity and Cliniko.
- Deposits, no-show fees and waitlist handling. Not published. In fairness, that is true of every one of the ten UK vendors we checked on 24 August 2026, Hey Jodie included.
- Invoice chasing. Also not published, and again not by any of the ten. It remains the clearest capability gap in the whole category.
Answering the call is not the whole job
Every row reflects what each vendor publishes, checked 24 August 2026.
| Capability | Remi | Hey Jodie |
|---|---|---|
| Answers calls 24/7 | Yes | Yes, all tiers |
| Books appointments | Yes | From £99, not on £49 |
| Transfers to a human | Yes, warm transfer | From £99, not on £49 |
| Books into Cliniko or Acuity | Yes | Not published |
| Native booking and messaging | Follow-up threads on higher tiers | |
| No-show reminders | Yes | Not published |
| Deposits at booking | Yes | Not published |
| Applies a no-show fee | Yes | Not published |
| Chases unpaid invoices | Yes (PaidUp) | Not published |
| Cancellation backfill, win-backs, review chasing | Yes | Not published |
| Languages | 11 on text, English and Afrikaans on voice | Not published |
| Minutes | 500 included on Lite, 1,000 on Standard, then 15p | Unlimited, subject to fair use of 1,000 calls per 30 days |
| VAT basis | Ex VAT, stated | Ex VAT, stated |
| Setup | Done for you | Not published |
The WhatsApp row is the one most often misread. A follow-up thread sent after a call is useful, but it is not the same thing as a patient opening WhatsApp on a Sunday evening, being offered three slots, choosing one, paying a deposit and getting a reminder the day before, without a phone call existing at all. That is what native WhatsApp booking means, and it is why we describe Hey Jodie's as follow-up rather than as a booking channel.
Where Hey Jodie is the better choice
There are clear cases, and several of them are strong.
- High call volume with a fixed budget. Unlimited minutes with no published overage is the single best answer in this market to the per-minute problem, up to the fair-use threshold of 1,000 calls in 30 days. On published figures Hey Jodie Professional is cheaper than Remi above roughly 567 talk-minutes a month, and the gap widens as minutes grow because their line stays flat while ours does not. If your practice takes fewer than about 1,000 calls a month and the budget is fixed, that is decisive.
- Unpredictable spikes. A flu surge, a local press mention, a competitor closing down. On a per-minute plan those weeks show up on the invoice. On Hey Jodie they do not.
- You genuinely only need messages taken. If nobody books over the phone, £49 a month is among the cheapest credible options in the UK and Remi has nothing to offer you at that price.
- You want a UK counterparty. A London address, GBP pricing and UK support are real considerations for data questions, contracts and getting someone on the phone in your own time zone.
- Your calls are long. Long consultative calls are exactly what a per-minute meter punishes and an unlimited plan rewards.
To be even-handed about the market: Hey Jodie already publishes its own comparison pages against other vendors. That is a legitimate thing to do, and it means you can and should read both sides. The only defensible position in a contested comparison space is accuracy, which is why every figure here is dated and every gap is labelled "not published" rather than guessed at.
How to choose
Three questions, in this order.
- Do you need booking and transfer? If yes, ignore £49 entirely. Your comparison is £99 against Remi Lite at £89 or Remi Standard at £149, depending on your minutes, subject to the VAT question above.
- How many minutes do you really use? Under roughly 567 minutes a month Remi Lite at £89 is the cheaper of the two; from there to about 1,300 minutes they sit within roughly £100 of each other and capability should decide it. Above that, up to about 1,000 calls a month, Hey Jodie's flat price is a serious financial advantage that capability has to work hard to justify. Beyond 1,000 calls, ask Hey Jodie for an Enterprise quote before comparing.
- Where does your money actually leak? If it leaks through unanswered calls, an unlimited-minutes answering plan fixes it cheaply. If it leaks through no-shows, empty slots after a cancellation, deposits nobody takes and invoices nobody chases, no answering plan touches it, and that is the specific gap Remi exists to close.
Our clinics page shows what that looks like set up for a UK practice, and the GP surgery guide covers the questions specific to a practice list.