IONOS sells its AI Receptionist alongside hosting, domains and business email. It answers your calls, and from the middle tier upward it can schedule appointments. The unusual part is the meter: IONOS bills per call, not per minute.
Remi is an AI front desk built for clinics. It answers the phone, but the phone is only one of its channels. It also books over WhatsApp, sends no-show reminders, takes deposits at the point of booking, applies your no-show fee, chases unpaid invoices, refills cancelled slots and asks happy patients for reviews. It books straight into Google Calendar, Acuity and Cliniko.
One thing should be said plainly at the top, because it decides the shape of this whole page: on published list prices IONOS is cheaper than Remi above roughly 567 talk-minutes a month, which is where most clinics sit. Below that line Remi Lite at £89 ex VAT undercuts the £99 IONOS unlimited tier, though a very quiet practice still inside the 100 included calls pays £69 and beats both. If the lowest possible invoice is what you are optimising for and your phone is busy, you can stop reading and buy IONOS. Everything below is about what the difference buys you, and whether your clinic needs it.
What each one actually does
IONOS is a platform product: a call-answering AI attached to a hosting brand, sold self-serve, with appointment scheduling as a feature on the higher tiers. Its job finishes when the call ends.
Remi is an outcome product. Answering the call is the start. What happens afterwards is the point: the appointment lands in the diary, the deposit is taken, the reminder goes out the day before, the no-show fee is applied, the cancelled 2pm is offered to someone on the waiting list, and the unpaid invoice gets chased until it is paid.
If your problem is "the phone rings out at lunchtime", both products solve it. If your problem is "we lose money to no-shows, empty slots and invoices nobody chases", only one of them is aimed at that.
Per call, not per minute, and why that cuts both ways
Almost every AI receptionist in the UK bills per minute. IONOS does not. On the Starter tier you get 30 calls a month and pay £0.49 for each additional call. On Professional you get 100 calls and pay £0.39 for each one after that. The top tier is unlimited calls. (Pricing as published on the IONOS AI Receptionist product page, checked 24 August 2026.)
Under that model a 20-second call costs exactly the same as a ten-minute one. Whether that is a bargain or a penalty depends entirely on what your calls look like.
- If your calls are long, per-call billing is excellent value. A physiotherapy clinic taking detailed new-patient enquiries at six or seven minutes a call pays the same £0.39 as a takeaway confirming an order. There is no clock running while a nervous patient explains their symptoms.
- If your calls are short, you pay a premium. "Are you open on Saturday?" is a 20-second call. Under per-call billing it costs £0.39. Under Remi's per-minute model the same call is about a third of a minute, roughly 5p at the 15p overage rate, and nothing at all while you are inside your included minutes, 500 on Lite or 1,000 on Standard.
Clinics get a lot of short calls: opening hours, parking, "has my referral come through", "can I move Thursday". Tally a normal week and note how many calls ran under a minute. That one number tells you which meter you want.
The fair summary is that per-call billing is the more predictable of the two. Your bill depends on a number you can count, not on how chatty your callers are.
What each one costs
| Plan | Monthly (ex VAT) | Included | Overage | Books appointments? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS Starter | £39 | 30 calls | £0.49 per call | No |
| IONOS Professional | £69 | 100 calls | £0.39 per call | Yes |
| IONOS top tier | £99 | Unlimited calls | None | Yes |
| Remi Lite | £89 | 500 talk-minutes | 15p per minute | Yes, plus deposits, reminders, WhatsApp and invoice chasing |
| Remi Standard | £149 | 1,000 talk-minutes | 15p per minute | Yes, plus deposits, reminders, WhatsApp and invoice chasing |
VAT, stated explicitly. The IONOS figures above exclude VAT, which is how IONOS publishes them. Remi's £89 Lite and £149 Standard also exclude VAT. The two therefore compare like for like on the same basis, which is not something you can assume in this market. With VAT at 20% the IONOS tiers become £46.80, £82.80 and £118.80; Remi becomes £106.80 and £178.80.
Promotional pricing. IONOS runs aggressive first-term promotional pricing across its range, and an IONOS newsroom release quotes launch prices below the standard rates above. The number at checkout may well be lower for the first term and then renew at the standard rate. Budget on the standard rate and read the renewal terms before you sign.
All of this is a snapshot taken from the live IONOS product page on 24 August 2026. Rate cards change. Check the current page before you decide anything on these numbers, and do the same with ours.
The maths at real clinic volume
Here are the assumptions, stated so you can argue with them. A 22-day working month. Average call length of 2.5 to 3 minutes, which sits at the low end of the 3-to-5-minute range in dental and practice-management data. Call volumes drawn from primary-care phone statistics, where inbound calls run at roughly 53 per physician per day. We use the IONOS Professional tier as the baseline because the £39 Starter cannot book appointments.
The two formulas: IONOS = £69 + £0.39 × (calls − 100), capped by the £99 unlimited tier. Remi Lite = £89 + £0.15 × (minutes − 500) and Remi Standard = £149 + £0.15 × (minutes − 1,000), whichever is the lower.
| Practice | Calls/month | Minutes/month | IONOS (best tier) | Remi (best tier) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sole trader, 8 calls/day at 2.5 min | 176 | 440 | £98.64 | £89 (Lite) |
| Small clinic, 20 calls/day at 3 min | 440 | 1,320 | £99 | £197 (Standard) |
| Solo GP practice, 50 calls/day at 3 min | 1,100 | 3,300 | £99 | £494 (Standard) |
| Four-partner practice, 200 calls/day at 3 min | 4,400 | 13,200 | £99 | £1,979 (Standard) |
There is a crossover worth knowing. £69 + £0.39 × (n − 100) reaches £99 at about 177 calls a month. Above that, the unlimited tier is the cheaper choice and your IONOS bill stops moving entirely. Practically every clinic is above 177 calls a month, so for most readers the real IONOS price is £99 flat, ex VAT.
So IONOS is cheaper at every line in that table bar the first, and the gap widens as you grow. We are not going to dress that up. The one place it runs the other way is the low end: Remi Lite is a flat £89 up to 500 minutes and stays under the £99 unlimited tier until about 567 minutes a month. Above that, IONOS wins on price and keeps winning.
What is worth doing instead is putting the difference next to what it is meant to earn. At the four-partner volume the gap is £1,880 a month. A clinic that size loses considerably more than that to no-shows, unfilled cancellations and invoices nobody has time to chase. Whether Remi closes enough of that gap is a question about your numbers, not ours. Our guide to what an AI receptionist costs in the UK walks through the same arithmetic with other vendors.
What the £39 tier cannot do
Appointment scheduling is not included on the £39 Starter tier. It starts at £69 Professional.
This matters more than it looks, because £39 is the number that appears in search results and comparison round-ups. A clinic that buys at £39 has bought a call answerer, not a booking system, and every caller who wants an appointment still ends up as a message someone has to ring back. If you want the AI to put anything in your diary, your real IONOS starting price is £69 ex VAT, or £82.80 including VAT.
Thirty included calls is also a small allowance: a solo practitioner taking eight calls a day passes it inside the first week of the month, and every call after that is £0.49. Remi has no equivalent split. Booking, WhatsApp, reminders, deposits and invoice chasing are in every voice tier, including the £89 Lite; the tiers differ only in how many talk-minutes are included.
Answering a call is not the same as finishing the job
This is the section that actually decides the comparison. Every row below reflects what each vendor publishes, checked on 24 August 2026; the calendar and call-forwarding rows were re-checked on 13 September 2026.
| Capability | Remi | IONOS AI Receptionist |
|---|---|---|
| Answers calls 24/7 | Yes | Yes |
| Books appointments | Yes, on every voice tier | From £69 Professional |
| Books into Cliniko or Acuity | Yes | Not published |
| Books into Google Calendar | Yes | Yes, from £69 (also Outlook, Cal.com and Calendly) |
| WhatsApp booking and messaging | Yes, native | Not published |
| No-show reminders | Yes | Not published |
| Takes a deposit at booking | Yes | Not published |
| Applies a no-show fee | Yes | Not published |
| Chases unpaid invoices | Yes (PaidUp) | Not published |
| Refills cancellations, win-backs, review chasing | Yes | Not published |
| Passes a call to a human | Yes, warm transfer | Call forwarding: 1 number on £39, 5 on £69, unlimited on £99 |
| Billing unit | Per minute (500 included on Lite, 1,000 on Standard) | Per call (30 / 100 / unlimited) |
| Setup | Done for you | Self-serve |
"Not published" means exactly that. It is not a claim that IONOS cannot do it; it means IONOS does not say so on the pages we checked, and you should ask them directly rather than take our word or theirs.
Two rows deserve spelling out. Invoice chasing: we checked ten UK AI receptionist vendors on 24 August 2026 and not one publishes it, yet for most clinics it is the most avoided admin job in the building. WhatsApp: a large share of patients would rather message than ring, and a WhatsApp thread is where a reminder, a deposit link or a rebooking prompt actually gets read.
There is also the clinical-systems question. If your diary lives in Cliniko or Nookal, a receptionist that cannot write to it generates callbacks instead of bookings. That is the same distinction we draw in AI receptionist vs answering service.
Where IONOS is the better choice
There are several real cases, and a comparison page that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
- Budget is the binding constraint at volume. £99 ex VAT for unlimited calls is a genuinely good price. Past roughly 567 talk-minutes a month it is less than anything Remi charges: £50 a month less at 1,000 minutes, and far more than that above it. At the other end, a practice under the 100-call Professional allowance pays £69 and beats Remi Lite too. If Remi Standard is not affordable this quarter and your phone is busy, this is not a close call.
- Your calls are long. Per-call billing rewards exactly the calls that punish a per-minute vendor.
- You want a bill you can predict to the penny. Above roughly 177 calls a month the unlimited tier makes your cost a fixed line item. No overage, no minute-watching, no surprise in a busy month.
- You are already an IONOS customer. If your domain, hosting and business email are there already, one supplier and one invoice has real administrative value.
- You only need calls answered. If nobody books over the phone and you just need messages captured out of hours, the £39 Starter is one of the cheapest credible options in the UK.
- You prefer to set it up yourself. IONOS is self-serve. Remi is configured for you, which some buyers want and others find slower to start.
How to choose
Three questions settle it.
- Does a caller need to leave the call with an appointment in the diary? If yes, Starter is out and your comparison is £69 or £99 against Remi Lite at £89 or Remi Standard at £149, depending on your minutes. If your diary is Cliniko or Nookal, ask IONOS in writing whether they write to it.
- How long is your average call? Mostly under a minute favours per-minute billing. Mostly over four minutes favours per-call billing, decisively.
- What is your no-show rate and your unpaid-invoice balance? If both are near zero and you are well past 567 minutes a month, the extra £50 a month and up is hard to justify and IONOS is the sensible buy. If a tenth of your appointments do not turn up and your aged debtors list runs to a page, that is the gap Remi is built to close.
Our clinics page sets out what a full front desk looks like for a UK practice, and the GP surgery guide covers the practice-specific questions.