Most UK businesses looking at an answering service want one number: what will this cost me a month? It is a harder question than it should be, because the providers bill in three different ways and only some of them publish a rate card at all.
Here is what the UK market actually charges in 2026, taken from published pricing pages, and how to work out your own number.
The three ways answering services bill
Before comparing any two prices, work out which of these you are looking at. They are not comparable on headline price.
- Per minute, with an included allowance. A monthly fee buys a bundle of minutes; everything past it is charged per minute. This is how most AI and phone-system providers bill.
- Per call. You pay a flat amount per call regardless of length. A twenty-second wrong number costs the same as a ten-minute booking.
- Per month, quoted. Human services largely work this way. You get a "from" price and a conversation.
The trap is the included allowance. A low monthly fee with a small bundle is a low price only if your phone barely rings.
What the AI and platform services publish
These are the ones you meet first in search results, because they are phone-system companies with big marketing budgets. Prices below were read from their own UK pricing pages on 24 August 2026. Treat them as a snapshot and check current rates.
| Provider | Monthly | Included | Beyond that |
|---|---|---|---|
| RingCentral AIR | £32 per account | 100 minutes | £0.40/min, 30-second increments rounded up |
| IONOS | £39 / £69 / £99 ex VAT | 30 / 100 / unlimited calls | £0.49 / £0.39 per call |
| Hey Jodie | £49 / £99 / £199 | "Unlimited minutes" (fair use: 1,000 calls a month) | None published |
| Moneypenny AI | from £25/mo | Not published | Not published |
Two things worth knowing before you use that table.
RingCentral's £32 is the clearest example of the allowance trap in the market. One hundred included minutes is roughly 33 calls of three minutes. A small clinic doing 20 calls a day burns through it in the first week. At 500 minutes a month you are paying about £192, not £32.
IONOS bills per call, not per minute, and its prices exclude VAT. Per-call billing is genuinely better if your calls are long, and genuinely worse if you get a lot of short ones. Also note the £39 tier does not include appointment booking.
What the human services publish
Less, is the short answer. Human answering services overwhelmingly quote rather than publish.
- Moneypenny publishes "from" figures only from £55 a month for its human service, with 24/7 cover an extra £35 a month. There is no full rate card on the site. They are also a hybrid, with AI escalating to their own human PAs, so they are not a like-for-like comparison with either category.
- Answer.co.uk publishes from £99 a month.
- AnswerConnect does publish properly: £395 for 350 minutes, £1,135 for 1,050 minutes, and £1.75 a minute beyond that.
- Ivy by Verbalise, aimed at clinical settings, publishes £197 a month plus 55p a minute.
Taken together, published UK human answering rates work out at roughly £0.30 to £1.20 a minute. That is the number to hold in your head when someone quotes you a monthly fee without an allowance attached.
Work out your own number
The only comparison that means anything uses your call volume. Two figures give you it:
- Calls per day: count a normal week, not your quietest.
- Average call length: three minutes is a reasonable default for a booking conversation.
Multiply: calls per day × minutes per call × 21 working days. A practice taking 20 calls a day at three minutes is doing about 1,320 minutes a month.
Now apply each provider's rate. At that volume, RingCentral's £32 headline becomes about £520 a month once the 100 included minutes run out. That is not a criticism of RingCentral specifically. It is what per-minute pricing does at real volume, and almost every provider in the category is built the same way.
What the price should include: the checklist
Cheap tiers get cheap by removing things. Before comparing, confirm each of these is on the plan you would actually buy:
- Appointment booking, not just message-taking. IONOS does not include it on the £39 tier; Hey Jodie's £49 tier can neither book appointments nor transfer calls. Both start at £99.
- Transfer to a human when the caller needs one.
- Out-of-hours cover. Often priced separately. Moneypenny charges £35 a month extra for 24/7.
- Your actual calendar, not a generic one. A service that cannot write into the diary you already use is creating retyping, not removing it.
- What happens at overage: the rate, and whether short calls are rounded up.
If a provider will not put a number against your expected volume, that is itself the answer.
Where Remi sits
We publish ours because the whole argument above depends on being able to see it. Remi is £149 a month ex VAT with 1,000 talk-minutes included, then 15p a minute, a 1-week free trial, no setup fee. There is a smaller tier from £19 a month, and a £89 option with 500 minutes.
At the 1,320-minute example above, that is about £197 a month, with booking, WhatsApp and transfer included rather than tiered.
The honest caveat: Remi is AI, not a human team. If your calls are genuinely unusual, emotionally difficult, or need judgement rather than information, a human service will handle them better and you should buy one. We wrote about where each of them actually wins rather than pretending there is one answer.
One thing no provider in the table above publishes, though: chasing your unpaid invoices. Answering the phone is half of a front desk. Getting paid is the other half.
Related reading: how much an AI receptionist costs in the UK, what a receptionist really costs to employ, and AI receptionist pricing per minute.