Ring…Ring… You're on your back under a vanity with a wrench in one hand.
The phone rings eleven more times before five o'clock. You know you're losing work. So you start looking at answering services, and within ten minutes you've found plans at $25 a month and plans at $1,725 a month, and no clear reason for the difference.
Here's what's behind that spread.
How much does an answering service cost per month?
Most small businesses pay between $150 and $500 a month for an answering service. Below that you're usually looking at an AI service or a very small block of minutes. Above it, you're paying for live human receptionists at higher call volume.
But the monthly price is the least useful number on the page. What decides your actual bill is how the provider counts your calls.
What are the pricing models, and which one costs you more?
There are four, and the same shop can get four very different invoices depending on which one it signs up for.
| Model | How you're billed | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Per-minute | $0.75–$1.75 per minute of agent time | Long calls. A ten-minute leak description costs ten times a hangup. |
| Per-call | A flat fee per answered call | Spam and wrong numbers. Every robocall may be billable. |
| Tiered minutes | Monthly fee for a block, overage above it | Busy months. The overage rate is where the real money is. |
| Flat rate | One fee, no meter | Usually nothing, if it's genuinely flat. Read what's excluded. |
What does a live answering service actually cost?
Ruby is one of the few live receptionist services that publishes its rates, so it's a fair yardstick. As of August 2026, Ruby's plans run $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, $395 for 100, $720 for 200, and $1,725 for 500.
By Ruby's own estimate, a typical call uses about two minutes — but that's an average across law offices, dental practices, and everyone else Ruby serves. A homeowner describing a leak runs longer than a message-take. Your minutes go faster than the estimate suggests, which is the thing to check before you pick a tier.
Overage is where minute plans get expensive, and most providers don't publish those rates at all. Ask for the number before you sign, because your busiest month — the one where an answering service should be earning its keep — is the month it applies.
What does an AI receptionist cost?
Less, and on a flat fee rather than a meter. AI services are generally sold as a monthly price with no per-minute charge, which makes the bill predictable in a way minute bundles never are. Flat pricing also means a busy month costs the same as a slow one — the reverse of how metered plans work.
Our own Kept Voice Agent is priced this way, starting at $99 a month with a 14-day free trial. Same service at every level; only call volume changes.
One distinction worth making, because it's the reason we exist: an answering service takes a message. Kept takes the job. A traditional service collects the caller's information and hands it to you, and then everybody waits. Every handoff adds friction, and every hour of waiting cools the lead.
What makes the bill go up?
Volume, mostly. But these are the line items that surprise people:
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Overage minutes above your included block
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Rounding — ask whether a 40-second call bills as one full minute, and whether hold and transfer time count
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Spam — on per-call and per-minute plans, robocalls and wrong numbers are usually billable
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After-hours and weekend coverage, which some providers charge a premium for
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Add-ons — appointment booking, texts, transcripts, extra numbers
That fourth one matters more for plumbers than most trades. In our Kept Plumbing Call Study, 49.1% of after-hours calls were qualified leads, against 37.4% during business hours. The calls a provider charges you extra to cover are the better calls.
What should you ask before you sign?
Get these in writing, before the first invoice:
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What's the base rate, and exactly what does it cover?
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What's the overage rate, per minute or per call?
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What billing increment do you use?
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Is there a setup fee, and is it refundable?
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What happens at 2 a.m. on a Sunday, and does it cost more?
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What's the cancellation notice period?
Questions Plumbers Ask
Why do answering service prices vary so much?
Because providers meter different things. One bills your talk time, one bills each answered call, one bills a flat fee. Two plans with the same monthly price can produce very different invoices once your call volume moves. Your own call pattern matters more than the sticker price.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a live answering service?
Usually, and the gap widens as volume goes up. Live services are priced around human time, so more calls means a bigger bill. AI services are typically flat, so a busy month costs the same as a slow one. The tradeoff is that automation handles routine calls well and unusual ones less well — test any service against your messiest call before you rely on it.
How many minutes does a small plumbing shop actually use?
Count it rather than guess. Track your inbound calls for three days and take the average, then multiply by 22 working days. At a three-minute average call, 40 calls a month is 120 minutes — already past most entry-level plans.
Does an answering service charge me for spam calls?
On per-call and per-minute plans, yes. A robocall that gets answered is an answered call, and it bills like any other. Your line gets a real share of them, and on a metered plan you're paying a human to pick up a recording about your vehicle's extended warranty.
This is one place AI has a structural advantage. Kept filters spam before it ever reaches you, and a filtered call doesn't cost you anything — there's no meter to run.
What's the cheapest way to get calls answered?
Voicemail, and it's why most plumbers lose the work. A caller with water on the floor doesn't leave a message; they call the next number on the list. The question isn't what's cheapest, it's what a captured job is worth against what the service costs.
Where these numbers come from
Published answering service prices are drawn from vendors' own pricing pages and comparison blogs, not from an industry survey. There's no neutral standard, plans change often, and most of the comparison articles you'll find are written by companies selling a competing service. Ruby's figures above are from its public pricing page as of August 2026. Treat every published number as a starting point and confirm current pricing directly with the provider.
Martha Knaupp is co-founder of Kept, an AI receptionist service for plumbers, contractors, and other local trades on Long Island. A former educator, she built the Kept Plumbing Call Study by analyzing every inbound call to a working plumbing business over five months — the transcripts, not just the totals.