Ruby

Plans and pricing

Understand how Ruby charges before anything else. Not per call. Per receptionist minute. That one fact decides whether Ruby is the cheapest good option on your list or twice the price of the right one, and it turns on how long your calls run.

Keep reading if the phone is how you get paid and a missed call is worth hundreds of dollars. If your phone rings four times a day, the floor here is $250 a month, so skip to the alternatives. This review is part of our resources directory: our team did the research and the price checking, we used AI to help organize what needed covering, and every opinion is ours.

Start with what Ruby counts. A receptionist minute is not a call. Per Ruby's help center, the clock starts when a receptionist picks up and stops when the call is transferred, sent to voicemail, or over, plus the time spent writing your message afterward. Hold time counts. Minutes bill in 60-second increments rounded up, so a 12-second conversation costs a full minute. Calls under ten seconds are free. Solicitors, hang-ups, and wrong numbers burn minutes too.

The public pricing page shows four tiers. Ruby's help center publishes all ten, plus the overage rates the pricing page omits. Both agree where they overlap. Everything is monthly, and the per-included-minute column is our arithmetic on Ruby's numbers.

• Call Ruby 50: minutes 50, per month $250, per included minute $5.00, overage per extra minute $5.40.

• Call Ruby 100: minutes 100, per month $395, per included minute $3.95, overage per extra minute $4.50.

• Call Ruby 200: minutes 200, per month $720, per included minute $3.60, overage per extra minute $4.40.

• Call Ruby 350: minutes 350, per month $1,210, per included minute $3.46, overage per extra minute $4.25.

• Call Ruby 500: minutes 500, per month $1,725, per included minute $3.45, overage per extra minute $4.00.

• Call Ruby 750: minutes 750, per month $2,550, per included minute $3.40, overage per extra minute $3.85.

• Call Ruby 1,000: minutes 1,000, per month $3,350, per included minute $3.35, overage per extra minute $3.65.

• Call Ruby 1,500: minutes 1,500, per month $4,945, per included minute $3.30, overage per extra minute $3.50.

• Call Ruby 2,000: minutes 2,000, per month $6,400, per included minute $3.20, overage per extra minute $3.40.

• Call Ruby 2,500: minutes 2,500, per month $7,875, per included minute $3.15, overage per extra minute $3.30.

Now turn minutes into calls. Ruby's help center puts a typical inbound call at around 2 receptionist minutes. At that average, $250 buys about 25 calls, or $10 a call. The 100-minute plan is about 50 calls at $7.90 each, the 200-minute plan about 100 calls at $7.20.

Unused minutes do not roll over. Overage lands on your next invoice, and Ruby emails you at 85% and 100% of your allowance. Upgrades apply to the current cycle whenever you ask. Downgrades are the slow direction: outside an initial three-cycle calibration window, you must sit on one plan for three consecutive billing periods before moving down.

Chat is a separate purchase, not a feature of your phone plan. Our old summary of Ruby got this wrong. Managed website chat runs from $143 for 10 chats up to $945 for 100, billed per engaged chat with its own overage rate. Bundling takes 20% off the chat side, putting 10 chats at $115, but that price is added to your receptionist plan rather than replacing it. Phone plus chat therefore starts at $365 a month.

Contract terms are genuinely clean. Month to month, no long-term commitment, cancellation effective at the end of the current billing period. First-time customers get a refund inside 21 days or 500 receptionist minutes, whichever comes first, and 500 minutes would take ten months on the entry plan, so 21 days is the real window. One cost hides: credit card payments carry a 3% processing fee, $7.50 a month on the entry plan. ACH or check avoids it.

Coverage is 24/7/365 with no separate fee for the hours, though the hours are not free anyway, because after-hours calls come out of the same minute bucket. Cutting your live answering hours cuts your bill, since calls landing on after-hours voicemail are not billed at all. Spanish answering costs nothing extra, but Ruby's own pages disagree on whether it runs around the clock or weekdays only, so pin that down if it matters.

Why consider it

Your calls are short. Per-minute pricing rewards a business whose calls are 90-second screenings: is this a real lead, where are you, someone will call you back. A Chicago plumber taking 80 of those a month lands near the 200-minute plan at about $7.20 a captured call.

Nights and weekends without hiring for them. A contractor who quotes emergency work at 9pm cannot staff a phone at 9pm. Ruby answers live at 9pm on the plan you already bought, with no premium tier gating the hours, and it will host your published number for free so you stop handing out a personal mobile.

The reviews hold up. Across the two sources big enough to trust, Ruby averages 4.7 out of 5 on 1,187 reviews: 4.6 on Trustpilot across 849 and 4.8 on the App Store across 338. Its G2 and Capterra listings score lower on about a dozen reviews each, too few to count. Ruby credits 120 hours of training in empathetic service, conflict resolution, and active listening before a receptionist takes a live call. That is their number, not an audited one. The reviews support consistency. Nobody can prove a head-to-head win over a cheaper answering service on transfers or message quality, because no service publishes that.

Where it falls short

Long calls wreck the math. If your calls involve real intake, a form, a case description, insurance details, per-minute billing is the wrong meter. A six-minute intake call on the 200-minute plan costs about $21.60. Smith.ai charges per call instead: $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90, $2,100 for 300, which is $10, $9, and $7 a call however long each one runs, with intake and a handoff into your CRM. Time four of your own calls with a stopwatch before choosing.

The floor is $250 a month. If your phone rings a dozen times a month, no live service is the right answer yet. Quo, formerly OpenPhone includes phone menus on its Business plan at $33 per user monthly or $23 annually, and transcribes voicemail on every plan. A menu that sorts quotes from emergencies, with transcripts to your phone, buys most of what a receptionist does at a tenth of the cost.

You cannot interview your receptionist. Ruby uses a trained shared pool, not a person assigned to you. That is why it scales, and it is the opposite of how we would tell you to hire. More on that below.

Nobody here is local to you. Ruby is headquartered in Portland with employees working remotely across 13 states. It does not publish the full list, and its Illinois page claims no Illinois-based receptionists. Whoever answers "good morning, Belmont Roofing" has probably never driven Belmont Avenue. For callers who expect neighborhood knowledge, that matters.

A note from Lobi Space management

Twenty-plus years of running businesses here, including using remote employees and live reception services, and one rule keeps holding: always interview whoever is going to pick up your phone. That person is the first impression of everything you have built. With a service like Ruby you cannot interview the pool, so do the closest thing available. Ask to hear recordings on the sales call. Place test calls and listen to how they sound answering as your company. Write the greeting and the screening script yourself, then check that it is followed.

The harder question is whether you need this at all yet. Starting out, an auto attendant or an AI answering setup can carry you a long way, and there is no better person to answer a phone call than the owner, the sales manager, or the person in charge. You know the answer to the question the caller is actually asking. You can close. A receptionist can do neither. So do not buy one because a colleague at a networking breakfast raves about theirs. Not every business is designed to be the same, and their call volume is not yours.

Decide it the way you decide anything here. Write down every process you need in order to succeed, then ask whether answering the phone in business hours is truly one you cannot carry. If it is, Ruby is a strong answer. Ruby also has a discounted platform-only plan with direct-to-voicemail service if you want the app and the number without live answering. Ask what that costs, because it is not published.

The short version

Ruby bills receptionist minutes, rounded up to the full minute, hold time and message writing included. Ten plans, $250 for 50 minutes up to $7,875 for 2,500, which is $5.00 down to $3.15 per included minute. At Ruby's two-minute average that is about $10 a call at the entry tier, $7.20 at the 200-minute tier. Chat is separate, from $143, added on top. Coverage is 24/7, but the hours still eat minutes. No contract, and 21 days to get your money back. Short calls favor Ruby, long intake calls favor per-call pricing like Smith.ai, and a quiet phone favors an auto attendant and your own voice.

One last thing. Receptionists, software, seminars, tools: all worth having, none of it works alone. Without a road map, a goal, and a plan, you are shooting in the dark or chasing a dream. Build the plan, then buy the pieces it asks for. Our plans are meant to fit in that order too.

Blunt questions, straight answers

So what does one phone call actually cost me? About $10 on the entry plan, at Ruby's own figure of roughly two receptionist minutes per inbound call. Call it $7.90 on the 100-minute plan and $7.20 on the 200-minute plan. If your calls run long, multiply by your own average, because you are buying minutes and not calls.

Do I get billed when a robocall gets through? Yes. Ruby bills any live-answered call of ten seconds or more, solicitors, hang-ups, and wrong numbers included, because a receptionist still had to handle it. Calls under ten seconds are free, so are calls outside your live answering hours, and Ruby's free robocall filtering keeps automated calls off the bill. Ask for it on day one.

Ruby or Smith.ai? Time your calls. Averaging under two minutes, Ruby is cheaper and the answering is excellent. Averaging three or four, especially with real intake to push into a CRM, Smith.ai at a flat $9 to $10 a call stops punishing you for thorough conversations. Both are month to month, so testing beats agonizing.

I only get about fifteen calls a month. What should I do? Answer them yourself, and put an auto attendant in front of the line so the ones you miss get sorted and transcribed instead of lost. That is $19 to $33 a month rather than $250. Revisit a live service when missed calls cost more than the plan does. A virtual office or business mailbox covers the address side meanwhile.

Why it made our list

• The receptionists are consistently well trained, which shows up as fewer awkward transfers and better notes than the budget answering services.
• Chat is a separate product rather than part of a phone plan, so phone plus chat starts around $365 a month once you bundle both.
• You pay a premium here, and it is worth it for businesses where the first impression on the phone is most of the sale.