Smith.ai

Plans and pricing

You pay by the call, not by the minute. That single choice shapes everything else, and it is why the service sits where it does in our resources directory. It suits businesses where one missed call is a lost job: law firms, contractors, clinics, anyone whose caller will just dial the next name on the list. It does not suit a fair number of people reading this, including anyone who could pick up the phone themselves.

Our team checked every price below on Smith.ai's own pages today. We used AI to help organize what needed covering. Every opinion is ours.

Smith.ai now sells two things on two pricing pages. Virtual Receptionists is the live-human service, AI Receptionist the automated one. Not tiers of one product: they price differently, cancel differently, and count spam differently.

Virtual Receptionists, per the receptionist pricing page, checked September 2026. Month to month, no setup fee.

• Starter: $300 a month for 30 calls. $10.00 a call. Calls past 30 cost $11.50 each.

• Basic: $810 a month for 90 calls. $9.00 a call. Overage $10.50.

• Pro: $2,100 a month for 300 calls. $7.00 a call. Overage $8.50.

• Enterprise: custom, quoted on a call.

Coverage is 24 hours on every tier at no premium, so a call at 2 pm and a call at 2 am cost the same. The overage rate is where the money hides. Every tier charges more for a call over your allotment than for one inside it: about 15% more on Starter, 17% on Basic, 21% on Pro.

Which sets up the math nobody publishes. Coming off Starter, overage stays cheaper than upgrading until roughly 74 calls a month, the point where Starter plus overage hits $817.50 against Basic's $810. From Basic, the crossover to Pro lands near 213 calls. Committing to 12 months takes 10% off, making Starter $270 and $9.00 a call.

AI Receptionist, per the AI pricing page, runs the same per-call logic at roughly a fifth of the price. Free gets 25 real calls a month at $0, with transcripts, qualification, and scheduling, then $3.00 a call after that. Paid tiers start at $150 for 75 calls.

Now the part that turns a $300 quote into a bigger bill. Most of what people picture when they picture a receptionist is a per-call add-on: appointment booking $1.50, recording and transcription $0.25, a Slack or SMS transfer notification $0.50, payment collection $1.00, extended intake $1.50.

So the honest version of "calls book straight into your calendar" is that they do, at $1.50 every time, and per the reasonable use policy it needs a public booking link like Calendly rather than a direct write into a private calendar. The CRM half holds up better: your first CRM, Zapier, or Make connection is free, additional ones cost $0.50 a call, and Salesforce, HubSpot, and Clio are named. Worth settling before you sign, though. Smith.ai/receptionists lists booking, recording, and payment collection as included with every plan, while the pricing page bills all three by the call.

What counts as a billable call. Length does not matter, so a 40-second call and a 9-minute call cost the same. Per the reasonable use policy, every call covers finding out what the caller needs and taking their details, and paid plans add five short-answer intake questions plus qualification against your criteria. Question six onward is a $1.50 add-on capped at two minutes. Spam and wrong numbers are free as long as your forwarded line passes Caller ID, and a blocked call is not charged. The AI is less generous: every call it answers counts, minus a 10% spam allowance, and cancelling takes 30 days' notice. Both carry a 30-day money-back guarantee capped at $1,000 that excludes overage, though the same page elsewhere calls the window the first two weeks.

One more expectation to reset: nobody reads a script. Their pages say both trained rather than scripted and custom scripts, depending which you read. In practice your intake questions get followed, no word-for-word greeting does.

Why consider it

Per-call billing pays you back for the calls you want. A ten-minute intake conversation about a $12,000 basement job costs the same $10.00 as a wrong number. Per-minute services invert that and make your most valuable calls your most expensive. If your good calls run long, this is the whole argument.

The caller arrives pre-screened. Five intake questions and qualification against your own criteria are included, not extra. For a contractor, the call reaching your phone has already been asked about the address, the job, and the budget. For a clinic, new patients get separated from refill requests.

Small law firms get real specialization. The company claims 4,000 law firms as clients, says many agents are former paralegals or court staff, runs conflict checks against your case-management system, accepts collect calls from correctional facilities, and says its receptionists never give legal advice. No auto attendant matches that.

Where it falls short

You cannot interview whoever answers your phone. Smith.ai says it has 500 or more agents working from home offices across North America. No named receptionist is assigned to you and there is nobody to sit down with. That is the biggest thing to weigh.

The headline price is not the bill. A realistic contractor month on Starter: 45 calls, so $300 plus 15 overage calls at $11.50, which is $472.50. Book 20 into a calendar and record all 45 and you are at $513.75, or $11.42 a call. Reasonable. Just not $300.

The review evidence is thin. In our own tally Smith.ai averages 4.6 out of 5 across 559 reviews: Trustpilot 4.4 from 367, G2 4.9 from 73, Capterra 4.9 from 42, Clutch 4.8 from 77. Every score is strong and no sample is large. Dozens to a few hundred reviews is much weaker evidence than a service with thousands, and the Capterra listing sits under the company's website-chat product. Encouraging, not proof.

Two alternatives, named honestly. For a more polished and more consistent front-desk voice at a premium, look at Ruby, which carries roughly twice the review volume in our data. And if you are one person with a phone, the cheaper answer is usually not a receptionist at all. An auto attendant on OpenPhone or Nextiva greets the caller and takes a message for a fraction of $300.

A note from Lobi Space management

Twenty-plus years of running businesses here, including using remote employees and live reception services, taught us one rule about this category: always interview whoever is going to pick up your phone. That person is your first impression, before anybody sees your website or your truck.

Which is an honest problem at a service built on 500 agents you will never meet. You cannot interview a pool. So substitute what you can. Turn on recording for the first month, cheap at $0.25 a call, and listen to twenty of them. If what you hear is not how you would want your mother spoken to, you learned it inside the guarantee window for the price of lunch.

The bigger question is whether you need a live reception service at all right now. People in our community ask each other constantly, what do you use, what is good, then they jump on a neighbor's recommendation. Not every business is designed to be the same. An auto attendant or an AI can carry you a long way early, and at 25 calls a month Smith.ai's own free tier costs nothing. There is still 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 about to ask. A stranger working through five intake questions does not.

So write down every process your business needs in order to succeed, and find where answering the phone sits on it. Above the work you are supposed to be doing, buy the service. Below it, answer it yourself another six months.

The short version

Live North American people on your phone around the clock, billed by the call instead of the minute, from $300 for 30 calls up to $2,100 for 300. That is $10.00 a call down to $7.00, with overage running 15% to 21% above in-plan rates, so upgrade around 74 calls and again around 213. The separate AI product starts free for 25 calls. Booking, recording, and follow-up are per-call add-ons whatever the marketing pages say. Best fit is a firm, contractor, or clinic losing real jobs to unanswered calls. Worst fit is a solo operator who would sound better answering it personally.

And the thing no vendor will tell you: a receptionist service, a phone system, an AI, all fine. Without a road map, a goal, and a plan behind them, you are shooting in the dark or chasing a dream. Write the plan first. If a virtual office address and a proper phone setup belong on it, our pricing page is one click away, but only once you know why.

Blunt questions, straight answers

What actually counts as a call I get charged for? Any real call answered for you, whatever its length. Spam and wrong numbers are excluded on the human plans as long as your forwarded line passes Caller ID, and blocked callers are not charged. Outbound calls made to book an appointment do carry standard charges.

Can I talk to the person who will answer my phone? No, and that is the honest limit of the model. There are 500 or more agents and no dedicated one. What you can do is record calls at $0.25 apiece, listen to a batch while the guarantee is live, and cancel if the voice is wrong for your business.

Should I just use the free AI tier instead? For a lot of people starting out, yes, at least first. Twenty-five calls a month for nothing, with transcripts you can read, tells you whether the calls you are missing are worth paying a human to catch. If the transcripts show callers getting frustrated, you have your answer.

Smith.ai or Ruby? Ruby costs more, sounds more polished, and has a larger and longer review record. Smith.ai bills per call rather than per minute, which favors you if your good calls run long, and goes deeper on legal intake and CRM plumbing. Get a quote from both, hand each the same five intake questions, and listen.

Why it made our list

• Their receptionists ask up to five intake questions and qualify callers against your criteria, which is why it is our pick for law firms, contractors and clinics where one missed call is a lost job.
• The first CRM connection is included, and appointment booking is a $1.50 per call add-on that needs a public booking link.
• Coverage is 24/7 and priced per call. Excellent value at moderate volume, so watch the plan tier once your call count climbs.