For businesses comparing answering plans
Published plans run from twenty five dollars to nine hundred a month, and the cheap ones are priced per call.
A report on your own number, showing how many calls it misses in a month and what answering them would take.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
AI receptionist cost in Australia has a published answer, and it is a wide one. Plans run from twenty five dollars a month to nine hundred.
The monthly figure is rarely what decides the bill. What the plan charges once the phone gets busy is where the year's cost actually lands.
Three bands cover almost every published Australian plan, and they buy different amounts of work rather than different amounts of quality.
Twenty five to a hundred a month is software you set up and run yourself. Entry plans at that price cover somewhere around thirty to sixty calls, and the cheapest ones answer website chat rather than the phone.
Two hundred to nine hundred a month is done for you. Somebody writes what it says, connects it to your diary and your job software, and fixes it when the business changes.
The per call and per minute charges underneath the headline figure. They stay invisible in a quiet month and arrive all at once in a busy one.
A plan advertised at thirty nine dollars is usually a small bundle of calls with a rate after it. The month your advertising works, or a storm fills the phone, is the month the bill stops looking like the plan.
Human answering services are charged this way almost everywhere, which is why two businesses on the same plan pay very different amounts.
Flat unlimited offers exist at around ninety nine dollars. Read what unlimited means in the terms before treating it as one.
Four things, and all four are about what happens after the first month rather than what the sign-up page says.
The number comes first. It should run on the number already on your signage and your listing, so nothing printed has to change and no customer learns a second number.
The plan to compare is not the one on the pricing page. It is what the bill comes to in the month your phone is busiest, which is also the month the calls are worth the most.
Related reading from us: the phone answered while you work.
Published plans run from about twenty five dollars a month for software you run yourself to nine hundred for a managed service. Most phone answering plans sit between one and three hundred.
At small volumes the published plans are a fraction of a wage. A business taking calls all day is a different calculation and is worth doing on real numbers.
On the cheaper plans and on most human services, yes, after a small included bundle. That is the figure to ask for, because it decides what a busy month costs.
It should. Calls to your current number divert when they are not answered, so nothing on your signage or your listing changes.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, with no lock-in contract. What it comes to depends on the business, so the number gets given on the call.