“From £29 a month.” That is the honest headline price of most AI receptionist platforms, and it is also where the honest comparison starts falling apart, because the sticker price answers the wrong question. The right question is: what does it cost to have your calls answered, at your volume, with the behaviour your trade needs? This is what the pricing pages leave out.
The three costs every AI receptionist has
- The platform fee. The monthly subscription: £27–£110 on the UK market depending on included minutes. This is the number on the pricing page.
- The overage. Per-minute charges beyond the included bucket, typically 20–40p a minute. This is the number that finds you on a busy month.
- The setup work. The one nobody prices: your evening spent writing the greeting, listing your services, tuning the escalation rules, and testing the voice until it sounds like your business. On most platforms that work is yours, unpaid, before your first call.
A pricing page that says £29 and a bill that says £29 are separated by items two and three. Any comparison that ignores them is not a comparison, it is an advert.
The maths at trades-typical volumes
Run a realistic month for a one-van operation: about 60 answered calls, averaging 90 seconds each, so roughly 90 answered minutes.
| Model | Base | Overage | Month one | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cheap platform (100 min included, thin defaults) | £29 | £0 | £29 | You build the agent, hours of your time |
| Mid platform (50 min included) | £49 | ~£16 | £65 | You build the agent |
| Brring Cover (100 min included) | £49 | £0 | £49 | 10 minutes, it reads your website |
| Human service (~50 calls) | £115–£389 | per call | £115+ | £25–£75 fee, contract |
The pattern that matters is not which line is cheapest at zero volume. It is that the cheap platform’s real cost is denominated in your evenings, and the human service’s is denominated in setup fees and contracts. The full market breakdown, including when none of this is worth paying for, is on our call answering service cost page.
Four questions that expose the real price
- What counts as an answered minute? If spam calls burn your bucket, the bucket is smaller than it looks. Brring logs spam separately and it never reaches your phone.
- Who writes the greeting, services and prices? If the answer is you, add your hourly rate to the sticker price. If the platform reads your website instead, it does not.
- What happens at the overage boundary? Per-minute overage is fine; per-call minimums and punitive tiers are not. Brring is 25p a minute, visible in your dashboard.
- Does it charge extra for the behaviour you actually bought it for? Emergency texts, diary booking and price quoting are the whole point for a trade. Platforms that gate them behind top tiers are selling you a message machine and calling it a receptionist.
The comparison nobody puts on a pricing page
An AI receptionist’s competition is not other AI receptionists. It is voicemail, which is free. So the only sum that matters is: your missed calls, times your conversion rate, times your average job. One £200 job a week that now gets answered is £800 a month against a £49 subscription. That is the whole pricing page, written in the only numbers that apply to you. The rest of that argument is in the real cost of a missed call.
Ready to hear what £49 sounds like on an actual call? Listen to the example call, or start the 7-day trial, no card needed.