You are on the tools and your phone is in the van. Every one of those rings is either money or an emergency, and you cannot take them. So you look at call answering services. And the first thing every one of them does is hide the price behind a “request a quote” form. This page is the opposite of that: the real market bands, what drives them, and what it costs to have every call answered at each tier of the market.
The short answer
In the UK in 2026 you will pay one of three bands:
| Type | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Human answering service (dedicated or shared PA) Moneypenny, ReceptionHQ, Jam, Best Reception | £115–£389/month, ~50 calls | Established firms with complex calls and budget to match |
| Metered AI receptionist Per-minute platforms, you build the agent | £27–£110/month | Tech-happy businesses willing to build and tune the agent themselves |
| Brring Set up for you from your website | £49/month flat | Sole traders and small UK trades who want it done, not built |
Those bands are not ours: they are what the incumbents publish and what the market charges. Below is where each one comes from, and the maths for a typical sole trader.
What human answering services charge
Human services charge per call or per month. Pay-as-you-go rates run £1–£2.50 a call; monthly packages for roughly 50 calls land between £115 and £389 a month, depending on how many calls are included, whether the PA is dedicated, and what hours are covered. Overnight and weekend cover typically costs extra, and overage beyond your package is charged per call.
Most also charge a setup fee of £25–£75 and ask for a 3–12 month contract. For an established firm with complex calls this is worth it. A good human PA is genuinely excellent at what they do. For a sole trader whose calls are “how much for a dripping tap”, it is a lot of structure for a simple job.
What metered AI receptionists charge
The new wave of AI receptionist platforms charge per answered minute. You describe your business, they build the agent, and you pay a monthly fee that includes a bucket of minutes with per-minute overage. On the UK market these run £27–£110 a month for typical sole-trader volumes.
The catch is not the price, it is the work: on most platforms you are the one building the agent. Writing the greeting, listing services, tuning the escalation rules, testing the voice. If that sounds like a fun evening, great. Most tradespeople would rather be paid for their own trade.
What Brring charges, exactly
Brring is flat monthly pricing with minutes included. The price you see is the price you pay:
| Plan | Price | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cover | £49/month | Answers every call 24/7, takes the details, texts you a summary. 100 answered minutes. |
| Cover+ | £79/month | Everything in Cover, plus it knows your prices and books jobs into your diary. 300 answered minutes. |
| Front desk | £129/month | Everything in Cover+, plus urgent-call texts, call recording, and warm transfer to your mobile. 500 answered minutes. |
No setup fee. No contract. Overage is 25p a minute beyond your allowance, visible in your dashboard. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, no card needed.
The maths for a sole trader
Take a plumber who misses three calls a week while on jobs. Not every missed call was a job. Say one in three would have converted, at an average £200 job. That is one lost job a week:
| Missed jobs | Revenue lost | Brring Cover | Net position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 × £200 job a week | £800/month | £49 | +£751 |
| 2 × £200 jobs a week | £1,600/month | £49 | +£1,551 |
You do not need to believe every missed call was a job. You only need to believe one a week was. For the full missed-call picture, see how a missed call service works and what it recovers.
When an answering service is NOT worth it
Honesty section, because trust beats a conversion rate:
- Fewer than five business calls a month. Voicemail is free and perfectly good at that volume.
- You always answer, every time. If your phone is never missed, there is nothing to recover.
- Your calls need a human on the phone for long stretches. If callers need 20-minute technical conversations, a human service or an employed person is the right tool. No AI receptionist belongs in that conversation.
For everyone else (the “on the tools all day, phone in the van, one missed job a week hurts” crowd) the sums above are the whole story.
What to check before you sign up to any service
- Per-call or per-minute? Per-call pricing punishes short spam calls; per-minute punishes long customer calls. Know which you are.
- What counts as “answered”? Some services bill a call as answered even when it is binned as spam. Ours logs spam separately so you can check nothing real was binned.
- Contract and setup fee. There is no good reason for either in 2026.
- Can it book into your diary? Message-taking is table stakes; diary booking is where the jobs actually stick.
- Does it know your prices? A receptionist that cannot quote “call-out is £85” is a message machine, not a receptionist.
Every one of those is answered on the how it works page. Or better, just start the trial and listen to it handle a call before you pay anything.