Four receptionists connect to Clio — and they price your intake four completely different ways

Updated 2026-09-09 — Smith.ai replaced its entire tier ladder, so every Smith.ai figure here is new. There is no Starter and no Basic on the page, and nothing called a Managed plan: the tiers are Free ($0 for 25 real calls, then $3.00 each), self-service Pro at $150/75 calls, $270/150 and $500/300, and sales-led Enterprise at $500/300, $800/500 and custom above 1,000. The old $95 Starter and $270-for-90-calls Basic are gone, and so is the flat $2.40 overage — it is now a six-step ladder from $3.00 down to $2.10, and $2.40 appears nowhere on the page. Read the tier name carefully: “Pro” now starts at $150, while the $800 this guide used to call Pro is Enterprise and no longer self-service. At this guide’s 200-call workload Smith.ai now costs $385, which moves it from the top of the AI group to second place. The rebuilt page names Clio and Calendly only — MyCase and Filevine were on the June version and are not on this one, so the record no longer claims them. The Clio premise survives; the prices did not. Upfirst, Abby Connect and Ruby are unchanged since 2026-06-22, when Ruby was raised and re-tiered to $250/50min, $395/100min, $720/200min and $1,725/500min.

If “does it write into Clio?” is your first filter — and for a law practice it should be — the dataset collapses to exactly four names: Smith.ai, Upfirst, Abby Connect, and Ruby. Every other vendor we track routes to Zapier, a generic CRM, or nothing at all — including the index’s newest entry, CallSprout Sage, which names no integration partner of any kind. So the real question isn’t whether these four connect to your case-management system; it’s what each one charges to turn an answered call into an intake record, and the four answers are wildly different. At a busy solo-practice volume of 200 calls a month at 3 minutes each (600 talk-minutes), the cheapest of the four costs $159.95 (Upfirst); Smith.ai’s rebuilt ladder lands at $385 on the rung that actually fits that volume; Abby Connect’s top published AI tier is $690 and stops at 500 minutes; and the live-human incumbent Ruby runs $1,725 for 500 minutes — a 600-minute month is past even that.

The same intake, priced four ways

Here is what 200 Clio-bound calls run on each vendor’s lowest plan that prices honestly at this volume.

Vendor	Cost @ 200 calls / 600 min	Plan used	Billing model
Upfirst	$159.95	Pro (300 calls incl.)	Per-call
Smith.ai	$385	Pro — 150 calls/mo, self-service ($270 + 50 extra @ $2.30)	Per-call
Abby Connect	$690+	AI Growth (500 min incl.); 600 min is past it	Flat / minutes
Ruby	$1,725+	500-min tier; 600 min is past it	Per-minute, live human

Read that table carefully, because the per-call vendors and the per-minute ones diverge sharply. Smith.ai used to sit at the top of the AI half of this list on an $800 plan; on the rebuilt ladder it sits second, and Ruby’s live-human minutes are the runaway top of the range.

Per-call: Upfirst and Smith.ai, now 2.4x apart

Both Upfirst and Smith.ai bill per answered call, and both publish a 300-call bundle — Upfirst’s Pro at $159.95/mo and Smith.ai’s Pro — 300 calls/mo at $500. But a 200-call firm should not buy Smith.ai’s 300-call rung: the $270 rung for 150 calls plus 50 overage calls at $2.30 comes to $385, which is $115 cheaper than the flat $500. So the honest comparison at this caseload is $159.95 against $385 — about 2.4x, or $0.80 a call against $1.93. That is a far narrower gap than the roughly 5x that the retired $800 self-service rung implied at this same volume, and it narrowed because Smith.ai’s ladder changed shape, not because Upfirst moved.

The marginal rates still diverge sharply. Upfirst’s overage on Pro is $0.75/call, falling to $0.70/call on its $299 Scale tier (600 calls). Smith.ai’s overage now steps by rung: $3.00 on Free, $2.50 on the $150/75-call rung, $2.30 at 150 calls, $2.17 at 300, and $2.10 on the sales-led 500-call rung. At the rung a 200-call firm would actually sit on, that is $2.30 against $0.75 — about three times the price per extra call.

What the extra buys is no longer a human. The $500 Managed plan and the $3/call live-agent handoff that the June page carried are both absent from the rebuilt page, and the record no longer claims them. What sits above self-service Pro today is Enterprise, at the same $500 for 300 calls and $800 for 500, where the call to action is a sales conversation and Smith.ai builds and runs the setup rather than you configuring it yourself. Two things do favour a firm buying per call: Smith.ai filters its spam list before answering, so those calls never touch your bundle, and up to 10% of calls can be credited off each bill as spam. Billing is month-to-month with 30 days’ notice and no annual term at all, where Upfirst publishes 20% off for paying annually — so on a year’s commitment the gap widens again.

One number on that top rung deserves a warning, because the page argues with itself about it. On Enterprise at $800 for 500 calls, the card and the desktop comparison table both show an effective $1.60 per call with a −4% badge, the narrow-screen table badges the same rung −10%, and the page’s own structured data says $1.50. $800 ÷ 500 = $1.60, so the visible figure is the one that reconciles; the badge and the structured data do not. And none of those three is the $2.10 charged for calls beyond the 500 — that is a separate meter, and conflating the two understates a busy month.

One caveat for cost-sensitive firms: Smith.ai’s entry rungs are thin, and the rung matters more than the tier name. The cheapest paid bundle is $150 for 75 calls (~2.5/day, and $2.00 a call before you exceed it); at 200 calls it bills $462.50. The free tier answers 25 calls for nothing, but at 200 calls its $3.00 rate makes it the most expensive of the self-service rungs, at $525. Picking the wrong self-service rung costs $77.50 to $140 more than the $385 the right one does — and the sales-led Enterprise 500 rung, at $800 for a 200-call month, costs more than any of them.

If your firm runs lean and wants AI to handle the whole intake, Upfirst is the aggressive pick — its Starter is just $24.95/mo for 30 calls, against Smith.ai’s free 25 calls at $0 and its $150 entry bundle. (The lowest paid sticker in the whole index now belongs to CallSprout Sage at $22.95, but that price buys one user seat rather than a business — a five-person office pays $114.75 — and it is a sticker rather than a bill: Sage bundles no minutes at all and meters $0.39/min, so one seat at this guide’s 200-call, 600-minute workload models at roughly $257 — fifteenth of the 21 vendors we can price at that workload, and itself an upper bound, because our cost model cannot express Sage’s free first 30 seconds of every call. CallSprout also names no integrations at all, so it never enters a Clio shortlist.)

Flat-minute and live-human: Abby Connect and Ruby

Abby Connect prices its AI receptionist by included minutes, not calls: AI Starter $99 (50 min), AI Essential $165 (100 min), AI Professional $299 (200 min), AI Growth $690 (500 min). At 600 minutes you’ve outgrown even the $690 Growth tier, and Abby doesn’t publish an overage rate — so the honest reading is that a 200-call firm sits at the top of Abby’s published AI ladder or in a custom quote. Abby’s pitch is human backup on every AI tier plus the same Clio and Zapier hooks, which — now that Smith.ai’s page has stopped publishing a live-handoff price — makes Abby the only AI option here with a human in the loop at a posted number.

Ruby is the incumbent benchmark and the only one of the four that answers with live human receptionists, billed by receptionist-minute: $250 for 50 minutes, $395 for 100, $720 for 200, $1,725 for 500 (Ruby raised these prices and re-tiered the ladder in 2026 — up from $235–$720, dropping the old 350-minute tier and adding a 100-minute one). It integrates with Clio and Rocket Matter — and with Smith.ai’s page down to Clio and Calendly, Ruby is now unambiguously the deepest legal-vertical fit in the group — but at 600 minutes you’re past even the $1,725/500-minute plan, with overage billed higher and not posted. Ruby isn’t competing with the AI plans on price; the roughly 11x gap between Upfirst’s $159.95 and Ruby’s $1,725 is the AI-versus-human tradeoff, stated in dollars.

How to read this

If the only thing that matters is getting intake into Clio cheaply and letting AI do the talking, Upfirst at $159.95/mo is the clear value pick, with overage as low as $0.70/call if you scale. Smith.ai at $385 — the self-service Pro — 150 calls/mo rung at $270 plus 50 calls at $2.30 — is now the middle of this market rather than its ceiling, and it earns the premium only if you want its lead-qualification and routing layer, or the sales-led Enterprise build at $500 for 300 calls or $800 for 500. If you want a human in the loop on the same Clio pipeline at a published price, Abby Connect up to $690/mo is the option, while Ruby is the all-human benchmark with the broadest legal integrations — now $720 for 200 minutes and $1,725 for 500 after its 2026 increase. None of the four publish HIPAA or a signed BAA, so a firm handling protected health information — personal-injury or medical-malpractice intake — should treat that absence as a question to raise before signing, not an assumption to make. Change your call volume and the order shifts; that’s why we publish the workload and the source behind every figure.