Guide · AI Receptionists
The cheapest AI receptionist at 200 calls a month isn't the one with the lowest sticker price
At a realistic small-business volume, pay-as-you-go developer platforms look cheapest on paper — but the number you see is rarely the number you pay. Here's what 200 calls actually costs, vendor by vendor.
Ask “what’s the cheapest AI receptionist” and you get a sticker price. That number is almost useless on its own, because the four billing models in this market — flat monthly, per-minute, per-call, and developer pay-as-you-go — only become comparable once you fix a workload. So we fixed one: 200 inbound calls a month at 3 minutes each, or 600 talk-minutes. That is a busy solo practice or a small clinic — enough volume that the cheap-looking plans start showing their true shape.
Here is what that workload costs, cheapest first, using each vendor’s lowest plan that we can price honestly.
The pay-as-you-go floor is real, but it’s a floor
The bottom of the table is owned by developer voice platforms billed purely per minute:
| Vendor | Cost @ 200 calls/mo | Plan | What the rate covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vapi | $30 | Build (PAYG) | Platform fee only — $0.05/min |
| Retell AI | $42 | Pay As You Go | Published floor — $0.07/min |
| Synthflow | $54 | Pay As You Go | Voice engine only — $0.09/min |
| Bland | $84 | Start | All-in — $0.14/min |
The catch is in that last column. On Vapi, the $0.05/min we multiply out to $30 is the platform fee; the language model, speech-to-text, and text-to-speech are passed through “at cost” on top, so the number you actually pay is higher and depends on which models you wire up. Synthflow’s $0.09/min is the voice engine alone, with the LLM ($0.02–$0.05/min) and telephony billed separately. Retell’s $0.07/min is the published floor of a $0.07–$0.31/min range.
Bland is the honest comparison point here: its $0.14/min Start rate is explicitly all-in — model, speech, and telephony included — which is why it lands at $84 for the same 600 minutes and is the one PAYG number you can take at face value.
So the real reading of the bottom of the table is: a per-minute platform can be the cheapest way to answer 200 calls, but only Bland’s $84 is a true end-to-end figure. The others are entry rates that grow once you add the pieces a working receptionist needs.
The cheapest “it just works” plan is $79
If you don’t want to assemble a model stack, the cheapest flat plan that bundles everything is Goodcall’s Starter at $79/mo — unlimited minutes, so 200 calls or 2,000, the price doesn’t move (the only cap is on unique customers, not call volume). For a business that wants one predictable line item, that is the number to beat, and almost nothing beats it: Rosie’s Scale plan covers the 600 minutes at $149/mo, and Phonely’s Pro tier lands at $150/mo.
What you’re really paying when you pay more
The top of the table is just as instructive. PATLive comes in at $1,170/mo for the same 200 calls — roughly fifteen times Goodcall — but PATLive answers with live human agents, not AI. That is not the AI market failing to compete; it is the price of the thing the AI plans are built to replace. When a flat AI plan and a managed human service appear on the same axis, the gap is the product comparison.
If you need HIPAA, the field narrows fast
Healthcare buyers should ignore the cost ranking until they’ve filtered for compliance, because most of this market doesn’t publish it. Only four vendors in our dataset state both HIPAA support and an available signed BAA: Phonely, Vapi, Bland, and Retell AI. Three of those four are the per-minute developer platforms — and on Vapi the BAA is a $2,000/mo add-on, which inverts the whole “cheapest” picture. Phonely is the one that pairs a flat managed plan ($150/mo at this volume) with BAA-eligible HIPAA, making it the most straightforward compliant pick for a small practice.
How to read this
The cheapest AI receptionist at 200 calls a month is $30 on paper (Vapi), about $84 all-in (Bland), and $79 if you want a flat plan with nothing to assemble (Goodcall). Which of those is “the cheapest” depends entirely on whether you’re willing to wire up your own model stack — and whether you need HIPAA, which knocks the list down to four names before price even enters the conversation. Change the volume and the order changes again; that’s why we publish the workload, the method, and the source behind every figure.