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.
Re-verified 2026-06-23. The base rates held (Vapi $0.05, Retell $0.07 floor, Synthflow $0.09, Bland $0.14 all-in, Goodcall $79 unlimited, Rosie $149, Phonely $150 Pro, PATLive $1,170 Pro). The compliance section needed real correction: a signed BAA is more available than this guide claimed, but it’s gated very differently. Phonely’s $150 Pro and Bland’s $0.14 Start are not HIPAA-compliant — both sign a BAA only on their Enterprise tiers. Vapi’s HIPAA is a $2,000/mo add-on. And Retell signs a BAA for free, self-service — which makes it, not Phonely, the cheapest compliant path. (Synthflow’s $0.09/min PAYG still stands; its pricing page is now JavaScript-rendered and shows fetchers only a ~$30k/yr Enterprise floor, but third-party trackers confirm the self-serve rate is live.)
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 — one we size up in detail in AI vs human receptionist cost.
If you need HIPAA, the field reshuffles — it doesn’t just narrow
Healthcare buyers should filter for compliance before cost, but the compliant options are not where this guide once pointed. More than four vendors here will sign a BAA — Vapi, Retell, Bland, Phonely, Goodcall, and even PATLive all offer one — but the tier and the cost differ enormously, and the cheap flat plans are mostly not the compliant ones:
- Retell is the cheapest documented compliant path: its signed BAA is free and self-service (you sign it at click-agreements.retellai.com at no additional fee), so a practice can run Retell’s $0.07–$0.31/min pay-as-you-go — about $42+ at 600 minutes — with a BAA already in hand. (Retell’s pricing matrix nominally lists HIPAA under Enterprise, but its compliance docs put the no-fee self-sign within reach without a sales call.)
- Vapi signs a BAA too, but HIPAA is a $2,000/mo add-on — which inverts the “$30 cheapest” picture entirely; the platform fee is trivial next to that compliance line.
- Bland and Phonely both gate the BAA to their Enterprise tiers (custom, quote-only). So Bland’s $0.14/min Start plan and Phonely’s $150/mo Pro plan — the cheap tiers you’d otherwise buy — are not HIPAA-compliant; a covered entity would be quoted an Enterprise contract for the BAA. (An earlier version of this guide called Phonely’s $150 Pro the straightforward compliant pick. That was wrong: Phonely’s own FAQ says it signs a BAA “for Enterprise customers.”)
- Goodcall and PATLive will sign a BAA as well — Goodcall through a custom Enterprise account, PATLive via an opt-in agreement in its Terms of Use — neither priced on the public tiers.
So the honest compliant ranking flips: for a small practice that wants a BAA without an enterprise contract, Retell’s free self-service BAA on pay-as-you-go pricing is the cleanest and cheapest path; Vapi works but adds $2,000/mo; and the flat-plan names (Phonely, Bland) put the BAA behind a sales-gated Enterprise tier.
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 doesn’t so much shorten the list as reshuffle it: the cheapest compliant path (Retell’s free self-service BAA on pay-as-you-go) looks nothing like the cheapest sticker, and the flat plans you’d reach for first (Phonely, Bland) keep their BAA behind an Enterprise quote. Change the volume and the order changes again; that’s why we publish the workload, the method, and the source behind every figure.