Guide · AI Receptionists
Three AI receptionists give you a real free plan — and three developer platforms charge $0 a month but bill every minute
If you want to test an AI receptionist for free, only Phonely (100 minutes), Smith.ai (25 calls) and My AI Front Desk (20 minutes) bundle real included usage, and only Phonely states no card is needed; the developer platforms charge $0 base but bill every minute you talk.
Yes — you can test an AI receptionist for $0, and three vendors do it the way most buyers mean by “free”: a permanent plan with real included usage. Phonely’s Free plan gives you 100 voice minutes a month at $0, explicitly “no card required.” Smith.ai’s Free plan gives you 25 real calls a month at $0. My AI Front Desk’s Free plan gives you 20 voice minutes a month at $0. All three are standing plans, not 7-day trials — though only Phonely says outright that no card is needed. (A trial is a different offer: Kalyvox, for one, runs a 7-day free trial with no credit card before its $95/mo (excl. tax) Solo plan.) Most of what else is marketed as “free” in this market is a different animal: a developer platform that charges $0 a month in base fees but bills every minute you talk.
That distinction is the whole answer, so it’s worth being precise about it.
The three real free plans
| Vendor | Free plan | Included usage | Card to start | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phonely | Free | 100 voice min/mo | No | Not charged on Free |
| Smith.ai | Free | 25 real calls/mo | (not stated) | $3.00/call |
| My AI Front Desk | Free | 20 voice min/mo | (not stated) | $0.25/min |
Phonely is the most generous of the three by a wide margin: 100 included minutes is five times My AI Front Desk’s 20, and Phonely’s page states the no-card condition outright. At a typical 3-minute call, 100 minutes is roughly 33 calls you can run before paying anything — enough to actually hear the agent handle your real callers, not just a scripted demo. Smith.ai counts calls rather than minutes: 25 real calls a month whatever their length, with calls from its spam list filtered out before they count — but the 26th call costs $3.00, the dearest per-call rate on its ladder, so it is a test bed rather than a place to grow. My AI Front Desk’s 20 minutes is closer to a structured test drive: about six or seven calls before its $0.25/min overage (billed as 25 credits/min at $0.01/credit) kicks in.
None of the three asks you to commit. If Phonely’s 100 minutes convinces you, the next tier up is Starter at $50/mo for 250 minutes; Smith.ai’s next rung is Pro at $150/mo for 75 calls, month-to-month; My AI Front Desk’s Business-in-a-Box steps up to $99/mo for 200 minutes (or $79/mo billed annually).
The “$0 a month” platforms are free to open, not free to use
Three developer voice platforms publish a $0 base price, which makes them show up in any “free AI receptionist” search — but none of them include a single minute:
| Vendor | Base fee | Per-minute rate | What the rate covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vapi | $0/mo | $0.05/min | Platform fee only — LLM/STT/TTS passed through on top |
| Retell AI | $0/mo | $0.07/min | Published floor of a $0.07–$0.31/min range |
| Bland | $0/mo | $0.14/min | All-in: model, speech, and telephony included |
You can open an account on any of these for nothing, which is genuinely useful if you’re a developer who wants to wire up an agent and pay only for what you test. But “free” here means no subscription, not no bill. The moment a call connects, the meter runs. And two of these three rates are not the rate you’ll actually pay: Vapi’s $0.05/min is the platform fee with the language and speech models passed through “at cost” on top; Retell’s $0.07/min is the published floor of a $0.07–$0.31/min band. A fourth used to sit here — Synthflow’s $0 Pay As You Go plan at $0.09/min for the voice engine — but it is no longer listed as of 2026-09-27; the page now sells only Enterprise contracts that start at $30,000 annually. Only Bland’s $0.14/min is explicitly all-in — model, speech, and telephony in one number — which makes it the one PAYG rate you can take at face value.
The practical read: to run the same 100-minute test that Phonely gives away, you’d pay $14 on Bland’s all-in $0.14/min. The other two headline rates are lower per minute — Retell $0.07 ($7 for 100 min), Vapi $0.05 ($5) — but each is below Bland’s only because it excludes part of the stack: those numbers turn real only after you’ve assembled and paid for the model and telephony layers Bland already bundles into its $0.14.
If you’re testing for a regulated practice
There’s one more filter that matters before you pick a free door to walk through. If you handle protected health information, you need HIPAA support with a signed BAA — and most of this market doesn’t publish either. Among the free-to-start options here, four state both: Phonely, Vapi, Bland, and Retell AI. That’s the rare case where the genuinely free plan (Phonely’s 100 minutes) and the compliance box are checked by the same vendor — though Phonely’s BAA-eligible HIPAA is an Enterprise feature, so the free tier is for evaluation, not production PHI.
How to read this
If “free without a credit card” is the literal requirement, Phonely (100 minutes) is the answer — the only free plan here whose page says no card is needed — with Smith.ai (25 calls) and My AI Front Desk (20 minutes) as the other standing free plans. If you’re a developer comfortable wiring up your own stack and paying per minute, the $0-base platforms — Vapi, Retell, Bland — let you test for low single-digit-to-teens dollars depending on the rate (a 100-minute test runs $5 on Vapi’s $0.05/min up to $14 on Bland’s all-in $0.14/min), with Bland’s $0.14/min the only number you can take at face value because it already includes the model and telephony layers the others bill on top. What you should not do is treat a $0/mo developer platform as the same offer as a $0 plan with 100 minutes in it. One costs nothing to try; the other costs nothing to open and bills from the first minute.