Guide · AI Receptionists
The credit-pricing trap: ServiceAgent burns fewer credits per minute and costs more
ServiceAgent advertises 15 credits a voice-minute against My AI Front Desk's 25, but its credits cost two-to-four times as much — so the leaner-looking meter is the pricier one on every marginal minute.
My AI Front Desk costs less per marginal minute — $0.25 against ServiceAgent’s $0.30 to $0.60 — and the reason is exactly the number ServiceAgent puts in front of you. ServiceAgent burns 15 credits per voice-minute; My AI Front Desk burns 25. If credits were interchangeable that would make ServiceAgent 40% leaner. But they aren’t the same unit. ServiceAgent’s page prices a credit at $0.02 to $0.04; My AI Front Desk’s is a flat $0.01. Multiply it back out and the lower credit count is a mirage: 15 × $0.02–$0.04 is $0.30–$0.60/min, while 25 × $0.01 is $0.25/min. Fewer credits, more money.
These are the only two vendors in our index that meter voice in credits rather than minutes, which is why they invite the exact head-to-head the credit abstraction is designed to prevent: a credit is only a number until you know what a credit costs.
The unit economics, converted back to dollars
| Vendor | Credits per voice-min | Price per credit | Dollars per voice-min |
|---|---|---|---|
| ServiceAgent | 15 | $0.02–$0.04 | $0.30–$0.60 |
| My AI Front Desk | 25 | $0.01 | $0.25 |
Even at ServiceAgent’s most generous credit price — the $0.02 you get on the entry Core plan, where $39 buys 2,000 credits — a voice-minute lands at $0.30, still above My AI Front Desk’s $0.25. At the top of the published range, $0.04/credit, ServiceAgent’s minute is $0.60, or 2.4x its rival. There is no credit price in ServiceAgent’s stated band at which its marginal minute beats My AI Front Desk’s.
Where the bundle sticker misleads in the other direction
Read only the monthly bundles and you’d reach the opposite conclusion, so it’s worth being honest about why. ServiceAgent’s plans convert to a low headline cost-per-minute if every credit becomes a voice-minute:
- Core — $39 / 2,000 credits ≈ 133 voice-min, ~$0.29/min
- Growth — $95 / 6,000 credits ≈ 400 voice-min, ~$0.24/min
- Franchise — $279 / 20,000 credits ≈ 1,333 voice-min, ~$0.21/min
Against that, My AI Front Desk’s Business-in-a-Box at $99 for 200 voice-minutes works out to about $0.50/min on paper — apparently the worse deal.
The catch is in ServiceAgent’s own model. Those minute figures are an upper bound: the same credits also fund SMS and ad-creative features, so the “133 minutes” on Core only exist if you spend zero credits on anything but talk. Route half your credits to texts and ad copy and Core delivers ~66 voice-minutes, doubling the effective rate to roughly $0.59/min. My AI Front Desk’s 200 minutes are voice-minutes, full stop — there is no shared bucket to erode them. The bundle that looks cheaper is cheaper only under an assumption the product design works against.
Overage is where the credit meter really bites
The cleanest test is what one more minute costs after the plan is spent, because that’s a rate, not an allocation. My AI Front Desk publishes a flat $0.25/min overage — the same $0.25 its unit math implies, no surprise. ServiceAgent publishes no flat per-minute overage at all: exceeding your bundle means buying more credits, at the same $0.02–$0.04 each, i.e. $0.30–$0.60 per additional minute. So the vendor with the smaller credit count is also the one whose incremental minute is the least predictable and the most expensive.
Annual terms don’t rescue it. Both discount roughly the same — ServiceAgent lists 20% off annually, and My AI Front Desk’s annual takes Business-in-a-Box to $79/mo (also ~20%) — so the discount scales both sides equally and leaves the per-minute ranking untouched.
How to read this
If your question is strictly which credit-priced receptionist costs less per call, My AI Front Desk wins on the marginal minute at every point in ServiceAgent’s published credit range — $0.25 versus $0.30 to $0.60 — and it’s the only one of the two whose per-minute number is fixed and can’t be diluted by a shared credit pool. ServiceAgent’s Core bundle can look cheaper per minute, but only if you believe 100% of its credits become voice, which its own SMS-and-ads design contradicts. Neither publishes HIPAA support or a BAA in our dataset, so compliance can’t break the tie; on languages, only My AI Front Desk lists Spanish, while ServiceAgent hasn’t published bilingual support. The lesson generalizes past these two: whenever a vendor advertises “fewer credits per minute,” the only figure that settles it is the price of a credit — and here, the one quoting the lower count is charging the higher rate.