Guide · AI Receptionists
Smith.ai and Upfirst both bill per call — and Smith.ai charges five times more at 300
Two per-call AI receptionists, two completely different price scales: at every published tier Upfirst undercuts Smith.ai by 3.8x to 5x, which makes the real question what Smith.ai's premium buys.
Both of these answer the same buyer question the same way — a monthly fee that includes a fixed number of calls, then a per-call charge once you go over. But they are not in the same price bracket. At every tier where the two publish a matching call quota, Upfirst is between 3.8x and 5x cheaper than Smith.ai. At 30 calls a month it’s $24.95 vs $95. At 90 calls it’s $59.95 vs $270. At 300 calls it’s $159.95 vs $800. If your only question is which is cheaper at your call volume, the answer is Upfirst, and it isn’t close.
So the useful question is the inverse: what does Smith.ai’s premium actually buy, and when is it worth paying nearly five times more per answered call?
The two ladders, side by side
Both vendors bill per call, so for once the plans line up cleanly — same included-call buckets, directly comparable.
| Included calls/mo | Smith.ai | Upfirst | Smith.ai $/call at quota | Upfirst $/call at quota |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | $95 (Starter) | $24.95 (Starter) | $3.17 | $0.83 |
| 90 | $270 (Basic) | $59.95 (Premium) | $3.00 | $0.67 |
| 300 | $800 (Pro) | $159.95 (Pro) | $2.67 | $0.53 |
| 600 | — | $299.00 (Scale) | — | $0.50 |
Smith.ai’s self-service ladder stops at 300 calls; Upfirst publishes a fourth tier, Scale at $299/mo for 600 calls — still less than half of what Smith.ai’s 300-call Pro plan costs. And the gap widens as you climb: per answered call, Smith.ai runs $3.17 down to $2.67 across its range, while Upfirst falls from $0.83 to $0.50.
Overage behaves the same way
The divergence holds once you exceed your bucket. Smith.ai charges a flat $2.40 per call over plan, at every tier. Upfirst charges less the higher you climb — $1.50/call on Starter, $1.00 on Premium, $0.75 on Pro, $0.70 on Scale. So a Smith.ai overage call costs roughly the same as one of Upfirst’s included Pro calls.
That matters for spiky months. A practice on a 30-call entry plan that takes 60 calls pays $167 on Smith.ai ($95 + 30 × $2.40) versus $69.95 on Upfirst ($24.95 + 30 × $1.50). And because Upfirst’s quotas are so much wider per dollar, you rarely hit overage at all: 120 calls a month is still inside Upfirst’s single $159.95 Pro tier, but on Smith.ai’s 90-call Basic plan it’s $270 + 30 × $2.40 = $342.
One more lever on Upfirst’s side: it publishes a ~20% annual discount, which takes Pro to about $127.96/mo and Starter to roughly $19.96/mo. Smith.ai’s self-service AI plans list no annual discount in our dataset.
So what is the Smith.ai premium for
If Upfirst wins on price at every volume, the case for Smith.ai has to be the service wrapped around the call. Two things in the dataset point to it.
First, the live-agent handoff. Smith.ai’s Starter plan lists a $3/call add-on that escalates a call to a human agent — the hybrid AI-plus-human model that Upfirst, a pure AI answering service, doesn’t offer. If your calls sometimes need a person to close, book, or de-escalate, that’s a capability you’re buying, not just a markup.
Second, the integration target. Smith.ai’s published integrations are Clio and Calendly — it is positioned squarely at law firms, where Clio is the case-management standard. That’s the premium, Clio-integrated lane. The wrinkle for buyers assuming that’s exclusive: Upfirst also lists Clio, alongside Google Calendar, Outlook, Acuity, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and GoHighLevel. So Clio booking alone doesn’t justify the 5x — the live human handoff is the real line in the sand.
Neither vendor publishes HIPAA support or an available BAA in our dataset, so a healthcare buyer can’t use compliance to break the tie here; both are unstated.
How to read this
For a straight per-call AI receptionist, Upfirst is the cheaper option at every volume we can compare — $24.95, $59.95, and $159.95 against Smith.ai’s $95, $270, and $800 — with lower overage, a 600-call tier Smith.ai doesn’t match, an annual discount, and the same Clio integration most law-firm buyers go to Smith.ai for. Pay Smith.ai’s premium only if you specifically need its $3/call live-human handoff — the one thing in this comparison Upfirst’s price can’t buy. Change the figures and we’ll re-run them; the workload and the source behind every number are published above.