Guide · AI Receptionists
Smith.ai's per-call entry is now $150 for 75 calls — and Upfirst is cheaper from the 37th call a month up
Smith.ai replaced Starter, Basic and the $800 'Pro' with Free, Pro and Enterprise, and its flat $2.40 overage with a six-rung ladder from $3.00 to $2.10. The buckets no longer line up with Upfirst's, so we priced both at matched volumes: Upfirst wins everywhere above 36 calls a month, by 2.3x to 3.4x once Smith.ai's paid rungs take over — and Smith.ai's new free tier wins below it.
Both of these still answer the same buyer question the same way — a monthly fee that buys a fixed number of calls, then a per-call charge once you go past it. What changed is Smith.ai’s half of the table, all of it. The tiers this comparison used to run on — Starter at $95 for 30 calls, Basic at $270 for 90, a self-service Pro at $800 for 300, all at a flat $2.40 per extra call — are not on the page any more. Read first-party on 2026-09-09, Smith.ai publishes Free, Pro and Enterprise, each paid tier carrying its own volume selector, and the entry paid rung is $150 for 75 calls: a 58% rise on a bundle two and a half times the size. The flat overage is gone too. It is now a six-rung ladder from $3.00 down to $2.10, and $2.40 appears nowhere.
Because the buckets no longer line up with Upfirst’s 30 / 90 / 300 / 600, this stops being a matching-rows comparison and becomes a matched-volume one. Priced that way, the old headline mostly survives — and picks up an exception at the very bottom. Above 36 calls a month Upfirst is cheaper at every volume both vendors publish, by 2.3x to 3.4x once Smith.ai’s paid rungs take over. At 36 calls and below, Smith.ai is cheaper, for a reason it had no answer to in June: it now has a free tier — 25 real calls at $0 — and Upfirst has no free plan at all.
One naming trap before any of the numbers, because it is the easiest way to get this wrong today. “Pro” no longer means what it meant in June. Smith.ai’s Pro tier now starts at $150. The $800 this guide used to quote as self-service Pro is today the Enterprise 500-call rung, bought through sales. Ask a rep for “Pro at $800” and you have named the wrong tier, at the wrong price, on the wrong purchase path.
The two ladders, side by side
Smith.ai first, as its page publishes it now. The last column earns its place: the Pro rungs sign up on their own, the Enterprise rungs go through sales, and two of them charge the same $500 for the same 300 calls.
| Smith.ai tier (as the page names it) | Monthly | Included real calls | Per extra call | $ per included call | How you buy it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 25 | $3.00 | $0.00 | Self-service |
| Pro — 75 calls/mo | $150 | 75 | $2.50 | $2.00 | Self-service |
| Pro — 150 calls/mo | $270 | 150 | $2.30 | $1.80 | Self-service |
| Pro — 300 calls/mo | $500 | 300 | $2.17 | $1.67 | Self-service |
| Enterprise — 300 calls/mo | $500 | 300 | $2.17 | $1.67 | Sales-led |
| Enterprise — 500 calls/mo | $800 | 500 | $2.10 | $1.60 | Sales-led |
| Enterprise — Custom | Not published | 1,000+ | Not published | — | Sales-led |
Only real calls are metered. Each bundle also publishes a test-call and a simulated-call allowance alongside them, which we don’t record because they aren’t billable volume.
The $800 rung carries a warning we can’t resolve for you: the page contradicts itself about that rung’s effective per-call rate. The card and the desktop comparison table both show $1.60 per call with a −4% badge, the narrow-screen table badges the same rung −10%, and the page’s own structured data says $1.50. $800 ÷ 500 = $1.60, so the visible figure is the one that reconciles; the badge and the structured data do not. And none of those three is the $2.10 you pay for calls beyond the 500 — a different number for a different thing, and the one to read twice before signing.
Upfirst’s ladder, by contrast, has not moved. Re-verified 2026-09-02, every figure unchanged:
| Upfirst tier | Monthly | Included calls | Per extra call | $ per included call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $24.95 | 30 | $1.50 | $0.83 |
| Premium | $59.95 | 90 | $1.00 | $0.67 |
| Pro | $159.95 | 300 | $0.75 | $0.53 |
| Scale | $299.00 | 600 | $0.70 | $0.50 |
AIRA publishes a byte-identical table — same prices, same quotas, same per-call overage — so every Upfirst figure in this guide reads across to it.
What the same month actually costs
With the quotas out of phase, the only honest comparison is to fix a call volume and let each vendor route it down its own cheapest published path. That is what this table does.
| Calls in the month | Cheapest Smith.ai route | Cheapest Upfirst route | Smith.ai ÷ Upfirst |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | $0 — Free (self-service) | $24.95 — Starter | Smith.ai is free |
| 30 | $15 — Free + 5 × $3.00 | $24.95 — Starter | 0.6x |
| 60 | $105 — Free + 35 × $3.00 | $59.95 — Premium | 1.8x |
| 75 | $150 — Pro, 75 calls/mo (self-service) | $59.95 — Premium | 2.5x |
| 150 | $270 — Pro, 150 calls/mo (self-service) | $119.95 — Premium + 60 × $1.00 | 2.3x |
| 200 | $385 — Pro, 150 calls/mo + 50 × $2.30 | $159.95 — Pro | 2.4x |
| 300 | $500 — Pro, 300 calls/mo (self-service) | $159.95 — Pro | 3.1x |
| 500 | $800 — Enterprise, 500 calls/mo (sales-led) | $299.00 — Scale | 2.7x |
| 600 | $1,010 — Enterprise, 500 calls/mo + 100 × $2.10 (sales-led) | $299.00 — Scale | 3.4x |
Two things fall out of that. First, Smith.ai’s cheapest route is not always its obvious one: below 75 calls a month the free tier plus $3.00 overage beats the $150 Pro rung, and at exactly 75 the two cost the same $150. The entry paid plan only starts earning its price at the 76th call.
Second, once the paid rungs take over the multiple stays in a 2.3x–3.4x band, and it is worst where the ladders are furthest out of phase — 3.1x at 300 calls, where Upfirst’s $159.95 Pro bundle covers the month and Smith.ai’s cheapest cover is a $500 rung, and 3.4x at 600, where Upfirst’s Scale tier covers the month outright and Smith.ai has no 600-call rung to sell you: you buy the sales-led 500 and pay $2.10 for the other hundred, or you ask for a custom quote nobody publishes.
At 200 calls a month — the reference workload we normalize this whole index against — Smith.ai models at $385, or $1.93 an answered call, against Upfirst’s $159.95, or $0.80 — its Pro bundle swallows all 200 calls, so the $0.53 it charges per included call works out at $0.80 per answered one.
Overage: both sides taper now, from very different heights
The old version of this guide contrasted a flat Smith.ai rate against a tapering Upfirst one. That contrast is gone: both ladders now step down as you commit. What is left is the height they step down from.
Smith.ai’s six priced rungs carry five distinct rates — $3.00 on Free, $2.50 on Pro 75, $2.30 on Pro 150, $2.17 on both 300-call rungs, and $2.10 on the sales-led Enterprise 500. Upfirst runs $1.50, $1.00, $0.75, $0.70. So Smith.ai’s cheapest extra call — the one you reach only by talking to sales and committing to $800 a month — still costs 1.4x Upfirst’s dearest and 3x Upfirst’s cheapest. One $2.50 overage call on Smith.ai’s entry paid rung costs about what five included calls cost on Upfirst’s Pro plan, at $0.53 each.
That is what a spiky month looks like in practice. A practice that budgeted for 75 calls and took 120 pays $262.50 on Smith.ai ($150 + 45 × $2.50) against $89.95 on Upfirst ($59.95 + 30 × $1.00) — a 2.9x gap created by the overage rate rather than the sticker.
One lever stays on Upfirst’s side, and Smith.ai now has no answer to it at all: Upfirst publishes a ~20% annual discount, taking Pro to about $127.96/mo and Starter to roughly $19.96. Smith.ai bills per call, month-to-month, with 30 days’ notice, and publishes no annual term — so there is no annual price to compare, not merely one we couldn’t find. It does advertise a six-month commitment plan promising rollover calls and a lower rate, but attaches no figure to it, so we carry none.
The window where Smith.ai wins: 36 calls and under
This is the part of the comparison that genuinely reversed, so here is the arithmetic in full. Smith.ai’s free tier costs $3.00 × (n − 25) for a month of n calls. Upfirst’s cheapest route at these volumes is Starter: $24.95 for the first 30 calls, then $1.50 each — so past 30 it climbs too, at exactly half Smith.ai’s rate. Set the two curves equal beyond 30 and they cross at 36.6 calls. At 36 calls Smith.ai charges $33.00 against Upfirst’s $33.95; at 37 it charges $36.00 against $35.45 and loses — and it never leads again at any volume either vendor publishes. Buy Upfirst annually at about $19.96/mo and the window closes earlier, at 33 calls: $24.00 against $24.46 at 33, then $27.00 against $25.96 at 34.
Name that window precisely, though: it is a free-tier window, not a Smith.ai-is-cheap window. The rate that fills it — $3.00 per call — is the highest published per-call rate in our 25-vendor index, dearer than every rung on Smith.ai’s own paid ladder. It is an excellent way to try the product and a bad plan to grow into: 40 calls costs $45, 60 costs $105, and by 75 you have spent the $150 the entry paid rung charges for the whole bundle.
So what does the Smith.ai premium buy
If Upfirst wins from the 37th call up, the case for Smith.ai has to be what wraps the call — and that answer changed with the ladder. The $3/call live-agent handoff this guide used to hang the argument on is not on the rebuilt page, and our record no longer carries it. So the premium has to be argued on what Smith.ai publishes today, which is three things.
Spam is filtered, and then credited. Calls matching Smith.ai’s 20-million-strong spam list are filtered before they are answered and never touch your bundle, and up to 10% of calls can be credited off each bill as spam. On the 300-call rung that is up to 30 calls back — worth roughly $50 a month at that rung’s own $1.67 per included call. Nothing in Upfirst’s record answers it.
The Enterprise rungs sell a service, not a bigger bucket. The $500 Enterprise 300-call rung costs exactly what the self-service Pro 300 rung costs and includes exactly the same 300 calls; what the sales call buys is Smith.ai building and running the setup for you. Useful if you want that — but it also means climbing to Enterprise for volume alone buys nothing the self-service ladder doesn’t already have until you pass 300 calls a month.
The feature list sits on the free tier. 24/7 AI answering, recording, transcription and summaries, lead qualification and routing, AI scheduling, native integrations, analytics and Quality Studio are what the record lists against the $0 plan. The paid rungs sell volume.
On integrations, the law-firm lane has narrowed on paper. Smith.ai’s pricing page names Clio and Calendly today; MyCase and Filevine, which the June version of the page named, are absent from the rebuilt one, so we no longer claim them on a source that no longer states them (they may well still be supported — the integrations page, not this one, is where that would live). Upfirst lists Clio too, alongside Google Calendar, Outlook, Acuity, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and GoHighLevel. Clio booking alone still doesn’t justify the multiple.
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
Priced at matched volumes rather than matching rows: Smith.ai is the cheaper answer only at 36 calls a month or fewer, and only because of its new free tier. From 37 calls up Upfirst is cheaper everywhere both vendors publish — $59.95 against $150 at 75 calls, $159.95 against $500 at 300, $299 against $800 at 500 — with a lower rate on every overage rung ($0.70–$1.50 against $2.10–$3.00), a 600-call tier Smith.ai can only match by stacking overage on a sales-led $800 plan, a ~20% annual discount Smith.ai has no term to offer against, and the same Clio integration most law-firm buyers went to Smith.ai for. Pay Smith.ai’s premium for the spam filtering and the spam credits, or for the Enterprise rungs where Smith.ai builds and runs the setup — not for the tier names, which have moved out from under the old comparison. Change the figures and we’ll re-run them; the workload and the source behind every number are published above.