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Short answer: it depends which of the three routes you take. A basic live answering service starts around £30 a month. A full-time receptionist costs upwards of £30,000 a year once employer costs are added. An AI receptionist usually sits somewhere between the two, and the exact figure depends on whether you build it yourself or pay someone to run it for you.
This article works through all three options with published figures, then lists the hidden costs that tend to surprise people after they sign up.
A word on where this fits. We are an AI automation studio, and answering calls is one piece of that work rather than the whole of it. Most of what we automate is business process: enquiries, admin, quoting and paperwork. The phone line is the piece you can hear working for yourself in a single call, which is why it gets written about first. The other areas we cover are set out at amoskalets.com/solutions.
What counts as an AI receptionist
An AI receptionist is software that answers your business phone line. It speaks with the caller, answers common questions, takes a message or books an appointment, and then sends you a summary of the call. It is not a chatbot on your website, and it is not the same as a human answering service, although the jobs overlap.
The cost question only makes sense next to the alternatives, so we will compare all three.
Option one: hire a receptionist
According to Reed's salary data, the average receptionist salary in the UK is £28,552 a year, based on 386 live job listings at the time of writing. That is the salary alone.
On top of salary, an employer pays National Insurance at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year under the April 2025 rates published on gov.uk, plus a minimum employer pension contribution of 3% under automatic enrolment rules. Our estimate using those figures puts the true cost of an average in-house receptionist at roughly £32,500 to £33,000 a year, before recruitment, desk space, phone line and software.
There are also practical limits. One person answers one call at a time, usually within office hours. Holidays, sick days and lunch breaks need cover, and out-of-hours callers reach a voicemail.
Option two: a live answering service
A live answering service employs human operators who answer your calls under your business name, usually following a script you agree with them.
Published UK pricing gives a feel for the range. alldayPA lists a Starter plan at £29.95 a month excluding VAT, which includes 25 minutes of call answering, and a Growth plan at £49.95 a month with 45 minutes included; their published pricing also includes free evening and weekend cover as standard. Moneypenny's guide to UK answering service costs puts entry-level packages at roughly £15 to £20 a month, rising to £100 to £300 or more a month for fuller virtual PA packages.
The watch item with this option is the allowance. Twenty-five minutes a month is about a dozen short calls. A busy trade business can burn through that in a day, and the per-minute overage rate then drives the real monthly bill. Ask for the overage price per minute and how minutes are rounded before comparing packages.
Option three: an AI receptionist
There are two ways to buy this, and they have very different cost profiles.
Build it yourself on a voice AI platform. Voice platforms such as Vapi and Retell publish usage-based pricing. Vapi's pricing page breaks the cost into per-minute components, which add up to roughly $0.03 to $0.08 per minute depending on which speech and language providers you choose, with a Core plan at $29 a month. Retell's published pay-as-you-go rates run from $0.07 to $0.31 per minute. On paper that looks close to free: an hour of calls at $0.05 a minute is $3. The real cost is your time. Someone has to write the call script, connect the phone number, test the awkward callers, fix it when it goes wrong and update it when your services or prices change.
Pay for a managed service. A managed provider builds the assistant for you, connects it to your number and maintains the script. You pay a monthly retainer for the running system rather than raw platform minutes. As a published example, our own plans at amoskalets.com are £129 a month for Starter and £299 a month for Professional. Starter covers one assistant, up to five integrations and a UK phone line with guided onboarding, and Professional covers up to five assistants with unlimited workflows and dedicated UK phone numbers. Both plans are also available annually at £1,032 and £2,388 a year, and managed setup typically takes two to five working days. Our assistants run with a hard daily spend cap of £5, so a busy week cannot turn into a surprise bill, and done-for-you voice work is quoted at £150 to £350 a month.
A worked example
Example calculation, using our estimates on top of the published figures above. Imagine a plumbing firm receiving eight calls a day, averaging two minutes each. That is about 480 minutes, or eight hours, of call handling a month.
- A receptionist at the UK average salary plus employer costs works out at roughly £2,700 a month.
- A pay-as-you-go answering service at the fuller end of Moneypenny's range, £100 to £300 a month, may fit, but heavy months with overage minutes will push towards the top of that band.
- A DIY build on a voice platform comes to a few dozen dollars a month in platform fees, plus your time to build and maintain it.
- A managed AI receptionist retainer sits in the middle, as a fixed monthly fee.
The point of the example is not that one option always wins. It is that the cheapest sticker price and the cheapest total cost are rarely the same thing.
Hidden costs to check before you sign anything
Wherever the quote comes from, ask about these before you commit:
- Overage rate per minute, and whether minutes are rounded up
- Setup or onboarding fees, and what they include
- Phone number rental and outbound call charges
- Out-of-hours and weekend cover, and whether it costs extra
- Who updates the script when your prices, services or opening hours change, and what that costs
- Holiday and sickness cover, for a human hire
- Whether quoted prices include VAT (alldayPA's published prices, for example, are excluding VAT)
- Data protection: call recording consent, where call recordings and transcripts are stored, and whether the provider will sign a data processing agreement
That last point matters more than the price. A receptionist, human or AI, handles your customers' names, numbers and often more. Under UK GDPR you need to know where that data goes and on what terms.
The honest trade-offs
An AI receptionist handles the routine calls well: taking a message, qualifying a lead, booking or rescheduling an appointment. It answers at 7am on a Sunday the same way it answers at 10am on a Tuesday, with no sick cover or holiday rota to plan around.
The trade-off is worth saying out loud. A complicated, emotional or legally sensitive conversation still needs a human, and a good setup routes those calls to you instead of pretending they went fine.
The bottom line
An AI receptionist in the UK can cost as little as a DIY platform subscription, a fixed monthly retainer around £129 to £299, or several times that if you pick per-minute billing with a long contract. The price itself is rarely the trap. The billing model is.
If you want to hear one before talking to anyone, our own AI receptionist answers the amoskalets phone line on +44 20 4577 1226, around the clock. Or book the free AI Automation Audit at amoskalets.com/ai-audit: a 30-minute discovery call where we look at where calls and admin hours leak out of your business, and you leave with a written map of your automation opportunities whether you buy anything or not.
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