Answering service pricing in 2026: the published rates, with sources
Almost everything written about answering-service pricing is written by answering services, and most of it cites other vendor blogs rather than a price list. The numbers that result — “rounding adds 20–30% to your invoice”, “full-minute billing is the industry standard” — get repeated until they sound like facts.
So this page does something narrower and more useful: it records what five providers publish on their own pages, on a stated date, with the gaps marked as gaps. Then it traces the three most-repeated pricing claims and shows that none of them has a primary source.
The short version: Published entry points range from $30/month plus $1.60–$1.95 a minute (AnswerFirst) to $250/month for 50 minutes (Ruby) — and at the same plan size the gap between providers is wider than any billing increment could explain. Per-call pricing is well above what most summaries claim: Smith.ai publishes $300 for 30 calls, which is $10 a call, against the “$1.50–$3.00 per call” that circulates. Only two of five publish a rounding increment at all, and four of five say nothing about what counts as a billable call. Every figure was read at the provider’s own page on 17 October 2026; anything expressed as a per-minute rate for a plan is our arithmetic, not an advertised rate.
What five providers publish
Read at each provider’s own pricing page on 17 October 2026. “Not stated” means the page doesn’t say — which is itself the most common answer.
| Provider | Billed by | Published entry point | Rounding increment | Billable-call rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai | the call | $300/mo for 30 calls | Not stated | Stated — see below |
| Ruby | the minute | $250/mo for 50 min | Not stated | Not stated |
| PATLive | the minute | $49/mo, $2.99/min | Not stated | Partial — see below |
| AnswerFirst | the minute | $30/mo base, $1.60–$1.95/min | One second | Not stated |
| Moneypenny | the minute | Not on that page | 30 seconds (see caveat) | Not stated |
| Rindee | the minute | See pricing page | Two units — see below | Not stated on the page |
We’re in the table on the same terms as everyone else, including the gaps. That column records what each provider’s pricing page states, and ours doesn’t state a billable-call rule either. Here is the full rule.
What Rindee bills
- A call that never connects costs nothing. No answer, no duration, no charge. That isn’t a feature — it’s how telephony works nearly everywhere, and a provider making a selling point of it is selling you the floor.
- Plan minutes come off by actual talk time, rounded up to the nearest hundredth of a minute. A 10-second call takes 0.17 of a minute out of your bucket, not a whole one.
- The pay-as-you-go platform fee is charged per started minute. A 20-second call pays a full minute of it. The AI usage underneath the fee is metered; the fee itself isn’t.
- There’s no billable-call rule because there’s no exclusion. No spam filter, no wrong-number rule, no minimum length. If a call connects and runs, it bills.
- On a Rindee-provided number, the phone line is billed per started minute, per leg, at our provided rate. A call transferred to a person runs two legs, and both are billed that way. On your own carrier, none of this appears — you pay your carrier directly.
Ask any provider for those same five answers.
Two providers do say something about what they’ll bill you for:
- Smith.ai, the per-call provider: “as long as the lines you forward to us pass Caller ID, you won’t be charged for spam or unsolicited sales calls.” Note the condition — the clearest rule here still has a clause in it.
- PATLive bills “the time receptionists are live on your calls” and excludes “after-call notes, message entry, or wrap-up.” That’s a partial rule: it says when the meter stops, not what makes a call billable in the first place.
The number that actually matters: the rate a plan works out to
A plan price and a per-minute rate are different things, and the plan price is the one you pay most months. Neither Ruby nor PATLive publishes a per-minute rate for its plans — the figures in the right-hand columns below are ours, from dividing each published plan price by its included minutes. They are not advertised rates and shouldn’t be quoted as if they were.
| Plan size | Ruby — published | Works out to | PATLive — published | Works out to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 minutes | $250 | $5.00/min | $99 | $1.98/min |
| 100 minutes | $395 | $3.95/min | $189 | $1.89/min |
| 200 minutes | $720 | $3.60/min | $349 | $1.75/min |
| 500 minutes | $1,725 | $3.45/min | $759 | $1.52/min |
Two honest caveats before anyone reads a winner into that. These are not identical services — what each includes, how calls are handled and what sits in the plan differ, and a per-minute figure flattens all of it. And it assumes you use every included minute; use half and the figure doubles, which is the actual argument against buying capacity you don’t need.
What the arithmetic does show is that the spread between providers at the same plan size is larger than any rounding rule or hidden fee could account for — so the provider you pick matters more than the increment you negotiate. PATLive’s published per-minute overages run $2.99 (its pay-as-you-go tier) down to $1.49 on its largest plan; Ruby’s pricing page states no overage rate, so what a 201st minute costs on its 200-minute plan isn’t knowable from the page.
On the per-call side, Smith.ai’s published plans work out to $10.00 per call (30 calls, $300), $9.00 (90 calls, $810) and $7.00 (300 calls, $2,100) — again our arithmetic, not its advertised rate — while the per-call overage it does publish sits above those at $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50.
The practical consequence: divide before you compare, and ask what the overage is before assuming a plan protects you.
What the rounding increment does to one identical call
Only AnswerFirst and Moneypenny publish an increment, and between them they document the whole spread. AnswerFirst advertises “True One-Second Billing (No Rounding Up To The Nearest Minute)” and makes the contrast itself: a 65-second call “costs exactly 65 seconds here.” Moneypenny publishes a worked example of its own 30-second increments — “A 1-minute, 5-second call is billed as 1 minute and 30 seconds” — alongside what full-minute billing does to the same call: “calls are rounded up to the next whole minute… A 1-minute, 5-second call is billed as 2 minutes.”
So the same 65-second call bills as 65, 90 or 120 seconds depending only on the increment — up to 84% more for an identical call, before anyone’s rate enters the calculation.
⚠️ Even a published increment can be worth confirming. Moneypenny’s pricing and overages article (published 5 June 2026, read 17 October 2026) describes its billing both as “30-second increments” and as rounding “to the nearest 30 seconds”. Those phrases imply different results for the same call — rounding 1:05 up gives 1:30, rounding to the nearest gives 1:00 — and the article’s own worked example gives 1:30. We’ve recorded the worked example, since it’s the explicit one. The general lesson isn’t about Moneypenny, which publishes more detail here than most: if the one provider that documents its increment can be read two ways, get the rule for your own account in writing.
The claims that don’t hold up
Three figures dominate writing on this topic. We checked all three and couldn’t source any of them.
“Rounding adds 20–30% to your invoice.” Appears across at least six vendor blogs — ringly.io, ever-help, bigoutsource, getnextphone, automatenexusvoice, cytranet — none citing a primary source, each reading as a rewrite of the others (checked 25 September 2026). The mechanism is real and documented above with vendors’ own worked examples. The magnitude is not sourced by anyone, and it can’t be a single number anyway: rounding is a fixed penalty per call, so its percentage impact depends entirely on how long your calls run.
“6-second billing saves $50–$75 a month versus 15-second blocks.” Same vendor-blog origin, no methodology, no sample size, no stated call volume — and the saving is arithmetically meaningless without the last of those.
“Full-minute billing is the most common method in the answering service industry.” This one is traceable, and that’s the problem. Its clearest published statement is in Moneypenny’s own pricing article — a provider whose differentiator, stated in the same article, is that it doesn’t bill by the full minute. That doesn’t make it false; it means the prevalence claim comes from an interested party with no survey behind it. What we can say from checking five pricing pages is narrower and verifiable: three of the five don’t publish a rounding rule at all. That is not the same as “most round up.”
And one of ours. Until this post, /blog/answering-service-cost carried a rate table — ~$1.00–$2.00/min, ~$1.50–$3.00/call, ~$25–$300/mo — with no attribution, written before we started checking. The published figures above show how far off the per-call range was: Smith.ai’s entry plan is $10.00 a call, three to seven times that range. Those figures have now been replaced with sourced ones.
Where these numbers don’t apply
- All five providers are US-focused, and the prices are US dollars. For Australia, the UK or New Zealand we found no equivalent set of published rates to compare — which is a statement about what we could find, not a claim about how every provider in those markets prices. If you’re outside the US, the questions at the end of this page matter more, not less.
- Pricing pages change. Every figure here carries the date we read it. Re-check before quoting it anywhere, including from this page.
- These are list prices. What a provider quotes a specific business after a sales call is not something any public page can tell you.
- A plan price is not a bill. Setup fees, after-hours surcharges and overage rates sit outside the headline number, and only some of these pages mention them — AnswerFirst states no extra charge for nights, weekends and holidays; PATLive states no contracts and a 14-day trial; Ruby states no activation or onboarding fees.
What to ask, in writing
The gaps in that table are the questions:
- What’s the rounding increment, in seconds, and does it round up or to the nearest? Three of five don’t publish it.
- What counts as a billable call? Wrong numbers, two-second hang-ups, telemarketers, repeat calls from the same person. Four of five say nothing.
- When does the meter start and stop? Ring time, hold time, menu time, and the wrap-up after the caller has gone.
- What’s the overage rate, and is it higher than the in-plan rate? On at least one of the five plans above it is, and one of the five publishes no overage rate at all.
- Is there a monthly minimum, a setup fee or a contract term?
If you want the arithmetic for comparing a per-call quote against a per-minute one, that’s a separate guide. For how the models work in general, see how much does an answering service cost?.
Rindee answers those five questions about itself further up this page, including the two answers that don’t flatter us. Current rates are on the pricing page.
Sources
Each figure links to the page we actually read, with the date. Where a circulating claim couldn’t be traced to a primary source, we’ve said so rather than repeating it. Re-check the originals before citing them elsewhere — pricing pages change without notice.
- Smith.ai — receptionist pricing (read 17 Oct 2026) — per-call plans, overage rates, the spam/Caller ID condition, per-call add-ons
- Ruby — pricing (read 17 Oct 2026) — virtual receptionist plans by included minutes; no overage, increment or billable-call rule stated
- PATLive — pricing (read 17 Oct 2026) — live answering plans and per-minute overages, no contracts, 14-day trial, the wrap-up exclusion
- AnswerFirst — pricing (read 17 Oct 2026) — $30 base, $1.60–$1.95/min, one-second billing, no after-hours surcharge
- Moneypenny — pricing and overages explained (published 5 Jun 2026, read 17 Oct 2026) — 30-second increments and the full-minute comparison. Provider’s own blog, and the source of the “most common method” prevalence claim discussed above
- Vendor-blog figures we could not source (checked 25 Sep 2026): ringly.io, ever-help, bigoutsource, getnextphone, automatenexusvoice, cytranet — origin of the “20–30%” and “$50–$75/month” claims
The whole billing rule, written out above. Rindee deducts plan minutes by actual talk time, charges its pay-as-you-go platform fee per started minute, and ends calls with the appointment booked rather than a message for someone to action later. Rates on the pricing page.