Answering service cost is hard to compare because the industry bills in three incompatible units. Per minute: Ruby publishes $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, which is $5.00 per included minute. Per call: Smith.ai publishes $300 a month for 30 calls, which is $10.00 per included call, and $11.50 for each call after that. Monthly minimum with a quote: AnswerConnect publishes no plan price at all — its pricing page is a form.
Below, those published prices are put on one unit, with the arithmetic shown and each number linked to the vendor's own page and dated. There is no industry average on this page. Averages in this category are compiled by the vendors themselves, and the one assumption needed to convert per-call to per-minute is labelled as an assumption wherever it is used.
On Call Bell has not answered a phone call yet. The safety gate, the triage rules, the call flow and the evidence trail are written and tested offline; the telephony is the next piece of work. Nothing on this page describes how fast or how reliably a live line answers, because no live line exists to measure. There is nothing to sign up for and no demo number. Everything below is either a decided price or a number you can count in the code.
All prices read from each vendor's own public pricing page on 5 September 2026 and quoted as published. The two derived columns are arithmetic on those numbers, not estimates. Converting between calls and minutes needs an average call length; the column below uses three minutes, which is an assumption stated so you can substitute your own — it is not a measurement, and nobody on this page has measured yours.
| Plan | Bills by | Published price | Per included unit | At a 3-min call (assumed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby — 50 minutes | Minute | $250 / mo, 50 min | $5.00 / min | $15.00 per call |
| Ruby — 100 minutes | Minute | $395 / mo, 100 min | $3.95 / min | $11.85 per call |
| Ruby — 200 minutes | Minute | $720 / mo, 200 min | $3.60 / min | $10.80 per call |
| Ruby — 500 minutes | Minute | $1,725 / mo, 500 min | $3.45 / min | $10.35 per call |
| Smith.ai — Starter | Call | $300 / mo, 30 calls; $11.50 over | $10.00 / call | $3.33 / min |
| Smith.ai — Basic | Call | $810 / mo, 90 calls; $10.50 over | $9.00 / call | $3.00 / min |
| Smith.ai — Pro | Call | $2,100 / mo, 300 calls; $8.50 over | $7.00 / call | $2.33 / min |
| ReceptionHQ — ReceptionistPlus 15 | Call | $39 / mo, 15 calls | $2.60 / call | $0.87 / min |
| ReceptionHQ — MessageExpress | Call | from $25 / mo; $1.99 per call answered | $1.99 / call | $0.66 / min |
| AnswerConnect | Minute (quoted) | Not published — quote form | — | — |
| On Call Bell — standard | Month, flat | $199 / mo, 1,200 min; 35¢ over | $0.166 / min | $0.50 per call |
| On Call Bell — founding 20 | Month, flat | $149 / mo, 600 min; 35¢ over | $0.248 / min | $0.75 per call |
This table is not apples to apples, and the difference is not efficiency. Ruby, Smith.ai, ReceptionHQ and AnswerConnect staff their lines with people, all day, for any industry. The bottom two rows are an automated line that only picks up after hours for plumbing shops, and that has not answered a phone call yet. A price two orders of magnitude apart is telling you the products are different, not that one is a bargain.
What is missing from the table, so you can check the omissions rather than trust them: Smith.ai's Enterprise tier is "ask about enterprise pricing", and ReceptionHQ's ReceptionistPlus (from $35), MyAssistant (from $49) and MyDiary (from $49) publish a starting price with no allowance beside it. Neither shape can be converted to a unit without inventing the missing half, so they are left out rather than estimated. Every plan that publishes both a price and an allowance is in the table.
Three mechanics move a real bill away from the advertised rate, and all three are checkable before you sign.
Rounding. On a night of 20-second wrong numbers, the rounding rule is the price, and only one of these four publishes one. ReceptionHQ's pricing page states that on its per-minute plans you are "charged for the exact seconds taken for managing each call", and contrasts that with providers who round every call up. Ruby's and Smith.ai's pricing pages say nothing about rounding either way; AnswerConnect's publishes no prices to attach a rule to. The disclosure that belongs here in the other direction: the draft order form behind the flat plan in the table rounds up. A billable minute there is connected call time rounded up to the next whole minute per call, greeting included.
What counts as billable. Some services bill agent work time, not only talk time. Ask whether the minute meter runs while a message is being typed after the caller has hung up. AnswerConnect, whose pricing page publishes no plan at all, says on its own blog that you are "only charged for the time our team is actively handling your calls", and puts basic live answering there at $1.50 to $1.75 a minute over 200 to 300 minutes a month. That is a benchmark in a blog post, not a plan anyone can buy, which is why it is not a row in the table.
Overage headroom. All three Smith.ai plans — the only rows above that publish an overage rate at all — charge more per call over the allowance than the plan works out to inside it: Starter is $10.00 per included call and $11.50 for the thirty-first. That is the correct direction for the vendor and the wrong direction for a shop in a cold snap, which is exactly the month you go over.
The last one is why the flat plan on this site has a visible worst line. The founding plan is $149 with 600 minutes, a smaller allowance than the $199 plan's 1,200, and the reason is printed rather than hidden: a cold snap can double a shop's after-hours calls for a whole month, and $149 does not cover that without a cap. Overage there is 35¢ a minute with an email at 80% and again at 100% of the allowance.
The choice is decided by one number you already have: the average length of your after-hours calls, which is on your phone bill.
Short calls, per call is worse. A wrong number and a "are you open tomorrow" both cost a full call on a per-call plan. At ReceptionHQ's published $1.99 per call answered, twenty short calls is $39.80 whether they last ten seconds or two minutes.
Long calls, per minute is worse, and rounding makes it worse again. A seven-minute call at Ruby's published $3.95 per included minute is $27.65 of a 100-minute allowance.
Unpredictable months are what a flat plan is for. A flat plan with a published overage rate transfers the variance to the vendor up to the cap. The thing to check is what happens above the cap and whether you are told before you get there, not what the headline number is.
A number nobody on this page can give you is the after-hours call volume of a one-truck plumbing shop in January. Ours is not measured, and no cited vendor publishes theirs. Use your own bill.
Two services at the same price per minute can behave completely differently on the one call that matters, and no pricing page shows you that. The questions that separate them are on the four-outcome page: what happens on a suspected gas leak, which escalation rows you can edit, and what the system does when a question goes unanswered.
For a plumbing shop specifically, the escalation table that decides whether your phone rings at 2am is published row by row, which is the part of the purchase a price cannot tell you about.
It depends entirely on the billing unit, and published prices vary by more than an order of magnitude. Read on 5 September 2026: ReceptionHQ lists ReceptionistPlus 15 at $39 a month for 15 calls, Ruby lists $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, and Smith.ai lists $300 a month for 30 calls. AnswerConnect does not publish a plan price.
Per-call is worse for short calls and per-minute is worse for long ones, so the deciding number is your own average after-hours call length, which is on your phone bill. At a three-minute call — an assumption, not a measurement — Smith.ai Starter works out at $3.33 a minute and Ruby 100 at $3.95 a minute.
Three things, and vendors differ on which apply: rounding each call up to a full minute, billing agent work time as well as talk time, and overage rates that are higher per unit than the plan itself. ReceptionHQ publishes that it bills per second rather than rounding up; Ruby and Smith.ai say nothing either way; Smith.ai publishes $10.00 per included call on Starter and $11.50 for each call over the allowance.
$199 a month flat, including 1,200 minutes, then 35 cents a minute, with an email at 80% and again at 100% of the allowance. The first twenty shops pay $149 a month for as long as the subscription stays continuously active, with 600 minutes included. Nothing is chargeable yet, because the line has not answered a phone call.
Because a cold snap can double a shop’s after-hours calls for a whole month, every January, and $149 does not cover that without a cap. The line is printed on the pricing rather than discovered on an invoice.
If you run a shop and something on this page is wrong — a rule that would wake you for nothing, a phrase the word list should catch and does not — write to hello@oncallbell.com. A person reads it. That is more useful to us than a signup, and there is no signup yet anyway.
Last checked against the code on 2026-09-06