AI receptionist comparison: 6 services compared

Every figure below came off the vendor's own pricing page and is stored with the sentence it was taken from. Where a vendor's own pages disagree with each other, or with a directory listing, that is said out loud rather than averaged into a tidy range.

Best for

• Dial Milo — unpredictable or modest volume. An empty month costs nothing, and missed, blocked and spam calls never reach the bill.
• Smith.ai — fewer than 25 calls a month, where its AI tier is free; or intake valuable enough that a human should be able to take the call over mid-conversation.
• Rosie — steady volume and no appetite for a variable bill. Exceeding the plan produces an upgrade, not an overage line.
• Goodcall — a small set of callers who talk for a long time. Minutes are unlimited; the meter counts people.
• Ruby — calls that must be answered by a trained human, including HIPAA-covered intake and legal screening.
• Dialzara — you want a per-minute rate published in advance on a subscription, and you will switch auto-recharge on.

What sixty calls a month actually costs

The scenario: 60 answered calls in a month, averaging 90 seconds, from roughly 50 different phone numbers. That is 90 minutes of talk time.

Smith.ai's paid AI tier costs less per call than its free one but more in total here: Pro is $150 flat and includes 75 calls, so it only starts winning above roughly 75 calls a month. Ruby's human service and Smith.ai's human service are a different product from the other four and priced accordingly — Smith.ai's cheapest human path for these 60 calls is $645, being the $300 Starter plan plus 30 overage calls at $11.50.

Per call: Smith.ai

One billed unit per conversation, however long it runs. That caps the cost of a long call, and Smith.ai argues the point openly on its own pricing page: a four-minute intake and a forty-second hours question cost the same.

The same property is what hurts a phone line that attracts junk, because every answered wrong number is a full unit. Smith.ai does describe an allowance to remove up to 10% of calls from the bill each cycle, though the mechanics are not published.

Per-call suits businesses whose calls are long, few and individually valuable. A booked consultation is worth many multiples of $3.00, so the unit price stops mattering. It suits a busy plumber's line badly.

Dial Milo vs. Smith.ai works the numbers both ways.

Per minute, bundled: Rosie, Dialzara and Ruby

You buy a block of minutes each month, and the only real question is what happens at the edges. All three answer it differently, and the differences move the ranking more than the sticker price does.

Rosie has no per-minute overage at all. Go past your minutes and it upgrades you to the next plan at that plan's normal price — no surprise line item, but the upgrade holds for the current billing period and at least the two after it. Rosie also rounds every call up to the next 60-second mark, so a business averaging 90-second calls burns two minutes on each one.

Dialzara publishes a rate on every tier, from $0.48 a minute on Lite down to $0.35 on Elite, and measures to the second with no rounding. The catch sits in the FAQ rather than on the plan cards: those extra minutes are a prepaid top-up, so if you run out without auto-recharge enabled, callers go to voicemail rather than onto a bigger invoice.

Ruby publishes no overage rate anywhere. Its FAQ says only that additional minutes are billed at the rate associated with your plan. At $250 for 50 minutes the included rate is $5.00 a minute, and the price of the 51st minute is not something a prospect can find out before signing.

Bundled minutes suit a flat, predictable call pattern. They punish seasonality in both directions: you pay for the block in January and hit the ceiling in June.

Head to head: Rosie, Dialzara, Ruby.

Per unique caller: Goodcall

Goodcall meters people rather than conversations. A unique customer is one phone number that calls and actually says something in a given month, billed once whether they call once or nine times, and whether the call runs thirty seconds or half an hour. Its own FAQ is blunt: no fees for number of calls, call minutes, or tokens.

That is the most forgiving model here for long calls and repeat callers, and the least forgiving for a wide, thin funnel — 300 first-time callers in a month costs Starter's $79 plus $0.50 for each one past 100. Prices are per agent, so a second location doubles the subscription.

Dial Milo vs. Goodcall has the crossover point.

Per second, no plan: Dial Milo

Dial Milo has no subscription and no minimum. It bills answered talk time by the second at 6.1¢ a minute on a US number, so the 90 minutes in the scenario cost $5.50, and a month with no calls costs nothing. Missed, blocked and spam calls are not billed because nothing was answered. A dedicated number is $3 a month, or forward the number you already have for free.

That buys an AI that answers on the second ring in six-plus languages, books into your connected calendar, answers questions from documents you upload, refuses to invent a price it was never given, and texts you a summary when a call needs you. It does not buy a staffed backstop. There is no Dial Milo employee who can take over the call; transfers go to your own team.

Zero fixed cost is the whole argument, and it only matters if your volume moves. If the phone rings 400 times every single month without fail, a flat plan will eventually be simpler.

Where the sticker price stops telling the truth

Price your own line first

1. 1

   Pull three numbers off last month's bill

   Answered calls, average call length, and how many distinct phone numbers called. Every model on this page prices out of those three figures, and no vendor's example volume will match yours.

2. 2

   Count what you would rather not pay for

   Robocalls, wrong numbers, hangups. If they are a fifth of your calls, per-call pricing is charging you a fifth of your invoice for nothing.

3. 3

   Multiply, do not eyeball

   Run your minutes through each model including its rounding rule. A 90-second average is 2 billed minutes at Rosie and 1.5 anywhere that measures to the second.

4. 4

   Ask what happens at the ceiling

   A bigger bill, a forced upgrade, or the phone no longer being answered? All three exist in this set, and only one of them is what most people assume.

The head-to-heads

Each of these carries the full verified fact table for that vendor, the cost math at a realistic volume, and a section on where they beat us.

• Dial Milo vs. Smith.ai — per call against per second, and why the free tier is the real story.
• Dial Milo vs. Rosie — the rounding rule, and why there is no overage rate to find.
• Dial Milo vs. Goodcall — how long your callers have to talk before unlimited minutes pay off.
• Dial Milo vs. Ruby Receptionists — human answering at $5.00 an included minute, and when that is the right call.
• Dial Milo vs. Dialzara — the closest pricing model in the set, and the voicemail failure mode.

For the model argument without the vendor names, see answering service alternatives compared and answering service pricing compared.