What it costs to run, at 1 call a day or 100.
Our monthly fee is flat and it lives on the agent page. The phone line, the minutes and the texts are pass through: you pay what Twilio charges, with nothing added. Here’s the usage side, calculated live, so there’s no surprise on month two.
Every line, at published rates.
| Line item | Rate | Who charges it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local phone number | $1.15 / month | Twilio | Your existing number stays; this is the line the agent answers on. |
| Inbound call minutes | $0.0085 / min | Twilio | Local inbound. Toll free is $0.022, we don’t recommend it for trades. |
| Outbound call minutes | $0.014 / min | Twilio | Only when the agent calls a customer back. |
| AI voice processing | ≈ $0.07 / min | AI providers | Speech to text, the model, and text to speech combined. |
| Text messages | ≈ $0.008 / segment | Twilio | Missed call text back, confirmations, follow ups. Long texts are multiple segments. |
| Transcripts | $0.05 / min | Twilio | Optional. Every conversation logged in your portal, searchable. |
| Hosting (Forge + server) | ≈ $19 + $24 / month | Laravel Forge · DigitalOcean | Shared across our clients, your share is a few dollars and it’s inside the monthly fee. |
| Callout fee | Flat monthly, see the tiers | Callout | Flat. No per call, no per minute, no per seat. This is the only line we profit on. |
Twilio and Forge rates are their published 2026 list prices and can change. The AI voice line is our working estimate for the current stack and moves as providers reprice; your invoice always shows the real number.
Six volumes, default assumptions.
4 minute calls, 3 texts a call, AI voice at $0.07 a minute, transcripts on. Change them in the calculator and this table updates.
| Calls / day | Calls / month | Usage / month | Usage / call |
|---|
We don’t mark up your minutes
Answering services and most AI receptionists bundle usage into tiers with caps and overages. You see the real number and pay it directly, so a busy month costs more in minutes, never in surprise fees.
A booked job pays for a month
At ten calls a day the whole thing runs around what one small job earns. At a hundred a day you have a different problem, and a custom system to run it.
No booked job in 30 days, that month is free
Usage is still pass through, because Twilio still charged us. But our fee comes off. That’s the deal.
What it costs to run, line by line
Most owners have been burned by “from $X a month” pricing where the real number shows up on the second invoice. This page exists to make the running cost boring. There are two buckets. The first is our fee: $297, $397 or $497 a month depending on the tier, flat, for the agent, the hosting, the monitoring and the weekly transcript review in month one. The second bucket is usage, and usage is pass through: you pay exactly what Twilio and the AI providers charge, and we add nothing to it.
Bucket one: the flat fee
The monthly fee covers the agent itself, the server it runs on, the number forwarding logic, the calendar and price book integrations, and a partner reading your transcripts with you for the first month. The $500 set up is one time. There is no per seat fee, no per call fee and no contract, so the cost never climbs because you added a truck.
Bucket two: usage, at published rates
Every line in the usage bucket is a rate you can verify yourself on the provider’s own pricing page. A local Canadian number is $1.15 a month. Inbound minutes are $0.0085. Outbound minutes, used only when the agent calls a customer back, are $0.014. Text messages are about $0.008 per segment, and a long text is two or three segments. AI voice processing, which is speech to text, the language model and text to speech combined, runs about $0.07 a minute on the current stack. Transcripts are optional at $0.05 a minute and most owners keep them on because searchable call history is worth far more than it costs.
What that adds up to
Put the default assumptions together (four minute calls, three texts per call, transcripts on) and ten calls a day comes to roughly $163 a month in usage, or $460 all in with our fee. At one call a day it is about $17 in usage. At a hundred calls a day it is about $1,615 in usage, and at that volume you have a different kind of business and probably a custom system to run it. The table above recalculates all six volumes whenever you change an assumption, so the numbers are for your business, not an average.
Why pass through instead of tiers
Answering services and most AI receptionists bundle minutes into tiers with caps and overage fees. Tiers look simple until a busy month lands you in the next bracket. Pass through means a busy month costs you more in minutes and nothing else, and a quiet month costs you less. It also means we have no reason to keep calls long or push you up a plan, because we do not earn on usage at all. Our only line is the monthly fee.
What moves the number
- Longer calls raise the AI voice line fastest; it is the biggest single component at any volume
- More texts per call add pennies, not dollars
- Turning transcripts off saves about $0.20 per four minute call
- Toll free numbers cost more per minute ($0.022 inbound) and we do not recommend them for trades
- AI provider rates drift downward over time, and we pass the drop through the same way we pass the rate through
Where to check the numbers
Twilio publishes Canadian voice pricing at twilio.com and SMS pricing on the same site; our servers run on Laravel Forge and DigitalOcean, and that hosting is shared across clients and included in the flat fee. If a rate on this page is ever out of date, the invoice is right and this page is wrong, and we will fix the page. We publish all of this so you are never surprised.
Three questions owners ask
Do I pay usage if the agent takes a spam call? Yes, a few cents, the same way you would if the phone rang and you picked it up. The agent recognises sales pitches and wrong numbers quickly and ends the call politely, so those calls rarely run past thirty seconds. In practice spam is a rounding error.
Can I cap it? Yes. Tell us a monthly ceiling and the agent will stop making outbound follow up calls once usage crosses it; inbound calls are always answered because a missed call costs more than a minute ever will. Most owners set the cap once and never hit it, and the monthly invoice shows usage as its own line so you can see it move.
Does it change if I add custom software? No. If you move to a custom build, the $399 retainer already includes the AI sales agent’s fee, and usage stays pass through at the same published rates. The numbers on this page are the same whether the agent runs on its own or inside your system.
Want the number for your business?
Fifteen minutes. We look at your call volume and tell you, to the dollar, what the agent would cost to run before you commit to anything.