What it costs
to run, at
1 call a day
or 100.
$297 a month is our fee. The phone line, the minutes and the texts are pass-through — you pay what Twilio charges, with nothing added. Here’s the whole thing, calculated live, so there’s no surprise on month two.
On this page
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. Adjustable above — see the note below. |
| 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 $297. |
| Callout fee | $297 / month | 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 — we’ll always show you the real number on your invoice.
Six volumes, default assumptions.
| Calls / day | Calls / month | Usage / month | + Callout fee | Per call, all in |
|---|
Default assumptions: 4-minute calls, 3 texts per call, AI voice at $0.07/min, transcripts on. Change them in the calculator and this table updates.
Answering services and most AI receptionists bundle usage into tiers with caps and overages. We’d rather you see the real number and pay it directly — so a busy month costs you more in minutes, never in surprise fees.
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.
Usage is still pass-through, because Twilio still charged us. But our fee comes off. That’s the deal.
Running costs, explained the way we’d explain them to a friend
Most owners have been burned by “from $X a month” pricing where the real number shows up on the second invoice. So this page exists to make the running costs of the AI sales agent boring. There are two buckets. The first is our fee: $297 a month, 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
$297 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 $997 set-up is one-time and can be financed at 0%: $100 down, then $299 a month for three months or $149.50 for six. There is no per-seat fee, no per-call fee, and no contract, so the running costs never climb 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 the running costs at ten calls a day come 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 running costs you see 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 running costs mean 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 $297.
How the running costs move
- 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. The point of publishing running costs at all is that you should never be surprised.
Three questions owners ask about running costs
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 in the running costs.
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.
Do the running costs change if I add the 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 running costs on this page are the same whether the agent runs on its own or inside your system.
Four minutes, three texts, transcripts on. Running costs scale with calls, never with seats.
Everything else is a rate you can look up. 0% markup on usage.
At ten calls a day the whole thing runs around $460, less than most single service calls.
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.
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