Smith.ai Pricing 2026: What 30 Calls Really Costs
Smith.ai's own pricing page says $300 a month for 30 calls. That is $10 a call before you switch on a single feature. The interesting part is what happens after you do.
Smith.ai is one of the oldest names in outsourced call answering, and it is the vendor most often shortlisted next to an AI receptionist app. It is also the vendor whose pricing is most often reported wrong. Three of the comparison articles ranking for its name today print three different price cards, and none of them matches what smith.ai/pricing served us on 28 August 2026.
One disclosure first. No Missed Call publishes this blog and sells a competing product, so read our conclusions with that in mind. Every figure below is taken from a vendor's own public page, checked on 28 August 2026, with the source linked beside it. Where a number is our arithmetic rather than a published price, we say so.
Smith.ai has two price cards, not one
This is the single most common mistake in Smith.ai write-ups. The company sells two different products with two different billing logics on two different pages:
- Virtual Receptionist — real people answering, priced in calls per month, on smith.ai/pricing.
- AI Receptionist — the AI-first product, also priced in calls per month but roughly a fifth of the price, on smith.ai/ai-receptionist.
A comparison that quotes the $300 entry price next to a $49 AI product is comparing a human answering service to software. A comparison that quotes the $150 AI plan and calls it "Smith.ai" is hiding the humans that most of Smith.ai's reputation rests on. Both happen constantly.
The human plans, as published
Verbatim from Smith.ai's pricing page, as of August 2026:
| Plan | Calls included | Monthly | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 30 | $300 | $11.50 per call over 30 |
| Basic | 90 | $810 | $10.50 per call over 90 |
| Pro | 300 | $2,100 | $8.50 per call over 300 |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | not published |
Divide the price by the calls and the entry tier is $10.00 a call, Basic is $9.00 and Pro is $7.00 — our arithmetic from Smith.ai's own two columns. All plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, no setup fees, no overseas agents and no charge for spam calls, per the same page.
Note the direction of the overage rate. On Starter it is $11.50, which is higher than the $10.00 average price of the calls inside the plan, per that card. Going one call over does not cost you the plan rate; it costs more than the plan rate.
The add-on stack is the story
The features a small business assumes are included are, on the human plans, priced per call. From the same page, as of August 2026:
| Add-on | Price |
|---|---|
| Book appointments | $1.50 per call |
| Complex call routing | $1.50 per call |
| Extended intake (six extra questions) | $1.50 per call |
| Dedicated Spanish line | $1.00 per call |
| Accept payments | $1.00 per call |
| Custom calendaring | $1.00 per call |
| Third-party intake | $1.00 per call |
| SMS, Slack or Teams notifications | $0.50 per call |
| Text and email follow-up | $0.50 per call |
| Conflict checks | $0.50 per call |
| Additional CRM beyond the first | $0.50 per call |
| Call recording and transcription | $0.25 per call |
| Additional transfer destination | $15.00 per month |
| Business caller ID for outbound | $10.00 per month |
| Inbound call tracking number | $5.00 per month |
Lead qualification, new client intake, a dedicated phone number and 24/7 live staffing are all listed as free on that same card, and so is the first CRM integration. That is worth saying plainly, because the add-on list on its own makes the product look more metered than it actually is.
Here is an illustrative month, not a customer. It is arithmetic on Smith.ai's published figures, shown so you can redo it with your own numbers. A two-person trade business on Starter takes 30 calls, wants appointments booked, wants a text when a lead qualifies, and wants every call recorded. Using the add-on rates above, that is $1.50 plus $0.50 plus $0.25, so $2.25 on top of each call. Thirty calls is $67.50 of add-ons, the month is $367.50, and the real cost per call is $12.25. Add a dedicated Spanish line at $1.00 a call and it is $397.50, or $13.25 a call.
Now let that business have a good month and take 40 calls. Ten of them are overage at $11.50 each, so the base is $415, the add-ons across 40 calls are $130, and the bill is $545. The busier you get, the worse the unit economics — which is the opposite of what you want from a lead-capture tool.
The AI-only card is a different animal
Smith.ai's AI Receptionist page publishes, as of August 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Per call, as printed |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 25 calls a month, then $3.00 per call |
| Pro | $150 | $2.00 at the 75-call setting |
| Enterprise | $500 | $1.67 at the 300-call setting |
Two details most write-ups miss. First, the Pro and Enterprise cards carry call-volume sliders. Pro offers 75, 150 and 300 calls, the last two marked with a 10% and a 17% reduction; Enterprise offers 300, 500 and 1000+, per the same page. The monthly totals for the higher settings are not printed until you move the slider. CloudTalk's write-up reports $270 for 150 calls and $500 for 300 calls on Pro, which is what those two reductions produce arithmetically from the $2.00 base (cloudtalk.io, read 28 August 2026). We could not confirm those totals from a static fetch of Smith.ai's page, so treat them as consistent rather than verified.
Second, the free tier is unusually generous and unusually honest about it: 25 live calls a month, free every month rather than as a trial, a credit card required at signup but "no charge until you authorize", and the line "Overages toggle on or off — you're in control". Very few vendors in this category let you cap your own spend. That is a genuine point in Smith.ai's favour and we will not pretend otherwise.
Escalation is priced sensibly too. Smith.ai's FAQ states that if the AI itself decides to hand a call to a human, there is no fee, and that live agent involvement you configure yourself is a per-call add-on available on any plan (smith.ai/ai-receptionist).
Why every comparison site quotes a different number
We checked three pages currently ranking for Smith.ai pricing on 28 August 2026 against Smith.ai's own card, fetched the same day.
| Source | Starter | Basic | Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| smith.ai/pricing (the vendor) | $300, 30 calls | $810, 90 calls | $2,100, 300 calls |
| loman.ai | $292.50, 30 calls | $765, 90 calls | $1,950, 300 calls |
| schedulingkit.com | $292.50, 30 calls | $532.50, 60 calls | $975, 120 calls |
The plan names match. The prices do not, and in the third case neither do the call allowances. None of these sites is lying; price cards move, and an article written months ago and never re-checked will drift. But it means a number you read in a listicle is not a number you can budget against — and neither is a number in this article six months from now. The only safe habit is to open the vendor's own pricing page on the day you decide.
We apply that rule to ourselves. We read twelve pricing pages line by line for this blog and we still re-verify every figure before republishing it, because we have already had to correct our own posts after a vendor repriced.
Per call or per minute? Converting the two
Smith.ai bills per call. Human answering services and most AI receptionists bill per minute, which makes a direct comparison hard. There is exactly one vendor-published conversion we could find: PATLive's price card labels 50 minutes "About 20 calls", 100 minutes "About 40 calls" and 200 minutes "About 80 calls", which is 2.5 minutes a call (patlive.com/pricing, as of August 2026).
Using that rule of thumb, and treating every derived figure below as our arithmetic on published prices rather than any vendor's own claim:
| Service | Published price | Approx. per call | Approx. per minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai Virtual Receptionist Starter | $300, 30 calls | $10.00 | $4.00 |
| Smith.ai Virtual Receptionist Pro | $2,100, 300 calls | $7.00 | $2.80 |
| Ruby 100 minutes | $395, 100 min | $9.88 | $3.95 |
| PATLive 200 minutes | $349, 200 min | $4.36 | $1.75 |
| Smith.ai AI Pro | $150, 75 calls | $2.00 | $0.80 |
| Rosie Professional | $49, 250 min | $0.49 | $0.20 |
| Goodcall Starter | $79, 100 unique callers | $0.79 | minutes not metered |
| Clara (heyitsclara.com) | $39.99, unlimited calls | no per-call charge | no minute allowance published |
Two honest caveats on that table. Ruby publishes neither an overage rate nor a rounding increment, so its effective cost above the allowance is unknown (ruby.com). And Rosie, Goodcall and Clara publish no voice overage terms at all, so the cheap end of the table is cheap partly because it tells you less. Clara here means the one at heyitsclara.com, built by 44pixels Limited — there is an unrelated getclaraai.com at several times the price, and the two get conflated constantly.
We ran the same exercise on human answering services in our cost comparison of AI receptionists, answering services and call centres, and on the hyperscaler entry in our look at Zoom's 100-minute plan.
Where Smith.ai genuinely beats us
This section exists because a comparison that never concedes anything is not worth reading.
Smith.ai has real humans, and that is not a small thing. Its own page cites 25 million calls handled over ten years and more than 500 North America-based receptionists in its live agent network (smith.ai/ai-receptionist). No Missed Call has no human fallback at all. If a distressed caller needs a person, or your intake needs judgement an AI should not be making, Smith.ai answers a question we do not.
Its legal-vertical depth is a second real advantage. Conflict checks as a priced feature, Clio Grow and Clio Manage as native integrations, and an AI that can pull live matter status out of a case management system mid-call are not things a general small-business app offers (smith.ai/ai-receptionist). A personal injury firm probably should not be shopping in our price band at all.
Third, Quality Studio. Smith.ai lets you define your own scenarios, run up to 50 simulated calls a month at no charge, score them against goals you set, and apply fixes before you go live (smith.ai/ai-receptionist). Testing an AI receptionist against your real call scenarios before any customer hears it is a better onboarding story than "forward your number and hope", and it is better than ours.
And fourth, that free tier. Twenty-five real calls a month at no cost, with overages you have to switch on yourself, is more generous than most seven-day trials in this category — ours included.
Where a flat minute plan wins
The case against per-call pricing is simple: the bill grows with your success. Thirty calls is a slow month for a plumber in July. If a marketing campaign works, the invoice punishes you at $11.50 a call, and every add-on you switched on multiplies across the new volume too.
A minutes plan inverts that. No Missed Call bills a flat monthly fee for a block of minutes — 250 on Pro, 500 on Premium — with no per-call and no per-minute charge on top, billed through the App Store or Google Play. Appointment booking, call recording, transcripts, summaries and multi-language answering sit inside the plan rather than being bolted on per call.
That has a real cost too, and we would rather you hear it from us. When you run out of minutes there is no overage bill — the AI pauses, and callers ring through to your own phone instead, until the billing date resets or you upgrade. That is a hard stop, not a soft one, and it is documented in our Help Center rather than on a price card. For some businesses a predictable ceiling is exactly the point. For others, an overage rate would be preferable to the phone going quiet. Work out which you are before you pick.
What to check before you sign anything
- Which Smith.ai product is the quote for? The human card and the AI card are separated by roughly five times. Ask in writing.
- Price the add-ons across your real call volume, not per call. An extra $2.25 a call sounds trivial and is $67.50 across 30 calls.
- Ask what counts as a call. Does a 20-second wrong number? Does a robocall? Smith.ai states spam is not charged; most vendors say nothing either way.
- Ask for the overage rate in writing if it is not on the page. Ruby, Rosie, Goodcall, Slang.ai and Clara all omit it.
- Ask for the rounding increment. On minute-billed services this quietly moves the bill, and no vendor we checked publishes it.
- Re-read the price card on the day you buy. Three sites quoting three different Smith.ai numbers is that argument in one line.
Smith.ai is a good product that is expensive on purpose, aimed at firms where a single missed intake call is worth four figures. If that is you, $300 for 30 calls is cheap, and the money-back guarantee on its pricing page makes it easy to test. If you are a two-van HVAC company taking 200 calls a month, the same card reads $2,100 before add-ons, and a flat minutes plan running on your phone is a different conversation entirely.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Smith.ai cost per month?
Smith.ai's Virtual Receptionist plans are listed at $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 calls and $2,100 for 300 calls, with Enterprise priced custom (smith.ai/pricing, as of August 2026). Its separate AI Receptionist product is listed at $0 for 25 calls a month, $150 for Pro and $500 for Enterprise (smith.ai/ai-receptionist). Prices change, so check the page on the day you buy.
What are Smith.ai's overage charges?
On the human Virtual Receptionist plans, Smith.ai publishes $11.50 per call over 30 on Starter, $10.50 per call over 90 on Basic and $8.50 per call over 300 on Pro (smith.ai/pricing, as of August 2026). On the AI Receptionist free tier it is $3.00 per call after the first 25, and that page states overages can be toggled on or off by the customer (smith.ai/ai-receptionist).
Are appointment booking and call recording included with Smith.ai?
On the human Virtual Receptionist plans they are per-call add-ons: booking appointments is $1.50 a call and call recording with transcription is $0.25 a call (smith.ai/pricing, as of August 2026). On the AI Receptionist product, recording, transcription, summaries and AI scheduling are listed as core features included on every plan, including the free one (smith.ai/ai-receptionist).
Why do comparison sites list different Smith.ai prices?
Because price cards move and most articles are never re-checked. On 28 August 2026 we found smith.ai's own page listing $300, $810 and $2,100; loman.ai listing $292.50, $765 and $1,950; and schedulingkit.com listing $292.50, $532.50 and $975 with different call allowances again. Open the vendor's own page before you budget.
Is Smith.ai cheaper than a per-minute answering service?
It depends on how long your calls run. Using PATLive's own published conversion of roughly 2.5 minutes per call (patlive.com/pricing, as of August 2026), Smith.ai's $300 Starter works out near $4.00 a minute by our arithmetic, against PATLive's published $349 for 200 minutes, which is about $1.75 a minute. On short calls, per-call pricing is expensive; on long, complex intake calls it can be the cheaper unit.
What is the difference between Smith.ai's two products?
Virtual Receptionist is answered by Smith.ai's own North America-based receptionists and billed per call with per-call add-ons (smith.ai/pricing). AI Receptionist is AI-first, with human escalation available as a per-call add-on, and Smith.ai states there is no fee when the AI itself initiates the handover (smith.ai/ai-receptionist). Any comparison treating the two as one product will be wrong by roughly five times.
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