AI receptionist cost calculator

How it works

1. Enter how many calls you get per month and how long each one lasts on average.
2. Add the annual cost of a receptionist, including gross salary and employer costs.
3. To estimate revenue, enter the share of calls you miss today, how many would become customers and what each is worth.
4. Click compare to see the annual cost of each option, the difference and the recovered revenue.

How do you calculate the cost of an AI receptionist?

The annual cost of the AI receptionist adds up three items:

• Voice usage: calls per month × minutes per call × €0.12 × 12 months.
• Maintenance: €150 a month, €1,800 a year.
• Setup: €2,500, counted only in year one.

With the default values (600 calls of 3 minutes), usage comes to €2,592 a year and the year-one total is €6,892. From year two the setup fee drops out and the cost falls to €4,392.

These figures are indicative market assumptions, not a quote. The €0.12 per minute is a typical voice platform rate covering telephony, speech recognition, the language model and speech synthesis. The real cost depends on the provider and the model, and voice usage is paid directly to the provider.

How is recovered revenue calculated?

Calls nobody answers are customers calling your competitors. The calculator estimates their value like this: calls per month × 12 × % of missed calls × % that would become customers × average value per customer.

With the default values (20% missed, 25% conversion and €80 per customer) the result is €28,800 a year. This is the figure most sensitive to your data: if you do not know how many calls you miss, your phone provider or switchboard usually reports unanswered calls.

What does the comparison leave out?

The comparison is deliberately simple. It leaves out cover for the receptionist's holidays or sick days, the after-hours calls a person cannot take, and the time your team spends reviewing conversations during the pilot.

It also does not assume you have to pick one option. In many clinics, law firms and real estate offices, the AI handles after-hours calls, peaks and repeated questions, and passes sensitive calls to a person. The useful comparison is your current front desk against your front desk with AI.

Voice agents with several integrations (calendar, CRM and ERP) usually need a higher setup than the default. For a fixed budget on your case, tell us about it.

What should you do with the result?

If the annual difference is positive, or the recovered revenue exceeds the cost of the AI, a 4-6 week pilot with your real calls is worth running. You can see how it works in detail on the AI receptionist page, and how we build these systems in AI agent development.

If your call volume is low, the first step may be another channel, such as WhatsApp.

Updated: 29 September 2026