The cost comparison is lopsided enough that we would rather start by saying why it is unfair. A receptionist does a dozen things software cannot touch. If you need a person at your front desk, hire the person. This page is about the narrower question of who answers the phone.
A front-desk hire greets people as they walk in, takes payment, manages the room, chases no-shows, calms the customer who has been waiting twenty minutes, notices that the person in the corner looks unwell, learns that Mr. Bianchi always wants the early slot, and absorbs whatever else the day produces.
An AI receptionist answers the phone. It answers questions from information you gave it, books appointments, takes a message, and transfers to a human when it should. That is the whole job description.
So any page that puts "$129/month" next to a salary and declares a winner is comparing a tool to a colleague. We sell the tool, and we are telling you the comparison is rigged. What follows is the useful version of it.
Narrowed to the part they actually compete on.
| AI receptionist | A front-desk hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Hours covered | Every hour, including nights, weekends and holidays | Their shift |
| Two calls at once | Both answered | One answered |
| Answering while with a customer | Unaffected | The main reason calls get missed |
| Sick days, holidays, turnover | None | All of them, plus rehiring and retraining |
| In-person customers | Cannot | The reason you hired them |
| Payments, admin, the room | Cannot | Yes |
| Judgment in a new situation | Weak — should hand off instead of improvising | The thing humans are for |
| A difficult or upset caller | Not the right tool | Yes |
| Relationships with regulars | Remembers records, not people | Often why customers stay |
| Ramp-up | Same-day to a few days of configuration | Weeks of training, and they get better for months after |
| Consistency of answers | Identical every time | Varies, improves with experience |
We are not going to quote you a wage as though it were a fact, because it varies by province, city and role. Instead, here is the shape of the calculation with figures you should replace with your own:
A part-time front-desk hire. Say 25 hours a week at $20 an hour — that is $500 a week, or about $2,170 a month. Then add the employer costs that are easy to forget: CPP and EI contributions, vacation pay, and in most provinces some form of workplace insurance. Call that another 12 to 15 percent, and you are near $2,450 a month before you count recruiting, training time, or the cost of covering their absences.
An AI receptionist. A monthly plan. Ours are $69 to $329 depending on included minutes, plus a one-time setup fee.
Those numbers are not close, and that is exactly why the comparison is misleading — the $2,450 buys a person who does the other eleven things in the table above. The honest framing is not "which is cheaper" but "what is the cheapest way to stop losing the calls I am currently losing". If the answer is a part-time hire who also covers the front desk, hire them. If your front desk is already staffed and still cannot reach the phone, no amount of hiring fixes that — you do not have a staffing problem, you have a coverage problem.
The number worth putting against either option is what the missed calls are costing you now. We wrote out how to work that out from your own call log, and there is a calculator if you already know your three figures.
The most common one by a wide margin. Your receptionist is excellent and is also one person who is currently checking somebody out. Calls two and three go to voicemail; the 7 PM caller gets nothing. An AI receptionist sits behind them and picks up what they cannot reach. Nobody's job changes and nobody is replaced.
Worth pausing on. If the pressure is specifically phone volume — bookings, hours, the same six questions — then software handles that slice for a fraction of the cost and you may not need the hire this quarter. If the pressure is the room, the admin and the payments, hire. Be honest with yourself about which it is, because the phone is the most visible symptom and not always the actual constraint.
A trade, a solo practice, a consultancy. You are on a job, under a sink, in a session, and you cannot answer. Hiring is not on the table. This is the clearest case for an AI receptionist, because the alternative is not a person — it is voicemail.
That this replaces a receptionist. It does not. It answers a phone, consistently, at hours nobody wants to work, and it books appointments while the caller is still on the line. That is a genuinely useful thing and it is not the same thing as a person at your front desk — and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling you a disappointment.
You need someone physically present — greeting customers, taking payment, running the room, handling the day as it comes. The phone is only one of the reasons you are hiring.
The gap is specifically phone coverage — after hours, during the busy hour, the second simultaneous call — or you are a one-person business whose only alternative is voicemail.
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