Most pricing pages in this market make you book a demo just to hear a number. This page does the opposite: it lays out honest, approximate, public price ranges for every real way to stop missing enquiries — including where a done-for-you build like ours sits, and who should not buy one. Every figure below is a rough public range, not a quote; your market and provider will vary.
What does a DIY chatbot cost?
Roughly $20 to $200 a month on public list prices, depending on features and volume. A $200-a-month chatbot is a real tool, and so is the $20 one: you get a website chat widget, canned or AI-generated answers, and a lead-capture form. What the sticker price doesn't include is your time — you build it, write its answers, connect it, test it, and fix it — and accountability: when it confidently tells a customer something wrong, that's your problem to discover. For a simple business with light, repetitive questions, this tier can honestly be enough.
What does an answering service cost?
Typically about $1 to $2 per minute of operator time, or roughly $200 to $500 a month on common public plans — long-established, widely published ranges. You get real humans answering the phone in your business's name, message-taking, and emergency escalation, which for some businesses is exactly right. What's usually not in the price: selling. Answering sales questions, qualifying, and booking are typically extra, limited, or simply not the service's job — and non-phone channels (forms, chat, DMs) aren't covered at all. Our after-hours answering comparison goes deeper on that trade-off.
What does hiring front-desk staff cost?
As a rough public figure, a full-time receptionist in the US commonly runs somewhere in the low-to-mid $30,000s per year in base salary — before payroll taxes, benefits, and cover for leave — and the number swings widely by city and country, so treat it strictly as a ballpark. What you get is real and shouldn't be talked down: human judgment, a face for walk-ins, and the hundred small things a good front-desk person quietly handles. The structural limits are what they've always been: one person covers roughly 40 of the 168 hours in a week, takes one call at a time, and gets sick, takes holidays, and eventually resigns.
What does a done-for-you build like Maxima cost?
Honest answer: it's a professional engagement, not a subscription toy. A real done-for-you build — an AI receptionist wired into your channels, trained on your business, maintained after go-live — is priced in dollars against your specific scope, and serious builds sit in professional, multi-thousand-dollar territory depending on what's built. Two things keep that honest. First, milestone deposits: you fund a defined step, see it working, and only then approve the next — never one big upfront bet. Second, no invented upside: we make no income claims and no guaranteed results; you pay for delivered, working systems, not a projection. And the plain disqualifier: if a $20 widget genuinely solves your problem, buy the $20 widget — we would rather say that here than in a refund conversation.
How do you choose between them?
Price the leak before you price the fix. The pattern that actually decides this:
- Few enquiries, simple questions: a cheap chatbot or a missed-call text-back tool covers you honestly.
- Phone-heavy with true emergencies: a human answering service earns its monthly fee, possibly alongside text-back.
- Enquiries across several channels, real money per job, after-hours gaps: this is where an AI receptionist or a done-for-you build changes the math — because the comparison is no longer tool price versus tool price, it's system cost versus the jobs currently leaking away.
The cost column nobody prices: the leads that never got an answer
Independent research puts numbers on the empty column. A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies (2011) found the average first response took about 42 hours and 23% of leads were never contacted at all; the Lead Response Management study found a reply within 5 minutes makes a business up to 21x more likely to qualify a lead than waiting 30 minutes. Those are public studies, not our promise of results — but they're why the cheapest-looking option, doing nothing, usually isn't. Measure your own gap first with the speed-to-lead owner's guide.
Get your own number, free
Run the free 2-minute Revenue Leak Audit — it estimates what your response gap may be costing from numbers you enter, no login, no sales call. Or talk to the Maxima AI about your situation — in minutes it hands you a ready-to-use fix, free. And if the honest answer for you is "buy a cheap tool," it will tell you that too.
Frequently asked questions
Why do AI receptionist prices vary so much?
Because the label covers different products: a self-serve chatbot licence (roughly $20-$200 a month on public list prices), a staffed answering service (roughly $200-$500 a month on common public plans), and custom done-for-you builds priced to scope. You are not comparing five prices for one thing; you are comparing five different things.
Are there hidden costs with the cheap options?
Usually the biggest one is your own time: DIY tools need you to set them up, write the answers, connect the channels, and fix them when they go wrong. Ask any vendor, including us, what is not in the sticker price - usage fees, phone numbers, extra channels, and who maintains it after go-live.
Is a cheap chatbot good enough for my business?
Sometimes, honestly, yes. If enquiries are few and the questions are simple and repetitive, a $20-a-month tool may be all you need. Look at your last ten enquiries: if most needed qualifying, judgment, or booking, a scripted widget will not carry them.