An AI voice agent typically costs $1,500 to $5,000 to build and $300 to $1,000 per month to run, with per-minute usage of roughly $0.07 to $0.20. A single-purpose agent for a small business — answer, qualify, book — usually lands near the bottom of those ranges. A multi-flow agent wired into a CRM, a payment system and a bespoke escalation matrix lands near the top.
Those are the headline numbers. What follows is where each one comes from, and the four costs that routinely appear after the quote is signed.
What you are actually paying for#
The bill splits into three parts that behave completely differently: a one-time build, a fixed monthly platform cost, and variable usage that scales with call volume.
The build fee#
This is engineering time, and it scales almost entirely with two variables: how many distinct call flows the agent needs, and how many systems it has to write to.
| Scope | Typical build |
|---|---|
| One flow, one integration (e.g. answer + book to Google Calendar) | $1,500 – $2,500 |
| Two or three flows, CRM + calendar | $2,500 – $4,000 |
| Multi-flow, bespoke escalation, several integrations | $4,000 – $8,000+ |
"Flow" means a genuinely different job — reception is one, outbound lead follow-up is another, appointment reminders is a third. Adding a second flow is not twice the work, but it is not free either: each one needs its own script design, its own test pass and its own failure handling.
Anyone quoting a fixed price before understanding those two variables is either padding heavily or about to discover they underquoted.
The monthly platform cost#
Covers hosting, telephony orchestration, monitoring, and someone actually looking at what the agent is doing. Ours is $300/month for a standard agent; the market runs roughly $200–$1,000 depending on how much ongoing tuning is included.
Be suspicious of anything advertised at $49/month. That price point buys you a self-serve builder and no one watching the transcripts, which is fine if you intend to run it yourself and have the time to do so.
Per-minute usage#
Every minute of conversation consumes transcription, model inference, speech synthesis and telephony. Combined, that is roughly $0.07 to $0.20 per minute at current provider pricing.
Worked example — a business taking 400 calls a month at an average of 3 minutes:
400 calls × 3 min = 1,200 minutes
1,200 × $0.12 = $144 / month usage
+ platform $300
= $444 / month total running cost
Against a part-time receptionist at $1,800–$2,500/month, that is the comparison most businesses are actually making. We put the two side by side properly here.
The four costs that show up later#
These are the ones that turn a $1,500 quote into a $3,000 project. None of them are dishonest — they are just easy to leave out.
1. Phone numbers and carrier fees. A number costs $1–$3/month. Inbound minutes carry a carrier charge on top of the AI usage. Small, but it is a separate bill from a separate vendor.
2. Integration work on your side. If your CRM has no API, or your calendar lives in a system nobody has credentials for any more, that is real work and it is usually discovered in week one. Ask specifically: what happens if my systems turn out to be harder to connect than expected?
3. Script iteration after launch. The first two weeks of real transcripts always produce changes. Good vendors include this. Ask whether yours does, and for how long.
4. Failure handling. What the agent does when the calendar API is down, when a caller is unintelligible, when someone asks something genuinely out of scope. Building these paths properly costs time and is invisible in a demo — which is exactly why cheap builds skip them and why cheap builds embarrass you in month two.
How to tell whether it is worth it#
The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope, and it hinges on one number most businesses have never measured: how many calls you currently miss.
Monthly missed calls × conversion rate × value per customer
= revenue currently lost
A dental practice missing 40 calls a month, converting 30% of new-patient enquiries, at $800 lifetime value:
40 × 0.30 × $800 = $9,600 / month in lost revenue
Against ~$450/month running cost, the agent only has to recover 5% of that to break even. This is why reception is the use case that reliably pays: the baseline is not "zero", it is "calls that currently go nowhere".
Now the same maths for a business taking 20 calls a month where a customer is worth $60:
2 missed × 0.30 × $60 = $36 / month recovered
That does not work, and no amount of good engineering will make it work. Run your own numbers before you run a procurement process.
Where to find your missed-call number#
Your phone provider has it. On most business VoIP systems it is in the call analytics dashboard under "unanswered" or "abandoned". If you are on a mobile, your carrier can supply a call log. If you genuinely cannot get it, forward your line to a voicemail that logs attempts for two weeks — the number will surprise you.
What we charge#
Transparently: our AI voice agents start at $1,500 to build plus $300/month, and we quote a fixed price after a scoping call rather than before one. If your scope is genuinely a single flow with one integration, that is the price. If it is not, we will tell you what it is before you commit rather than after.
See what is included on the service page, or start a scope and we will come back with the actual figure for your business.