An AI receptionist for a small UK business usually costs two things: a monthly software fee and a charge for the minutes it spends on the phone. With Unavoidable CRM, the receptionist is included in every plan from £29 a month, and the call minutes are billed direct by the voice provider, Retell, at around 13p a minute on our recommended set-up. For most small firms that works out at tens of pounds a month, not hundreds. The rest of this guide explains where the money goes, how to estimate your own bill, and how to judge whether it pays for itself.
You pay for the software that runs the receptionist and for the time it spends talking to callers. Most providers split it roughly like this:
When you compare quotes, put every one of these on the same page. A low headline price with a small minute bundle can cost more in a busy month than a higher subscription with minutes at cost.
Every Unavoidable CRM plan includes the AI receptionist. At the time of writing (30 September 2026), the plans on our pricing page are:
Receptionist minutes are billed direct to your own Retell account, not through us. We do not touch that spend. On the recommended set-up, Retell voice is around 13p a minute. Text messages and emails work the same way, billed direct by Twilio and Postmark. Always check the pricing page for the current figures, as provider rates can change.
Multiply the calls you expect the receptionist to take by the average call length, then by the per-minute rate, and add your subscription. Here is a worked example for a one-person trades business:
Your numbers will be different. A clinic taking lots of short booking calls will use fewer minutes per call. A heating engineer fielding breakdown calls in January may take far more calls in one month than in July. The useful point is that the cost scales with real use, so a quiet month costs less.
You decide. Some businesses send every call to the receptionist. Others only use it when they cannot answer, after hours or at weekends. If you only route missed and out-of-hours calls to it, your minute bill will be a fraction of your total call time.
For most small businesses with steady call volume, yes. Human answering services usually charge per call or per minute, often with extra charges for evenings and weekends, and the person answering can normally only take a message. An AI receptionist answers at any hour at the same rate, and when it is built into your CRM it can book the job there and then. We compare the two in more detail in AI receptionist vs answering service.
There are still calls a person handles better: long, sensitive or unusual ones. A good set-up passes those to your mobile rather than trying to deal with them.
It pays for itself if it wins you more work than it costs, and for most service businesses that means one or two extra jobs a month. The sums are simple. If a typical job is worth £250 to you and the receptionist costs around £55 a month, it needs to turn one missed call a month into a booking to cover itself several times over.
The bigger cost is usually the calls you never hear about. People who reach voicemail often ring the next business on the list instead of leaving a message. We look at how much that adds up to in why small firms miss a third of their calls, and at what to do about it in how to turn missed calls into booked jobs.
Before you sign up anywhere, ask these questions:
If a provider cannot answer these clearly, the headline price is not the real price.
The simplest way to find out what an AI receptionist would cost you is to run it on your own calls. Unavoidable CRM has a 14-day free trial with no card needed. Set up the receptionist with your services and hours using our set-up guide, route your missed calls to it, and look at the call log after two weeks. You will see how many calls it took, how long they lasted and how many turned into bookings.
If you work in the trades, see how it fits a working day on our trades page, or browse more guides on the blog.
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