How much does an AI answering service cost?

The range is wide because the products are not the same thing. At the bottom sit self-serve tools you configure yourself: they answer, read a script, take a name and a number, and email it to you. At the top sit built agents that know your services, sort an emergency from a routine call, transfer on rules you wrote, and put jobs on your calendar. Both get called an AI answering service.

What moves the price is whether somebody builds it for your business. A self-serve tool costs less because the configuration work is yours. A built agent costs more because a person takes your hours, your service area, your transfer rules and your emergency definitions, writes the call flows, tests it, and hands it to you to approve before it answers a customer.

Kende's figures: $1,200 a month for a single location with 750 minutes included, and a one-time $399 to activate. $1,800 a month for the Professional plan, which adds calendar booking and 1,500 minutes, at $499 to activate. Two or more locations are quoted from $2,500 a month. Minutes past the allowance are $0.50. There is no minimum term and 30 days' notice cancels it.

Both ends of that one-time fee are worth knowing. Set the agent up yourself through the self-serve flow and nobody here touches the build, and there is no activation fee at all. Have Kende do the whole build — the scoping call, the script written from what you already have, one integration, forwarding configured with you on the line — and that is the white-glove option at $2,000.

The comparison most owners make is against a receptionist, which runs roughly $2,800 to $4,500 a month all-in for forty hours a week and one call at a time. The comparison that matters more is against the work that walks when nobody picks up.