The short answer
What each option costs.
Lithium’s AI receptionist costs $179 a month, fully managed, with no contract and no setup fee. A live answering service usually bills by the minute or by the call, so its cost rises with your call volume. A human receptionist runs $3,500 or more a month and works set hours.
The monthly number is only part of the story. What matters is what each option does with a call: whether it takes a message or books the job, whether it answers at 2 a.m., and what happens when five people call at once. Here’s how the three compare.
Monthly cost
- Human receptionist
- $3,500 or more a month
- Live answering service
- Usually billed per minute or per call; get a written quote
- Lithium AI receptionist
- $179 a month, fully managed
Setup
- Human receptionist
- Hiring and training time
- Live answering service
- Check the quote for setup fees
- Lithium AI receptionist
- No setup fee; live in days
Contract
- Human receptionist
- Employment
- Live answering service
- Check the term and cancellation notice
- Lithium AI receptionist
- No contract; cancel anytime
Hours
- Human receptionist
- Set business hours
- Live answering service
- Depends on the plan
- Lithium AI receptionist
- 24/7, including nights and holidays
Calls at once
- Human receptionist
- One
- Live answering service
- Depends on how the service is staffed
- Lithium AI receptionist
- Unlimited concurrent calls
Books jobs
- Human receptionist
- Yes
- Live answering service
- Most take messages; ask about booking
- Lithium AI receptionist
- Yes, into your calendar
Reaches a person
- Human receptionist
- Is the person
- Live answering service
- Depends on the plan
- Lithium AI receptionist
- Transfers to a real person by your rules
How billing works
How answering services charge.
Live answering services use a few common pricing models. Per minute: you pay for the time operators spend on your calls, and each call may be rounded up to a set increment. Per call: a set charge for each call answered, whatever its length. Monthly plans: a set number of minutes or calls each month for one price, with overage charges once you pass it.
On top of the base price, quotes often carry extras: a setup or onboarding fee, a minimum monthly charge, surcharges for holidays or after-hours coverage, and separate charges for transferring calls, sending texts or booking appointments. Some require a contract with a notice period to cancel.
None of that is a trick, but it makes two quotes hard to compare side by side and a busy month hard to predict. Plenty of service businesses only find out what their answering service costs after the first storm or heat wave.
The other side of the ledger
What a missed call costs you.
The fair comparison isn’t $179 against zero. It’s $179 against the jobs you lose when nobody answers. You can work out your own number in five minutes with this formula:
Missed calls a month × share that were real job requests × the share you’d book × your average job value = revenue at risk each month.
Here’s the math with made-up numbers, so you can see how it works. Say you miss 20 calls a month, half of them are real job requests, you’d normally book half of those, and your average job is $400. That’s five jobs and $2,000 a month going to whoever answered instead. Plug in your own figures; for many trades the average job value alone makes the case.
To find your missed calls, check the call log in your phone system or carrier portal, or your call tracking reports if you run ads. Count calls that rang out or went to voicemail, especially after hours and during your busiest midday stretch.
Read the fine print
Hidden costs to check in any quote.
- How each call is rounded for billing
- Minimum monthly charge
- Overage rate once you pass the plan
- Holiday or after-hours surcharges
- Charges for transfers, texts or bookings
- Setup or onboarding fee
- Contract length and cancellation notice
- Whether spam and wrong-number calls are billed
- Price changes after an introductory period
- Fees to export your recordings if you leave
Then price your busiest month, not your average one. For a plumber that’s the first hard freeze; for HVAC, the first heat wave; for a roofer, the week after a hailstorm. A service billed by the minute costs the most at the moment you need it most. Ask every provider to quote that month in writing.
What you get
What Lithium’s $179 a month includes.
- 24/7 answering in one of 30 natural AI voices
- A custom knowledge base about your business
- Lead qualification on your criteria
- Appointment booking into your calendar
- Answers to your common questions
- SMS and MMS handling and follow-up texts
- CRM and calendar hooks
- Call recordings and transcripts
- Unlimited concurrent calls
- Transfers to a real person by your rules
- Setup and ongoing tuning by Lithium
- No contract and no setup fee
Some phone work goes beyond a receptionist. One plumbing company needed after-hours calls triaged by urgency, with emergencies texted to the on-call tech; we built that as custom automation on top of call answering. That kind of project is scoped after a free discovery call and priced on its own. Read about Lithium’s AI receptionist service for the full feature list.
Choosing
Which option fits your business.
Hire a person when you need someone in the office doing more than phones: greeting walk-ins, handling paperwork, chasing payments. A good front-desk hire does a lot, and the $3,500 or more a month buys all of it. They still go home at five, though, and they can only take one call at a time.
Use a live answering service when your callers need a human voice for every call and taking a message is enough, for example when a person from your team calls everyone back anyway.
Use an AI receptionist when you’re a phone-first trade that loses jobs to voicemail, gets slammed during storms or heat waves, or wants calls booked rather than logged. It answers nights and weekends, takes unlimited concurrent calls and hands off to a real person when it should. Smart Doors LLC, a garage door company, runs Lithium’s AI receptionist on its phones.
Combine them if you already have office staff: they answer during the day, and the AI receptionist covers after hours, lunch and overflow when every line is busy.
Try before you decide
Hear it, then price it.
Call (503) 766-5964 any time and our AI receptionist will answer. Ask it the question your customers ask most and judge the answer yourself.
Then compare it against any quote you have, line by line, with the hidden-cost list above. The AI answering service buyer’s guide has seven test calls to run on any provider, and our published pricing lists what every Lithium service costs.
