AI receptionist cost, broken down line by line

Searching for the cost of an AI receptionist usually turns up a headline price and little else. The headline matters, but it rarely tells you what the phone line will cost at the end of the month. To get that figure you need to know what the plan includes, which parts are billed somewhere else, and how many calls your business actually takes. This page puts those pieces in one place for Asyntai: the plan prices, the charges that come from Twilio, a worked example of how many calls fit in a month, and what happens at the limits.

The first part is the Asyntai plan. The AI receptionist is part of the Voice Agent, which is included on two plans. Standard costs $139 a month, or $125 a month billed annually, and includes 200 voice minutes, 5 calls at the same time and 15,000 AI replies a month. Pro costs $449 a month, or $404 a month billed annually, and includes 1,500 voice minutes, 10 calls at the same time and 50,000 AI replies. The plan price also covers the chat on your website, which answers from the same knowledge base, so you are not paying twice for two assistants. Custom Tools, for looking up live data such as an order status in your own system through an API, are available on both plans.

The second part is the phone line itself. Asyntai answers numbers in your own Twilio account, and Twilio bills you directly. There are two kinds of Twilio charge to plan for: a monthly rental for each phone number, and a per-minute charge for the calls that reach it. Both depend on the country and the type of number, so the honest answer is to check the current figures on the Twilio voice pricing page for the country you operate in. You pay Twilio's own rates and see them on Twilio's invoice.

The third part is easy to overlook: transfers. When a caller asks for a person, the agent can put them through to your office line or a mobile during the hours you set. Twilio bills that transferred leg as a normal outgoing call from your Twilio number. If transfers are a large share of your calls, add those outgoing minutes to your Twilio estimate. And if you keep your existing number and forward calls to the Twilio number, check what your current phone provider charges for forwarded calls. Outside your escalation hours, a caller who asks for a person gets a callback request instead of a transfer: the agent takes the name and number, reads the number back, and emails the request to your team.

With the parts in place, the useful question becomes how many calls the plan covers. The answer depends on how long your calls are. Receptionist calls tend to be short: a question about opening hours, a price, an address, a request for a callback. If your average call lasts 3 minutes, Standard's 200 minutes cover about 66 calls a month and Pro's 1,500 minutes cover 500. At 2 minutes a call, that becomes 100 and 750. At 5 minutes, 40 and 300. Spread across the plan price, a 3-minute call works out at roughly $2.10 of Asyntai cost on a fully used Standard plan, and roughly $0.90 on a fully used Pro plan, before Twilio's charges.

AI replies are the other allowance on the plan. Each answer the agent gives on a call counts as one reply, the same as a reply in the website chat. On calls alone, the voice minutes are usually used up long before the replies. Even a busy Pro month of 500 calls, with 8 answers per call, uses 4,000 of the 50,000 replies, which leaves most of the allowance for your website chat.

It is worth knowing what happens at the edges. If every line is in use, a new caller hears that the lines are busy and is asked to call again in a few minutes, so the number of calls at the same time is part of the plan choice for businesses with sharp peaks. When the month's voice minutes are used up, calls are declined with a short message until the minutes reset. If your volume is larger than Pro covers, write to [email protected] about more minutes. Switching a number off is another lever: a switched-off number declines calls with a short message, which suits a seasonal line you only want answered for part of the year.

The simplest way to estimate your own cost is to measure. Set up the agent with your website and documents, make a few test calls in your browser, and time them. Then look at your phone records for a typical month and count the calls you would want the agent to answer. Multiply the two, compare the result with 200 and 1,500 minutes, and add your Twilio estimate. The plan finder can help with the plan choice. After the first month, the Voice Agent page shows how many of your minutes were used and Twilio shows the phone charges, so you will have real figures instead of an estimate.

A last point on value. Every call the agent answers is saved as a conversation in your dashboard with the full transcript, and callers who leave a phone number or email address can be saved as leads. That record shows you what your callers ask, which answers your website is missing, and which calls really needed a person, which makes the monthly bill easier to judge against what the line is doing for you.