Notes · Report
The 2026 AI receptionist website report: six vendors, six ways to bill you
Every vendor we checked publishes its prices, and no two bill by the same unit. Calls, minutes, unique customers, conversations, seats and credits. Here is the data and how we collected it.
By Jay Callicott, NextAgency · · 4 min read
We read the public pricing pages and sitemaps of six AI receptionist and AI chat vendors on November 4, 2026. Every one of them publishes prices. No two of them bill by the same unit.
That second finding matters more than any single price. If one vendor charges per call, another per voice minute and a third per unique customer, the headline numbers cannot be compared until you translate them into your own volume.
The six billing units
| Vendor | What you pay for | Published entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai | Calls | Free plan with 25 calls a month, then $3.00 a call. Pro is $150 a month for 75 calls |
| My AI Front Desk | Voice minutes | $99 a month, or $79 a month billed annually, with 200 voice minutes |
| Goodcall | Unique customers | $79 a month for 100 unique customers, then 79 cents each |
| Tidio | Conversations | Free plan with 50 billable conversations. Plus starts at $300 a month |
| Intercom | Seats and AI outcomes | Essential is $29 per seat a month, plus $0.99 per Fin AI Agent outcome |
| Quickchat AI | AI credits | Free plan with 50 credits a month for non-commercial use. Starter is $9 a month for 150 |
Prices are each vendor’s own published figures, checked November 4, 2026. Tidio shows prices in local currency, so we quote only the figures its page states in dollars.
What each site publishes
| Vendor | Prices published | Free plan, trial or demo | Pages comparing itself to named competitors | Security or trust page | Customer stories | Integrations directory |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai | Yes | Free plan | Yes, 174 pages | Not found | Yes | Yes |
| My AI Front Desk | Yes | 7-day trial | Yes, 976 pages | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Goodcall | Yes | Free demo agent | No. 71 pages compare categories, such as AI versus an answering service | Not found | Not found | Not found |
| Tidio | Yes | Free plan and 7-day trial | Yes, as blog posts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Intercom | Yes | 14-day trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Quickchat AI | Yes | Free plan | Yes | Not found | Yes | Not found |
| Total | 6 of 6 | 6 of 6 | 5 of 6 | 3 of 6 | 5 of 6 | 4 of 6 |
“Not found” means we did not find that page in the vendor’s sitemap. It does not prove the information is missing from the site.
Three things the data says
1. Price transparency is now normal. All six publish prices and all six let you try something before you pay: a free plan, a trial or a demo agent. A vendor that hides its price is now the exception.
2. Comparison pages are a strategy, not an accident. Five of six publish pages that compare themselves with named competitors. Two of them do it at scale: 174 pages on Smith.ai, almost one per rival, and 976 on My AI Front Desk, often several per rival, such as versions for agencies or for buyers looking for a cheaper option. These pages exist because buyers search for “X alternatives” and AI assistants read and cite them. Read them as marketing, and check the rival’s own page before you believe a comparison.
3. Security pages lag behind. Only three of six have a dedicated security or trust page in their sitemap. An AI receptionist reads your customers’ messages and often their phone numbers, so this is the page buyers should ask for first.
How to compare prices across different units
Pick one month of real numbers from your own business: calls, average call length, website chats, and how many different people contacted you. Then work out each vendor’s price at that volume. A plan that looks cheaper per call can cost more per month if your calls run long, and a per-customer price favors businesses whose customers call back often.
Where Agent Front Desk fits, and our bias
We make Agent Front Desk, so treat this section as ours. We bill a different way again. We charge once for setup, from $1,500 (typically $1,500 to $3,900), with a written quote before anything is built, and optional updates from $199 a year. After that you pay the AI and phone vendors directly, on your own accounts, at their list prices. Our pricing page lists those running costs with a link to each vendor’s price page.
Method
- Sample. Six vendors that came up in AI assistant answers and in our own research when we asked buyer questions about AI receptionists and website chat in November 2026. A seventh site in an automated list we started from, frontdesk.com, turned out to be an unrelated web design company, so we left it out.
- Prices. Read by hand from each vendor’s public pricing page on November 4, 2026.
- Page types. Counted from the sitemaps each site lists in its robots.txt, ignoring translated copies of the same page. A comparison page names a specific competitor; pages that compare categories, such as “AI versus answering service”, are counted separately. A security page is a dedicated page at a path like /security or /trust-center.
- Limits. Six vendors is a small sample, sitemaps can be incomplete, and prices change. We will repeat this each year and say what changed.
Spotted an error? Email [email protected] and we will correct it.