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Smith.ai Pricing (2026): Plans, Real Costs and What You'll Actually Pay
Smith.ai sells the same job at two very different prices: its AI-first receptionist runs from free for 25 calls a month to $800 for 500 calls ($1.60 to $2.00 a call), while its human-first virtual receptionists cost $300 for 30 calls up to $2,100 for 300 calls ($7 to $10 a call). Both bill per call, charge more for every call over your plan, and add per-call fees for extras like appointment booking. This guide lays out both price lists, works out what 50, 200 and 600 calls a month really cost, shows where the tier jumps and add-ons push the bill up, and compares Smith.ai with Ruby, Goodcall and Rosie.
Prices checked September 19, 2026 on Smith.ai's AI Receptionist pricing page and Virtual Receptionists pricing page. Our Smith.ai guide covers what the service does; this page covers what it costs.
Smith.ai pricing at a glance
| Plan | Monthly price | Annual | Included calls | Per call | Over the limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI-first Free | $0 | n/a | 25 | Free | $3.00 a call |
| AI-first Pro | $150 / $270 / $500 | Not listed; a 6-month plan is offered by quote | 75 / 150 / 300 | $2.00 / $1.80 / $1.67 | $2.50 / $2.30 / $2.17 |
| AI-first Enterprise | $500 / $800 / custom | 6-month plan with rollover calls, by quote | 300 / 500 / 1,000+ | $1.67 / $1.60 / custom | $2.17 / $2.10 / custom |
| Human-first Starter | $300 | 10% off for 12 months | 30 | $10.00 | $11.50 a call |
| Human-first Basic | $810 | 10% off for 12 months | 90 | $9.00 | $10.50 a call |
| Human-first Pro | $2,100 | 10% off for 12 months | 300 | $7.00 | $8.50 a call |
| Human-first Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Prices checked September 19, 2026 on smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist and smith.ai/pricing/receptionists. Both are sold month-to-month, and the AI plans need 30 days' notice to cancel. The human-first plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, capped at $1,000 and excluding overage.
The homepage adds a third option between the two: Hybrid, "starting at $2.50/call," where AI takes routine calls and live agents take the complex ones. Smith.ai doesn't publish a separate Hybrid rate card. The same page lists "Human escalation ($3 extra)" among the features in every plan, which is the mechanism: an AI-first plan plus a $3 charge each time a call goes to a live agent.
The AI-first plans in detail
AI-first pricing is a grid of fixed call bundles. You pick a plan and a size, and every call past the bundle costs the "extra per real call" rate.
Four details in that table qualify the headline "$1.60/call":
- Enterprise at 300 calls costs the same $500 as Pro at 300. Both are $1.67 a call with a $2.17 overage, but Enterprise adds full-service setup, custom AI prompting by Smith.ai's team and unlimited custom integrations. If you need 300 calls, there's no price reason to choose Pro.
- The Pro card's "$1.60–$2.00/call" range doesn't match the table. The table's lowest Pro rate is $1.67; $1.60 is the 500-call Enterprise size. The Enterprise card's "$1.30–$1.67" implies custom rates below $1.60 above 1,000 calls, which Smith.ai quotes privately.
- Test calls come free. Each plan includes as many test calls as real ones and twice as many simulated calls, so trying a new script doesn't eat the bundle.
- Spam has a 10% cap. Smith.ai says calls from its list of "20 million+ known spammers" are filtered out before they count, and AI customers can remove up to 10% of their calls from the bill each cycle for spam that got through. Spam above that 10% is billed.
The AI Receptionist page also offers a 6-month plan with "rollover calls and a lower per-call rate," sold by quote.
The human-first plans in detail
Human-first (Virtual Receptionists) is simpler and much more expensive: three bundles and an Enterprise quote, with live North American agents answering every call.
The overage premium is $1.50 a call on every plan: $11.50 against $10.00 on Starter, $10.50 against $9.00 on Basic, $8.50 against $7.00 on Pro. That's 15% to 21% above the in-plan rate. Human-first also bills spam differently: Smith.ai says you "won't be charged for spam or unsolicited sales calls" as long as the forwarded line passes caller ID, with no 10% cap.
Add-ons are charged on every call
Human-first plans include lead qualification, five intake questions, one CRM integration, a dedicated number and 24/7 staffing. Everything else is a per-call or monthly add-on:
| Add-on | Price |
|---|---|
| Book appointments | $1.50 per call |
| Complex call routing, extended intake (six more questions) | $1.50 per call each |
| Accept payments, dedicated Spanish line, third-party intake, custom calendaring | $1.00 per call each |
| SMS/Slack or Teams notifications, text and email follow-up, conflict checks, collect calls, each extra CRM | $0.50 per call each |
| Call recording and transcription, each custom intake question | $0.25 per call |
| Business caller ID for outbound | $10 a month |
| Additional transfer destination | $15 a month |
| Inbound call tracking number | $5 a month |
Smith.ai applies "per call" to every call. Its help article on the subject is titled "Why are add-ons 'per-call?' Why should I pay for this on all calls?", and it explains that the fee is a "blended average of the additional costs" charged across all calls, not only the calls where the feature was used. Appointment booking at $1.50 on a 200-call month is $300, even if 40 of those calls booked something.
Recording and transcription show the gap between the two products: it's included on every AI-first plan and a $0.25 add-on on human-first.
What Smith.ai costs at three call volumes
We modeled three businesses and priced each at the cheapest plan-plus-overage combination Smith.ai sells. The assumptions: 50, 200 and 600 answered calls a month (spam excluded); on AI-first, 20% of calls escalated to a live agent at $3 each; on human-first, one add-on (appointment booking) shown separately.
AI-first:
| Calls a month | Cheapest combination | Arithmetic | Month | With 20% escalated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | Free + 25 extra calls | $0 + 25 × $3.00 | $75 | $75 + 10 × $3 = $105 |
| 200 | Pro 150 + 50 extra calls | $270 + 50 × $2.30 | $385 | $385 + 40 × $3 = $505 |
| 600 | Enterprise 500 + 100 extra calls | $800 + 100 × $2.10 | $1,010 | $1,010 + 120 × $3 = $1,370 |
Human-first:
| Calls a month | Cheapest combination | Arithmetic | Month | With appointment booking |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | Starter + 20 extra calls | $300 + 20 × $11.50 | $530 | $530 + 50 × $1.50 = $605 |
| 200 | Basic + 110 extra calls | $810 + 110 × $10.50 | $1,965 | $1,965 + 200 × $1.50 = $2,265 |
| 600 | Pro + 300 extra calls | $2,100 + 300 × $8.50 | $4,650 | $4,650 + 600 × $1.50 = $5,550 |
At 200 calls the AI-first bill with escalations works out to $2.53 a call, close to the $2.50 "starting at" figure Smith.ai quotes for Hybrid. Human-first costs $9.83 a call at the same volume. The 12-month discount would take 10% off the human-first plan fee, if it applies only to the plan and not the overage (Smith.ai's FAQ says "a 10% discount for subscribing for 12 months" and doesn't say more).
At 600 calls, human-first Pro plus overage is $4,650, and Smith.ai's Enterprise quote is the only way below that. All three of our volumes land in overage on the cheapest option, because the bundle sizes (25, 75, 150, 300, 500 calls) rarely match a real month.
Where the tier jumps are
Because overage costs more than the in-plan rate, each plan has a call count where the next bundle becomes cheaper. From the published prices:
| Move up from | To | Worth it above |
|---|---|---|
| AI Free ($0 + $3/call) | Pro 75 ($150) | 75 calls |
| Pro 75 ($150 + $2.50) | Pro 150 ($270) | 123 calls |
| Pro 150 ($270 + $2.30) | 300-call plan ($500) | 250 calls |
| Enterprise 300 ($500 + $2.17) | Enterprise 500 ($800) | 438 calls |
| Human Starter ($300 + $11.50) | Basic ($810) | 74 calls |
| Human Basic ($810 + $10.50) | Pro ($2,100) | 213 calls |
A firm sitting at 180 human-first calls pays $1,755 on Basic plus overage, $345 less than Pro's $2,100 for calls it doesn't use. Plan changes take effect the following month ("We'll start billing for your new plan the next month"), so a seasonal spike gets billed at overage rates for the month it happens.
Smith.ai's call dashboard draws your plan as a dashed line across the monthly call chart, and its notification settings can email you at 90% and 100% of the monthly quota. Turn both on; they're the only warning before overage starts.
What the billing unit rewards
Smith.ai makes its own argument for per-call billing on the AI pricing page: "Per-minute services work opposite to your needs; they want to maximize your call length while you want to minimize your call time." That's fair. A per-call price doesn't reward a receptionist for keeping a caller on the line, which is a real difference from Ruby's per-minute plans.
Per-call billing creates its own incentive, though. The vendor earns the same for a 40-second wrong number that clears caller ID as for a 10-minute intake, so what Smith.ai counts as a billable call matters as much as the rate. On AI-first, that's why the 10% spam allowance exists and why it's capped.
The bundle-plus-premium-overage structure pays the vendor most from customers who buy a tier slightly below their real volume. Every call over the line costs $1.50 more than the in-plan rate on human-first and about $0.50 more on AI-first. Christopher M., an attorney owner who has used Smith.ai for six years, asked for exactly the opposite on G2 on September 2, 2026: "more flexibility with regarding to purchasing more calls per month instead of calling block that is more expensive and larger than I need."
The per-call add-on model also earns more as your volume grows, whether or not the feature is used on the extra calls. Smith.ai's help article frames that as fairness across customers; for a buyer it means an add-on's cost scales with total calls, not with bookings.
What users say about the price
Smith.ai splits its reviews across three G2 listings: Virtual Receptionists at 4.9 out of 5 from 82 reviews, AI Receptionist at 4.8 from 31, and Live Chat at 4.8 from 21. Trustpilot (trustpilot.com/review/smith.ai) shows 4.4 from 371 reviews (all checked September 19, 2026).
Price rarely comes up in the G2 text. A small-law-firm reviewer called it "quality, cost effective service" on September 1, 2026. The complaints that do appear are about bundle sizing (Christopher M., above) and contract terms. On Trustpilot, Dean Roberts left one star on September 1, 2026, writing that Smith.ai "required a upfront payment at $2500 for a six month contract" for the AI Receptionist, which matches the 6-month plan on the AI pricing page. He posted the reply he says he got when he asked to cancel: "because the account is on a long-term plan, our policy does not allow us to cancel the agreement early or refund the unused portion of the contract." That's one customer's account, but it's the practical difference between the month-to-month plans and the 6-month plan: the lower per-call rate comes with prepayment you can't get back.
The service complaints are about call handling, not billing. We couldn't verify a matching spam-filter complaint verbatim on Smith.ai's three G2 listings today, so we've dropped it rather than paraphrase a quote we can't source. The risk is still worth naming: an over-aggressive spam filter cuts the other way from the 10% spam cap, screening out calls you'd have paid for.
How Smith.ai pricing compares
The closest alternatives bill in three different units, so we priced one scenario: 200 calls a month averaging 2.5 minutes (500 minutes), each from a different caller. Rival prices come from their own pricing pages on September 19, 2026.
| Service | Billing unit | Published price | 200 calls, 500 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smith.ai AI-first | Call | Free to $800 a month, $1.60–$2.00 a call | $385, or $505 with 20% escalated |
| Smith.ai human-first | Call | $300 to $2,100 a month, $7–$10 a call | $1,965 |
| Ruby | Receptionist minute | $250/50 min, $395/100, $720/200, $1,725/500 | $1,725 (500-minute plan) |
| Goodcall | AI agent plus unique callers | $79 / $129 / $249 an agent a month; $0.50 per extra unique caller | $129 (Growth, 250 callers) |
| Rosie | AI minute | $49/250 min, $149/1,000 min, $299/2,000 min | $149 (Scale) |
Ruby is the like-for-like comparison for live receptionists. At 2.5-minute calls, its 500-minute plan costs $1,725 against Smith.ai human-first's $1,965, and Ruby includes its features in the plan instead of charging add-ons. Longer calls flip it: at 4 minutes, 200 calls is 800 minutes, past Ruby's largest published plan, while Smith.ai's price doesn't move. Ruby doesn't publish its overage rate.
Goodcall prices an AI agent per month with unlimited minutes and caps unique customers instead of calls, so repeat callers are free. At $129 a month on monthly billing ($108 billed annually) it's a third of Smith.ai AI-first at this volume, without a live-agent network behind it. See our Goodcall guide.
Rosie sells AI minutes in bundles, and 1,000 minutes for $149 covers this scenario with room to spare. Our Rosie guide covers what those plans include. For home-services call centers, Avoca is the other AI-first option we've priced.
Across the table, pure-AI answering services cost $129 to $149 for this volume; Smith.ai AI-first costs two to four times that, and the difference buys the option to hand any call to a trained human for $3. Human answering from either Smith.ai or Ruby costs $1,700 to $2,000. Smith.ai's own FAQ acknowledges the premium: "So yes, it's a bit pricier than the competition."
Where Macha fits
Smith.ai fits teams whose leads arrive by phone and need a person, or an AI with a person behind it, to answer. It answers phone calls and web chat and doesn't touch the email and chat tickets in a help desk, which is the work Macha does. Macha is an AI agent layer on the help desk you already run (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom), billed per ticket at about $0.40 a ticket, from $299 a month for 750 tickets, with setup and monitoring by the Macha team (pricing). A law firm that uses Smith.ai for intake calls and Zendesk for client email can run both: calls priced per call, tickets per ticket. Our overview of AI agents for customer service covers how the two channels split.
How we researched this
We checked both Smith.ai pricing pages, its homepage and two of its help center articles in a browser on September 19, 2026, and cross-checked the AI plan prices against the structured data on Smith.ai's own page. Ratings and quotes come from G2 and Trustpilot the same day, and rival prices from Ruby, Goodcall and Rosie's live pricing pages. We didn't sign up for Smith.ai, so the dashboard images come from its help center, and the monthly costs are our arithmetic on published prices at volumes we chose, not invoices.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Smith.ai cost per month? The AI Receptionist runs from $0 (25 calls) to $800 (500 calls), with custom pricing above 1,000 calls. Human-first Virtual Receptionists cost $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300. At 200 calls a month we calculate $385 on AI-first and $1,965 on human-first.
Is there a free Smith.ai plan? Yes. The AI-first Free plan includes 25 answered calls a month at $0, then charges $3.00 for each extra call. Below 75 calls, Free plus overage costs less than the $150 Pro plan.
How much does Smith.ai charge per call? AI-first costs $1.60 to $2.00 a call inside a plan and $2.10 to $3.00 above it. Human-first costs $7 to $10 inside a plan and $8.50 to $11.50 above it. Sending an AI call to a live agent adds $3.
What happens if I go over my Smith.ai call limit? Every extra call is billed at the plan's overage rate, which is higher than the in-plan rate: $1.50 more on human-first plans and about $0.50 more on AI plans. Plan changes apply from the next month.
Are Smith.ai add-ons charged on every call? Yes. Smith.ai's help center says per-call add-ons are applied to all calls as a blended average, so appointment booking at $1.50 costs $1.50 on every call in the month.
Does Smith.ai charge for spam calls? Human-first plans don't charge for spam or unsolicited sales calls if your line passes caller ID. On AI-first plans, known spammers are filtered out before they count, and you can remove up to 10% of your calls from the bill each cycle for spam that got through.
Does Smith.ai offer an annual discount? Human-first plans are 10% off if you subscribe for 12 months. The AI Receptionist offers a 6-month plan with rollover calls and a lower per-call rate, by quote; one Trustpilot reviewer reports it was prepaid and couldn't be refunded early.
Is Smith.ai a legit company? Yes. It's an established answering service that holds 4.9 out of 5 on G2 for its Virtual Receptionists (82 reviews) and 4.4 on Trustpilot (371 reviews). Searches for "Chat Smith" usually mean an unrelated chatbot app, and questions about Smith.ai's pay rates are about its job listings, not its prices.
What's cheaper than Smith.ai? For AI-only answering, Goodcall ($79 to $249 an agent a month) and Rosie ($49 to $299 a month) cost less at most small-business volumes. For live receptionists, Ruby's minute-based plans cost less when calls are short.
If your support queue is email and chat tickets in a help desk, not phone calls, start a Macha trial with $50 of free usage, or compare the tiers on our pricing page.
Sources: Smith.ai AI Receptionist pricing, Smith.ai Virtual Receptionists pricing, Smith.ai homepage, Smith.ai help: per-call add-ons, Smith.ai help: quota notifications, Smith.ai help: call dashboard, G2 Smith.ai Virtual Receptionists, G2 Smith.ai AI Receptionist, Trustpilot Smith.ai reviews (trustpilot.com/review/smith.ai, read in a browser; it blocks our link checker), Ruby pricing, Goodcall pricing, Rosie pricing.
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