Three of the biggest phone vendors on earth now sell an AI receptionist, and the sticker prices are small enough to make you wonder what we're doing charging what we charge.
So let's do this the honest way, with everybody's real published numbers, including ours. Some of you should stop reading halfway down and go buy RingCentral's. We'll tell you where that line is.
What they actually cost
RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR). Per RingCentral's own announcement (May 2026): "Standalone AIR starts at $49/month" and includes 100 minutes. If you're already a RingEX customer, "RingEX customers can add AIR starting at $39/month" — also 100 minutes.
Webex AI Receptionist. Generally available since June 10, and Cisco publishes the mechanics plainly: "Each AI Receptionist includes a 250-minute bundle for $100." You can run up to 100 instances and minutes pool across all of them, which is genuinely well designed. It's an add-on for Webex Calling customers.
Microsoft. Teams Phone Agent is real and it's coming for exactly this category — but per Microsoft's own documentation it "is currently only available to customers in the Frontier Public Preview program." You can't buy it today. If you're a Microsoft shop, put a pin in this one; it will matter within a year.
Us. Aria starts around $1,200/mo for a 25-seat office, flat. No minute bundles.
$49 against $1,200 looks absurd. It is absurd — until you price the minutes.
100 minutes is not a month
This is the number nobody does the arithmetic on, so let's do it.
A routine inbound business call runs about three minutes. That makes RingCentral's 100-minute bundle roughly 33 calls a month — about a call and a half per business day. Webex's 250 minutes is roughly 83 calls a month, about four a day.
If you run a 75–300 person company, you already know that isn't your phone. That's a quiet dentist's office. The bundle isn't sized for you, and that's not a criticism of the product — it's a statement about who the product is for.
The overage costs more than the base rate
Here's where it gets interesting, and this is straight arithmetic on Cisco's published numbers.
Webex's base bundle is $100 for 250 minutes — 40 cents a minute. When you exceed it, per Cisco: "additional 250-minute bundles are automatically added at $115 per bundle." That's 46 cents a minute. Your overage minutes cost about 15% more than your base minutes. And note "automatically added" — the meter doesn't stop and ask.
Play that forward on Cisco's own figures:
- 1,000 minutes/mo (~330 calls): $100 + three extra bundles at $115 = $445
- 2,500 minutes/mo (~830 calls): $100 + nine extra bundles = $1,135
At roughly 2,500 minutes a month, the $100 product costs about what our $1,200 deployment costs. That's the crossover, and we're not going to hide it: below that line, they're cheaper than us on price.
RingCentral's overage is harder to write about, because they don't publish one. We loaded their AI Receptionist pricing page and it lists no rate at all. Third-party reviewers consistently report around $0.50/minute, billed in 30-second increments — but we could not confirm that at the source, so we're not going to state it as fact. What we'll say instead is the durable version: a meter whose rate you can't read on the vendor's own pricing page is the number to pin down in writing before you sign. Ask for it. Get it in the order form.
When you should buy theirs. Genuinely.
We're a voice AI company telling you to consider not hiring a voice AI company, so treat this as the section where we have the least incentive to lie.
Buy RingCentral's or Cisco's if most of this is you:
- You take a handful of calls a day, and the bundle actually covers your volume.
- The calls are informational — hours, location, services, "are you open Saturday."
- You're already paying for RingEX or Webex Calling, so it's an add-on, not a migration.
- You want it live this afternoon, configured by whoever answers the phone today.
If that's your situation, a $1,200/mo managed deployment is a bad purchase and we'd rather you knew that from us. Go buy the $49 one. It'll work.
Where the meter stops being the product
The line isn't call volume, though volume is what makes you notice it. The line is whether your phone is a switchboard or a business process.
A switchboard answers, informs, and transfers. Every product above does that competently and cheaply.
A business process is different. It's when the call has to do something:
- Look something up in a system that isn't the phone system. Order status in your ERP. Whether that part is in stock. What this caller's account actually says.
- Write something back. Book against real technician availability, not a generic calendar. Open the ticket. Update the record so the follow-up call knows what happened on this one.
- Know who's calling before they explain themselves for the third time this week.
- Hand off with the context intact — so your person picks up mid-thread instead of "can I get your name again?"
- Survive an audit. Recording consent, disclosure, retention. We wrote about what's actually required and what isn't — less than the internet claims, but not nothing.
Every one of those lives outside the phone vendor's box. That's not a flaw in their product; it's the boundary of it. They sell a very good receptionist for a phone system. The work you actually want done is in your CRM, your scheduler, your ticketing system, your inventory.
One more structural thing worth noticing: Webex AI Receptionist requires Webex Calling, and AIR's $39 rate requires RingEX. The AI is priced to deepen the phone contract. That's a reasonable strategy — just know that's the trade you're making, because it's the thing that's hard to unwind later.
What $1,200 buys that $49 doesn't
Not minutes. We don't sell minutes, and that's the entire point — a flat managed fee means nobody on your side is doing mental math in November about whether a busy month blows the budget.
What it actually buys: the integration work into the systems you already run, a system built for your call flow rather than configured from a website scrape, and a human who owns it when it's wrong. That last one is most of the price, and it's the part a bundle can't contain. When your agent mishandles a caller at 2am, "open a support ticket with your phone vendor" and "someone whose job is your deployment already knows" are different products at different prices, and they should be.
We're the expensive option. We'd just rather you buy it for the right reason.
Three questions that settle it
- What are your real monthly call minutes? Don't estimate — it's on your phone bill. Multiply by the published rates above. If the answer is under a few hundred minutes, the incumbents win on price and you should take that.
- Does the call need to do something in another system? If yes, you're not shopping for a receptionist, you're shopping for an integration — and the $49 line item is the wrong aisle entirely.
- Who fixes it when it's wrong? If the honest answer is "nobody has time," the cheap option isn't cheap. It's just unowned.
Answer those honestly and the decision usually makes itself — sometimes in our favor, often not. Either way you'll have priced the thing properly, which is more than the sticker gives you.
Related reading: We answer our own phone with Aria — what a deployed voice agent actually sounds like on a real business line, and is an AI receptionist even legal? — the disclosure and recording rules that do (and don't) apply.
Related solution: explore AI voice agents — built, integrated, and managed, billed flat instead of by the minute.