
This is not a fair fight in either direction. A person and a system are good at genuinely different things, and pretending otherwise wastes your money.
| Hiring a person | AI receptionist | |
|---|---|---|
| Hours covered | Your business hours | 24/7/365 |
| Cost | Salary, tax, benefits, cover | From $149/mo |
| Sick days and holidays | Covered by someone else, or nobody | Not applicable |
| Handles two callers at once | No | Yes |
| Handles a complex or emotional call | Better | Transfers to a person |
| Knows your business | After weeks of training | From day one, from your own material |
| Consistency at 5pm on a Friday | Human | Identical to 9am Monday |
| Greets people in the lobby | Yes | No |
| Judgement | Yes | No |
Judgement, warmth in a hard moment, and everything that is not on the phone. A receptionist greets people who walk in, reads a room, notices that a patient is upset, and makes decisions nobody wrote down.
If your front desk is mostly in-person, hire a person. Nothing here replaces that.
A full-time front-desk hire in the United States generally costs well into five figures a year once tax, benefits and cover are included, and covers roughly a quarter of the week’s hours. An AI receptionist starts at $149 a month and covers all of them.
That is not an argument for replacing the person. It is an argument that the two are not substitutes, and that the nights and weekends your receptionist does not work are where the cheap wins are.
Keep the person for the hours and the conversations that need one. Put the AI on the overflow, the after-hours calls and the repetitive questions that were eating their day.
The receptionist stops being a switchboard and gets to do the part of the job that needed a human in the first place.
Ava is our live demo agent. Ring her from your own phone and try to trip her up — ask about hours, pricing, availability, whatever you'd throw at a real front desk.
7 days free on your plan. Setup is billed when you sign up.
A 15-minute call. We'll ask how your phone rings today, show you the same thing answering it, and tell you which plan is actually cheaper for you — even if that's the $149 one.
