Best AI Receptionist Under $100 a Month: Five Verified Plans Compared

Search for a cheap AI receptionist and you will find lists that confidently rank six or eight products under $100 a month, complete with prices that were copied from other lists. This page is the checked version. Five providers in our database publish a plan at or under $99 a month, verified on their own pricing pages on 2026-09-07: Dialzara at $29, Rosie at $49, Goodcall at $79, and Frontdesk and Torklio at $99. They are not the same product at different prices. Each entry tier gives something up, and the point of this page is to say what.

What "under $100" buys

A sub-$100 plan is an entry tier, and entry tiers are defined by limits more than by features. Expect a cap on talk time (or on customers), one phone number, one or two dashboard users, a single location and a short retention window for recordings. When comparing two entry plans, compare the limits first, because two $99 plans with 200 and 300 included minutes are not the same price at all.

• Included minutes. The single most important number on a minute-metered plan. Divide the monthly price by the allowance to get a cost per included minute, and compare that across vendors.
• The meter itself. Goodcall does not meter minutes at all; it caps unique customers per month. A plan with unlimited minutes can still run over.
• Booking and transfers. Whether the entry plan books into your calendar and transfers calls, or only takes a message. Rosie's $49 plan does neither.
• Overage. Whether the rate is on the page. Dialzara and Frontdesk publish one; Torklio and Rosie do not.
• Retention. How long recordings, transcripts and customer details are kept. Goodcall's Starter keeps them for 7 days.

The five verified plans under $100

Dialzara Business Lite, $29 for 60 minutes

Dialzara has the lowest verified headline price in the category, and the smallest allowance: 60 minutes is roughly 20 three-minute calls. The plan does include appointment scheduling, call routing and CRM/calendar integration, a 7-day trial, no setup fee, and the published overage ($0.48 a minute) means a 150-minute month is a predictable $72.20. At $0.48 per included minute it is the most expensive minute on this page, and Dialzara's $99 Business Pro (220 minutes, $0.45 over) is the tier a real business is more likely to land on. The SMS agent and website chatbot are bundled with voice plans.

Rosie Professional, $49 for 250 minutes

Rosie's entry plan is the cheapest included minute here at about 20 cents, and it is the one with the clearest trade-off: it takes messages, sends appointment links by text, detects spam and connects to Zapier, but it cannot transfer a call and does not book directly into a calendar. Both of those arrive on the $149 Scale plan with 1,000 minutes. No overage rate is published, so a month above 250 minutes has no price on the page. There is a 7-day trial and annual billing gives two months free.

Goodcall Starter, $79 per agent

Goodcall is the only plan under $100 with unlimited minutes, so call length never matters. What matters is the customer count: 100 unique customers a month are included, then $0.50 each, and the price is per AI agent ($66 with 15% off annual billing). The give-ups are retention and depth: Starter keeps call and customer details for only 7 days, allows one logic flow and three directory contacts, and the pricing page does not detail scheduling or CRM integration. There is a free trial, length not stated. For a business with many repeat callers and long calls, it is the cheapest plan on this page; for one with a wide stream of new customers, the meter moves.

Frontdesk Business-in-a-Box, $99 for 200 minutes

Frontdesk bundles calls, texts and chat with scheduling, transfers, an AI-native CRM and Zapier for $99 ($79 billed annually), with a 7-day trial and no contracts. The allowance is the smallest of the two $99 plans at 200 voice minutes, and overage is published at $0.25 a minute, the lowest minute overage here, so a 450-minute month is $161.50. Ignore the $20 Basic plan for answering purposes: it includes the platform but zero voice minutes.

Torklio Starter, $99 for 300 minutes

Torklio's Starter plan lists 300 included minutes, 1 phone number, 2 team members, 1 location, a cap of 10 calls per hour from one number, Google Calendar booking with deterministic conflict checks, a knowledge base of up to 5 sources or 20 documents, and recording retention up to 90 days. Phone answering, website chat, caller qualification and grading, summaries, transcripts, screened transfers and one customer history are on every plan. There is a 7-day trial, a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first payment, no setup fee and no annual contract. The give-ups: the overage rate is not published, so a month above 300 minutes is not a $99 month; text messaging is listed as coming soon; there is no outsourced human backup; and the plan sits one dollar under a marketing boundary. The publisher of this site has a financial interest in Torklio.

Out of range under $100

Smith.ai starts at $300 for 30 calls, Slang AI at $399 per restaurant location, and Synthflow sells only enterprise contracts from $30,000 a year. None can be configured under $100. Retell AI and Vapi can, in usage terms: 300 minutes on Retell is $21 to $93 and on Vapi $15 in platform fees plus pass-through. But they are developer platforms, and the engineer who builds and maintains the agent is the real cost, so they do not belong on a list for owners shopping a monthly plan.

What a sub-$100 plan usually does not include

The following are the items most often absent from, or capped on, the five entry tiers above. Each is a checkbox for the pricing page.

• Human receptionists. All five are AI-only; the cheapest plan with people behind the AI is Smith.ai at $300.
• Call transfers and direct booking on the cheapest tier. Rosie moves both to $149.
• A second phone number, a second AI agent or a second location without an add-on or a higher tier.
• Outlook or other non-Google calendar integrations (Torklio adds Outlook on Plus and above).
• Long retention: 7 days on Goodcall Starter, 90 days on Torklio Starter.
• A published overage rate. Two of the five (Torklio, Rosie) leave it off the page.
• SMS follow-up: bundled on Dialzara and Frontdesk (per-message credits), text links only on Rosie, coming soon on Torklio.

How to sanity-check a "$49/mo" claim

A low headline figure is easy to publish and easy to misread. Before you treat any sub-$100 price as real, run it through these checks:

1. Find it on the vendor's own pricing page, not in a review or a comparison table. If the vendor's page shows a different number, the vendor's page wins.
2. Check whether the figure assumes annual prepayment. Goodcall's $66 and Frontdesk's $79 are annual-billing prices; month-to-month they are $79 and $99.
3. Read the included minutes or calls. A $29 plan with 60 minutes costs 48 cents per included minute, more than a $99 plan with 300 (33 cents) or a $49 plan with 250 (20 cents).
4. Find the overage rate. If it is not on the page, the low figure only holds for a very quiet month.
5. Count the numbers, agents, users and locations included. Then price your actual configuration, not the smallest one.
6. Check what the entry tier cannot do. A $49 plan that cannot transfer a call or book an appointment is a message service, priced as one.
7. Confirm the trial terms. A free trial that converts silently to a higher tier is a common way a "$49" plan becomes a $149 charge.

Our pricing guide explains each billing model in more depth, and the cost walkthrough shows what happens to each of these plans at 150, 500 and 1,000 calls a month.