How much does a RingCentral AI receptionist cost?

It is $49 a month on its own, which includes 100 minutes, or $39 a month if you add it to a RingEX phone plan starting at $30 a user. Minutes past your allowance are $0.50 each, rounded up and billed in 30-second blocks. Two RingCentral blog posts still quote $39 and $59 as the starting price, so check the pricing page rather than a blog. These figures were checked on 2026-07-26.

What can a RingCentral AI receptionist do?

It answers calls around the clock, routes them by name or keyword, answers questions about your business, books appointments against Google and Outlook calendars, captures lead details, and sends text follow-ups. It also replies to inbound texts, and RingCentral says it blocks spam, though it gives no detail on how. When it cannot handle something it transfers to a person with a summary of the call attached.

How do you set up an AI receptionist in RingCentral?

Setup is self-serve in the admin portal and there is no setup fee. It can fill in your business details from your website or Google listing, or you type them in, then you set the greeting, hours, questions and transfer rules. The last step is assigning it to a phone number or extension, because it will not answer anything until you do.

Do you need RingCentral's phone system to use AI Receptionist?

No. The standalone plan lists working with any business phone system as an included feature, so you can keep your current carrier and number and forward calls to it. Buying the bundle drops the answering price from $49 to $39 a month, but adds a RingEX plan at $30 a user on top.

Is an AI receptionist worth it?

It depends on how many calls you currently miss and what a job is worth to you. If callers regularly reach voicemail and then call someone else, one booked job a month usually covers any of the prices on this page. If your phone is already answered reliably during the hours you get calls, the honest answer is probably not.

Comparison · Updated July 26, 2026

RingCentral AI Receptionist: what it costs and who it fits

RingCentral AI Receptionist picks up calls, books appointments, and follows up by text, and it runs on top of whatever phone system you already have. Every price here was read off RingCentral's own pricing page on July 26, 2026, because that page builds its numbers with a script and two of RingCentral's own blog posts still quote older ones. One honest note before we start: we build EveryDial, an answering service for home-services trades, and it appears here as a third option. Where a rival is the better pick for you, we say so.

RingCentral AI Receptionist

A phone company's AI answering product, sold on its own or bundled with its phone system. It answers, routes by name, books, and texts.

Pricing: $49/mo standalone (100 min), or $39/mo added to a $30 RingEX planBest for: Businesses that want AI answering without switching phone systems

Smith.ai

An answering service, ten years and 25 million calls in. AI answers first, with employed receptionists behind the software for messy calls.

Pricing: Free (25 calls/mo), Pro $150/mo; human plans from $300/moBest for: Offices that want AI with human backup, like law firms

EveryDial

Built only for home services. It books the job and sends you the details after every call, on every plan.

Pricing: $49/mo (100 min) or $149/mo (400 min), same rate past the capBest for: Solo and small home-services crews

Feature	RingCentral AI Receptionist	Smith.ai	EveryDial
What it is	Phone company's AI answering product	Answering service	Answering service
What answers the call	Software only	Software, with paid human backup	Software only
Billing model	Minutes included, then per minute	Per call	Minutes included, same rate after
Starting price for answered calls	$49/mo, 100 minutes	Free (25 calls/mo), then $150/mo	$49/mo, 100 minutes
Cost past the plan	$0.50 a minute, rounded up to 30 seconds	$2.00 to $3.00 a call	$0.49 a minute (Starter)
Works without buying a phone system	YesWorks with any phone system	Yes	Yes
Try before you pay	NoNo trial on the standalone plan	YesFree plan, card on file	Yes10 minutes with no card, then a 7-day trial
Books appointments	YesGoogle and Outlook calendars	Yes	YesOn every plan
Languages beyond English	YesSix, switches during the call	YesEnglish and Spanish	NoEnglish only today
Transfers calls to your team	YesWith a call summary	YesPaid per-call add-on	YesEmergencies ring your cell
Spam and robocall screening	YesClaimed, no detail given	YesOn every plan	YesFlags spam calls
Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan or Jobber	NoNot on any RingCentral page	NoCRM only, plus Zapier	NoOn the roadmap, Jobber first
Setup	Self-serve, filled in from your website	About 15 minutes, with test calls first	Self-serve, no sales call

A month of 60 calls, priced three ways

Sixty answered calls in a month, averaging three minutes each, so 180 minutes of talk time. That is a realistic month for a small crew that forwards its phone. Prices checked on July 26, 2026.

RingCentral AI Receptionist$49 covers 100 minutes, then 80 minutes at $0.50$89
Smith.ai, free plan25 calls included, then 35 calls at $3.00$105
EveryDial Starter$49 covers 100 minutes, then 80 minutes at $0.49$88.20

Three caveats, because the totals hide them. RingCentral rounds every call up to the next 30 seconds, so its billed minutes come in above the 180 above. Smith.ai's free plan is the cheapest way in at low volume and the most expensive as calls grow, since it charges per call whether the call was a booking or a wrong number. And on our side, once you pass roughly 300 minutes the $149 plan with 400 minutes beats paying overage on the $49 one.

What it costs, and why you had to dig for it

The first thing people ask about this product is the price. RingCentral's product page does not show one. The pricing page does. It is $49 a month for 100 minutes on its own, or $39 a month if you add it to a $30 RingEX Core phone plan. Past your minutes you pay $0.50 each. Call time is rounded up in 30-second blocks, so a call of two minutes ten seconds bills as two and a half.

Be careful which page you take a number from. RingCentral's launch post still says pricing starts at $39 a month. A second post says $59 a month. A review published this year repeats the $59. That is three starting prices for one product, all on or about the same company's site. Trust the pricing page. It is the one we checked.

RingCentral sells this mainly against its own older technology: the recorded menu that tells callers to press one for sales and two for service. A menu can only sort people into buckets you set up in advance. This holds a conversation instead. A caller can say "my water heater is leaking and I need someone today" and it will pick out the problem, the urgency and the address, then check your calendar and offer a time. It also routes by name, so a caller asking for a specific person gets there without pressing anything. That is the real gap between this and the phone tree you may already have switched on.

You do not need RingCentral's phone system

This is the most useful thing to know and the least advertised. The standalone plan lists "works with any business phone system" as an included feature. So you keep your current number and carrier, and point calls at it. Most phone companies sell answering only as a layer on their own platform. This one does not work that way. If you do want the phone system too, the bundle drops the answering to $39, but adds $30 a user on top.

Searching this turns up two things: AI Receptionist, and AI Representative, also called AIR Pro. They are not the same. AI Receptionist is the packaged one you can buy today. It answers questions, books jobs, takes lead details, and hands off to a person. AIR Pro is the build-your-own version for complex work across systems. It is early access only and has no published price. If a review sounds far stronger than what you can actually sign up for, it is usually describing AIR Pro.

Where RingCentral wins

Languages. It handles English, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese, and switches when it hears the caller switch. If a real share of your customers calls in Spanish, this is the strongest option on this page, and we say that as the one here that is English only.
Calendar booking against Google and Outlook, with real-time availability, text confirmations, and questions asked before it books.
It answers texts as well as calls, so an after-hours message gets a reply too.
Scale and compliance: HIPAA and SOC2, and a company with 400,000 customers behind it.
No setup fee, no sales call needed, and it fills itself in from your website.

Where it falls short for a trade business

No home-services software. Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho are named. Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan and Jobber appear on none of RingCentral's pages, so bookings will not land in the system your crew already works from.
"Answer only when my own people are busy" is not a setting you switch on. RingCentral's page says you can deploy it as a backup for overflow, and a user in its own community did get that working, but only by building it out of call-queue rules, and he asked for it to be selectable the way a queue or a person is. For most contractors "pick up the ones we miss" is the whole job, so expect setup work on the one thing you most want.
100 minutes is thin for a receptionist, and 30-second rounding means your billed minutes run above your real talk time.
The standalone plan has no free trial. Its buttons are "Contact sales" and "Buy now", while the bundle gets the "Try free" button.
Several integrations, including Calendly and WhatsApp, are marked coming soon, and RingCentral's own pages disagree about whether calendar and CRM sync is live or pending.

Where Smith.ai fits instead

Look at Smith.ai if a badly handled call is expensive for you. It bills per call, not per minute. Behind the software sit more than 500 employed receptionists who can take over a messy call, as a paid add-on. Its free plan answers 25 calls a month with a card on file, and that is the cheapest honest way to test any of these three. The catch is that per-call billing punishes short calls. A wrong number costs the same as a booked job, at $2.00 to $3.00 a call.

See what missed calls actually cost you

Before you pay for any of these, put your own numbers in and see what the calls you miss are worth.

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Which one to pick

Do your customers call in more than one language? Do you want the phone system and the answering from one vendor? Then RingCentral is the sensible pick, and the price is fair. If your worry is the rare call that has to go perfectly, Smith.ai's bench of real receptionists is the thing neither of the others sells. If you run a trade business and mostly want the phone answered and the job booked, look at a receptionist built for that. Our answering service pages by trade show what intake looks like for plumbing, HVAC and the rest.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it is why this page is not a sales pitch. RingCentral's entry plan and EveryDial's cost the same for the same minutes: $49 for 100, with overage a cent apart. We are not cheaper. The case for us is what the receptionist knows about a trade call, and where the booking lands. It is not the price. Want this comparison against a phone company that does make you buy its phone system first? Smith.ai vs Nextiva covers that. To size the problem first, try the missed call cost calculator.

FAQ

Common questions

How much does a RingCentral AI receptionist cost?: It is $49 a month on its own, which includes 100 minutes, or $39 a month if you add it to a RingEX phone plan starting at $30 a user. Minutes past your allowance are $0.50 each, rounded up and billed in 30-second blocks. Two RingCentral blog posts still quote $39 and $59 as the starting price, so check the pricing page rather than a blog. These figures were checked on 2026-07-26.
What can a RingCentral AI receptionist do?: It answers calls around the clock, routes them by name or keyword, answers questions about your business, books appointments against Google and Outlook calendars, captures lead details, and sends text follow-ups. It also replies to inbound texts, and RingCentral says it blocks spam, though it gives no detail on how. When it cannot handle something it transfers to a person with a summary of the call attached.
How do you set up an AI receptionist in RingCentral?: Setup is self-serve in the admin portal and there is no setup fee. It can fill in your business details from your website or Google listing, or you type them in, then you set the greeting, hours, questions and transfer rules. The last step is assigning it to a phone number or extension, because it will not answer anything until you do.
Do you need RingCentral's phone system to use AI Receptionist?: No. The standalone plan lists working with any business phone system as an included feature, so you can keep your current carrier and number and forward calls to it. Buying the bundle drops the answering price from $49 to $39 a month, but adds a RingEX plan at $30 a user on top.
Is an AI receptionist worth it?: It depends on how many calls you currently miss and what a job is worth to you. If callers regularly reach voicemail and then call someone else, one booked job a month usually covers any of the prices on this page. If your phone is already answered reliably during the hours you get calls, the honest answer is probably not.

AI receptionist for home services

Never send another job to voicemail.

EveryDial picks up, books the customer in, and sends you the details. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.