Three real tiers, not a vague 'it depends.' Most small businesses belong in the middle one, and this page explains why.
You configure it yourself
Pick a plan (Smith.ai, Ruby, and similar tools are typical examples), build your own call flows in a dashboard, and maintain them as your business changes. Cheapest option if you have the time and patience to set it up properly and keep tuning it.
Best fit: A single generic flow is enough, and someone in-house will own it
We build it around your business and run it
We design the call flows around how your business actually works — your hours, your escalation rules, your booking system — and manage it going forward. You are not logging into a dashboard or debugging a flow at 9pm.
Best fit: You want it to fit your business specifically, without owning the upkeep
A dev team builds it from scratch for you
Deep integrations, multilingual support, strict compliance, high call volume at enterprise scale. This is the right tier for a large, complex operation — and overkill for most small and mid-size businesses.
Best fit: Enterprise scale, heavy compliance or integration requirements
Common questions
For a small business, realistically $25–$300/month if you build and maintain it yourself on a SaaS platform, or a project fee starting at $800 plus ongoing management if you want it built around your business and kept running for you. Full custom development from a dev team runs into five and six figures and is built for enterprise scale, not a single-location business.
A cheap plan is cheap because you are doing the setup and upkeep. If your call patterns are simple and someone on your team has time to own it, that is a genuinely reasonable choice. If you want it to actually fit how your business runs and you do not want to maintain it, that work has to happen somewhere — either you do it, or someone builds it for you.
No — our fee covers the build and management. Telephony/call costs (if not already covered by your existing phone line) are billed separately at cost, with no markup.
Most small-business builds are live within one to two weeks of the scope being agreed, since we are configuring an existing platform around your business rather than building the underlying AI from scratch.
Get started
The first call is free and twenty minutes. Tell us how your phones run today and we’ll tell you honestly which tier actually fits — even if that means a $29/month plan is the right call.