What does a phone number for an AI agent cost?

The short answer

The number itself is the cheap part. What you pay for is talk time, the minutes an AI voice spends on calls. Prices come in three shapes: per minute, flat monthly with an allowance of minutes, and "unlimited" with a fair use policy. Which is cheapest depends almost entirely on how many minutes you use. Ours is the second kind, from $29 a month.

So the useful question is how many minutes you need, and that's easier to work out than it sounds. We'll do it further down. First, the three shapes, and what to watch for in each.

Per minute

You pay for each minute of call and nothing when it's quiet. This is how platforms built for developers tend to charge, because their customers are building products of their own and want costs that rise and fall with use.

Watch what the quoted rate includes. A call has several parts (the phone line, the voice, the AI doing the thinking) and they can be billed separately, so the rate on the front page may be one slice of what a minute really costs. The number is often a small monthly rental on top. None of this is sneaky. It's pricing for people who'll read a rate card. But it makes the monthly bill hard to predict, and a long hold with the airline is charged like any other minute.

Flat monthly, with an allowance

You pay a fixed amount each month, and it includes a set number of minutes. Go over and the extra minutes are charged one by one. If you had a mobile contract twenty years ago, you know this shape already.

The good part is you know the bill before the month starts. The catch is you're guessing your size up front. Pick too big and you pay for minutes you never use. Pick too small and the extra minutes add up. Which is why the estimate below is worth ten minutes of your time.

"Unlimited", with fair use

One price, no meter. It's appealing, and for a business with heavy, steady call volume it can be the right deal.

But read the fair use policy before anything else. There's always a ceiling. It's just written somewhere other than the pricing page, and sometimes in words ("reasonable use") where you'd want a figure. Ask what happens when you cross it. Does the service slow down, stop, or move you to a pricier plan? We compare the two approaches in unlimited vs per-minute plans.

What drives the bill

Whatever the shape, the same handful of things decide what you pay.

• Minutes connected. Calls in and calls out both count. So does hold music.
• Rounding. Many plans round each call up to the next whole minute, so a lot of very short calls cost more than the same time in a few long ones.
• Who is ringing you. If your missed calls forward to the line, every caller uses minutes. That includes the chatty ones.
• Extras. Some services charge for texts, extra numbers or a better voice. Ask.
• Your AI assistant. If you connect Grok, ChatGPT or Claude, that subscription is separate and paid to whoever makes it.

How to estimate your own minutes

Open the call log on your phone and scroll back two weeks. It shows every call and how long it lasted, which is all you need.

First, outgoing. Tick the calls you'd have handed over: the bookings, the "are you open" calls, the chasing. Add up their lengths. Then missed calls. Count the ones from real people, and allow a couple of minutes each, because a conversation that takes proper details runs longer than a voicemail would have.

Say that comes to nine errand calls at around three minutes and eleven missed calls at around two. That's forty-nine minutes in two weeks. Double it for a month, round up for the week when the boiler breaks, and you're at a little over a hundred.

For a business, do the same on the shop phone, and do it for your busiest week, not an average one. A pool company in March and the same company in June are two different phone bills.

What's in our plans

We charge a flat monthly price with an allowance of call minutes, and extra minutes are billed individually. A minute is time connected on a call, in or out, rounded up per call. Texts and email never use minutes.

Every plan includes the phone number, the line's own email address, and the connection to your AI assistant. There's no separate rental for the number. If you want a second line, say one for home and one for the business, each line has its own number and its own plan, on one account.

You can cancel any time, and the line stays on until the end of the period you've paid for. Current prices and allowances are on the pricing page. Go there with your estimate in hand and it's a thirty-second decision. And if you haven't heard what the minutes sound like yet, there are recorded calls on the demo page.

Common questions

More on the basics

• What is an AI phone number, and how do you get one?
• How to give your AI agent its own phone number
• AI that makes phone calls for you: what it can and can't do
• How an AI phone call actually works, from dial to summary