AI receptionist cost in the UK: subscription, agency, or custom build

An AI receptionist answers your business phone in natural speech, deals with the caller, and passes on what matters. The price range for one in the UK is enormous: from about £20 a month to well over £10,000 up front. Both ends of that range are reasonable. They are simply different products, and most of the confusion comes from comparing them as if they were the same thing.

This is a plain comparison of the options as they stand in October 2026, using prices UK providers publish themselves. Prices in this market move quickly, so treat the figures as a guide and get current quotes.

Option 1: an off-the-shelf AI receptionist subscription

These are ready-made products you sign up for, point your phone number at, and configure through a dashboard. Published UK entry plans mostly sit between about £20 and £100 a month. Some charge a flat fee, some charge per call, and some per minute.

• Good at: answering, giving out opening hours and basic information, taking a message, and emailing or texting it to you.
• Weaker at: anything that depends on your own systems, such as booking into the diary software you already use, looking up an order, or routing by who the caller is.
• Watch for: per-call or per-minute overage once you pass the plan's allowance, VAT, whether booking is actually included, and what happens to your call recordings if you leave.

If what you want is a polite voice that takes messages instead of voicemail, this is the right choice and it is hard to beat on price.

Option 2: a done-for-you plan from an AI agency

A large number of UK AI agencies set up a voice agent for you on one of the big voice AI platforms, then charge a monthly fee for hosting and support. Published figures range from a few hundred pounds of set-up for a simple agent to several thousand for a more involved one, plus a monthly fee that is commonly somewhere between £70 and £350, and higher for larger volumes.

• Good at: getting a capable agent live quickly without you touching any configuration.
• Weaker at: ownership. The agent usually lives inside the agency's platform account. If you stop paying, the agent, its set-up, and often the call history stay behind.
• Watch for: who owns the phone number, whether you can export the agent's configuration and transcripts, and what counts as a change request.

Option 3: a custom build you own

A custom voice agent is built for your business by an engineering team, runs on accounts in your name, and is connected to your systems with real code rather than a no-code connector. Published UK prices for this kind of work start in the low thousands of pounds for a focused inbound agent and climb into five figures for multi-department or outbound set-ups.

Running costs are separate and usage based. You pay the telephony provider, the speech recognition service, the language model, and the voice provider directly, per minute of conversation. Depending on the voice and model chosen, that commonly lands somewhere around 5p to 20p per minute all in. For a business taking 500 three-minute calls a month, that is roughly £75 to £300 a month in running costs, with no markup on top.

• Good at: working inside your existing booking system, CRM, or order database; high call volumes where per-call subscription pricing gets expensive; and anything a dashboard product cannot be configured to do.
• Weaker at: speed to start. It needs a proper scoping conversation and testing before it goes live.
• Watch for: whether the build price is fixed, who holds the accounts, and whether the agent is tested against real call scenarios before launch.

Option 4: a person

A full-time receptionist on the National Living Wage costs roughly £24,800 a year in wages alone at 37.5 hours a week, before employer National Insurance, pension, holiday cover, and sickness. Human call answering services are cheaper and usually charge per call or per minute.

A good receptionist is still better than any AI at a difficult, emotional, or unusual call. The strongest set-ups use both: the AI answers everything immediately, deals with the routine calls, and hands the hard ones to a person with a written summary.

The costs nobody puts on the pricing page

• Integration. Booking into your real diary or CRM is where most of the value is and where most cheap plans stop.
• Tuning. The first version of any voice agent gets things wrong. Someone has to listen to calls, find the failures, and fix them. Ask whether that is included.
• Phone numbers and porting. A new number is cheap. Moving your existing number has its own process and sometimes a fee.
• Compliance. Telling callers they are speaking to an AI, recording notices, how long transcripts are kept, and how you handle a request to delete them.
• Exit. What you can take with you if you change provider: the number, the transcripts, and the agent's set-up.

How to decide

1. 01Write down what the agent must do on a call, not what would be nice. If it is answer, inform, and take a message, buy a subscription.
2. 02List the systems it must read from or write to. If booking into your own software or looking up records is on the list, you need either a capable agency plan or a custom build.
3. 03Estimate your monthly minutes. Above a few thousand minutes a month, usage pricing on your own accounts is usually cheaper than per-call plans.
4. 04Decide how much ownership matters. If the phone line is central to the business, you want the number, the data, and the agent in your own name.
5. 05Ask every provider for a total first-year cost: set-up, monthly fees, usage, overage, VAT, and integration.

We build the third option, and we will tell you on the first call if the first or second would serve you better. Either way you should leave with a clear idea of what the phone line will cost you for a year.