AI receptionist, answering service, or hire someone?
If your phone is not being answered, you have three real options and one non-option. This is an attempt at an honest comparison, written by one of the three, with the cases where the other two win stated properly.
The three real options
Hire a person. Buy an answering service. Buy an AI receptionist. The non-option is “answer it yourself, better”. Every owner tries this first and it fails for a structural reason rather than a personal one: the hours your phone is busiest are the hours you are busiest, because they are the same hours. You cannot be more disciplined about that. It is a scheduling conflict, not a habit.
Option one: hire someone
A person on the desk costs what a wage costs — for the hours a small shop actually needs covered, comfortably the most expensive option here, and considerably more again for full coverage once you count payroll costs rather than just an hourly rate.
What you get for it is genuinely the best product on the market. A person picks up warmly, recognises regulars by voice, exercises judgement, handles the awkward call about a color that went wrong, and books competently. Nothing in this category replaces that, and any vendor telling you otherwise is selling. What you don't get: coverage outside their shift, or more than one call at a time. Saturday's rush queues behind whoever rang first, and Sunday evening goes to voicemail regardless.
Option two: a traditional answering service
$200 to $600 a month at small-shop volume, usually billed per minute or per call, with rates rising after hours and at weekends — which is precisely when a shop's phone is busiest. A real person answers under your business name and follows your script. It is a proven thing that has worked for decades, and for out-of-hours cover it is a reasonable answer.
The limitation is structural rather than a quality problem: an answering service moves the task, it does not finish it. You get a message. You still ring back, still miss them, still hunt for a slot that may have gone. Every message is a job added to your list, and the round trip is where callers are lost.
Option three: an AI receptionist
Roughly $49 to $300 a month, and the range is wide because the category contains three genuinely different products — message-takers, link-senders, and tools that write the appointment into a live calendar during the call. That distinction matters more than the price does, and we have written it up separately on this blog.
The weaknesses are real and worth stating. It is not a person, and it says so to every caller. It will not charm anybody. A nuanced conversation — a complaint, a consultation, a caller who needs reassurance — is a message for a human, and a well-built one will hand it over rather than pretend. Clayta sits here at $99 a month for 150 minutes, or $249 on Growth, no contract, 30-day money-back guarantee. It books into Square Appointments, or Google Calendar, in English and Spanish.
What they cost, side by side
A person costs the most and is the only option that brings judgement, warmth and a booking. An answering service is $200 to $600 a month and ends the call with a message for you to action. An AI receptionist is roughly $49 to $300: the cheaper ones end with a message or a link, and the calendar-writers end with the appointment made. Competitor prices were checked in August 2026; they move, so check them yourself before deciding.
The question that actually decides it
Not “which is cheapest”. The prices above are close enough that cheapest is a poor tiebreaker, and the cheapest option is the one that finishes the least work. The question is: what happens after the call ends? If the answer is “the appointment is in the calendar”, the job is done. If the answer is “there's a message waiting for me”, the job has been moved to you, and you should price that honestly — every message is a call you now have to make, during hours you are already working.
Where each one genuinely wins
Hire someone if your callers expect a person, the relationship is the product, your volume is low enough that one person can hold it, and the cost per call is not the constraint. High-end salons and long-standing local shops often should.
Use an answering service if your calls need judgement a script cannot capture, you want a human voice at any cost, or you mainly need out-of-hours cover and you are content to return calls yourself.
Use an AI receptionist if most of your calls are people wanting an appointment, your busiest hour is exactly when nobody can reach the desk, and the return-call round trip is where you are losing people. And within that, pick the one that writes to your calendar rather than the one that sends a link — the price difference between those two is smaller than one missed booking.
What to do this week
Three steps, none of which cost anything. First, get the number: ask your carrier for a month of inbound call logs, including unanswered — most owners are wrong about this figure and wrong in the same direction. Second, price your own time: count the return calls you made last week, because that is the hidden cost of the message-taking options. Third, hear one: ring an AI receptionist as though you were a client and judge it as a caller, not as a buyer. Ours answers on (949) 687-2811. Ask it something difficult about your trade.