AI Answering Service for Contractors: 100 Calls Priced Across Five Vendors

At about 100 calls a month, expect roughly $49 to $213 across these five: Rosie $49 to $149, Goodcall $79, Jobber's Receptionist about $84 on top of a Jobber plan, Dialzara $96 to $199 by call length, and Smith.ai $212.50. Each vendor bills a different unit, so the same 100 calls produce very different totals.

Those totals assume 100 answered calls and, for the two plans billed by the minute, an average of two to five minutes a call, because that is the number vendors leave you to guess. They also price the plan that carries the feature a contractor needs, which is not always the cheapest tier: Rosie's $49 plan, for instance, doesn't list live transfer. I read every vendor's own pages on 29 October 2026, and anything the pages don't state is marked as a question to ask.

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Five vendors, five meanings of "a call"

The unit comes before any sum. A plan that sounds cheap per month can be expensive per unit, and the unit decides which of your calls cost money.

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Three of the five ignore call length entirely. A twelve-minute call about a rewire costs the same as a two-minute call about a socket on Smith.ai, Goodcall and Jobber, so those suit firms whose callers talk for a long time. Dialzara and Rosie are the opposite: every minute is metered, so they suit short, frequent calls. The wider logic of per-minute, per-caller and per-call pricing is covered in the tutorial on how AI phone assistants are billed; the rest of this one is arithmetic on a single month.

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A solar installer's 100-call month, plan by plan

Take a four-person solar installer, purely as an illustration, whose phone shows 100 calls that an AI could have answered. The mix, with rough lengths:

• 40 new enquiries at about 4.5 minutes each: roof type, address, recent electricity bills, timeline.
• 25 existing customers at about 3 minutes: install dates, a monitoring app that won't connect, an invoice question.
• 15 supplier and subcontractor calls at about 1.5 minutes.
• 12 people asking whether their quote arrived, at about 1.5 minutes.
• 8 sales calls and misdials at about half a minute.

That adds up to roughly 300 minutes, an average of three minutes a call. Here is what each vendor's published plans charge for it.

Smith.ai is the dearest per call and Goodcall the cheapest, but read the row that fits your habits, not the ranking. The solar firm's callers describe roofs at length, which is exactly the pattern that makes Goodcall and Jobber look good and Dialzara and Rosie look dear. For scale, Smith.ai's human-answered Basic plan lists $810 for 90 calls and $10.50 for each extra one, which works out at about $915 for the same 100 calls.

Two rows need a caution. Rosie's cheapest plan, Professional at $49, includes 250 minutes, so it would cover this month only if calls averaged 2.5 minutes or less; the page doesn't print what the extra 50 minutes would cost, and the tutorial on what happens when you go over your Rosie minutes covers how to find out. And Jobber's $84.30 is the add-on alone. It only exists inside a Jobber subscription, which the next sections price. Jobber's own pages also disagree on the allowance: its Receptionist help article, updated 28 October 2026, says 30 conversations and names the invoice line "Receptionist - 30 Conversations / Month", while an add-ons article last updated in August still says 100. These sums use the newer 30, and your first invoice settles it.

How call length moves the minute-billed plans

For Dialzara and Rosie the average call length is the whole bill, and a guess of two minutes against five changes the plan you should be on.

Dialzara's plans are $29 for 60 minutes (Lite), $99 for 220 (Pro), $199 for 500 (Plus) and $349 for 1,000 (Elite), with per-minute overage of $0.48, $0.45, $0.40 and $0.35. The way to choose is to total every plan at your own minutes: plan price plus overage minutes at that plan's rate. A shortcut for spotting a step up: when the overage on your current plan is bigger than the price gap to the next one, work out the next plan's total. At 300 minutes, Lite's overage is $115.20 against a $70 gap to Pro, and Pro's total of $135 is the lower. If you want warm transfers, Spanish-speaking callers handled or calendar sync, Pro is the entry point anyway, which makes its $99 the practical price even at two minutes a call, where Lite alone would be $96.20.

A security installer shows the other end. Callers describe a building, its doors, an old alarm panel and where the cameras should go, so calls run nearer five minutes: 500 minutes in the month. That lands exactly on Dialzara Plus at $199, and one busy week pushes it into $0.40-a-minute overage. The same calls cost that firm $79 on Goodcall Starter, because Goodcall says it never meters minutes.

A quick sum shows why script length matters on the metered plans. Cut 30 seconds from every call with a shorter greeting and one fewer question, and 100 calls save 50 minutes. On Dialzara Pro in overage that is 50 x $0.45 = $22.50 a month. On Goodcall, Jobber or Smith.ai the same trim saves nothing, because they never count minutes.

An HVAC contractor's quiet month, normal month and heatwave

Volume changes the ranking too, and a trade with seasons feels it most. Here is a made-up HVAC contractor at 40 calls (the AI only takes the calls the owner misses), 100 calls, and 250 in a heatwave month, all at three minutes a call.

Four patterns stand out. Smith.ai's own free plan is cheaper than its paid one until the month reaches 75 calls, where $3 a call over 25 free equals the $150 paid plan; beyond that the paid plan's $2.50 overage wins, and the next tier, $270 for 150 calls, only beats it above about 123 calls a month ($150 plus 48 calls at $2.50). Goodcall barely moves because the 250-call month falls inside its Growth plan, $129 for 500 unique customers. Rosie's Scale plan absorbs 750 minutes without a change. And Jobber's add-on climbs in a straight line at $0.79 a conversation.

That last line has a ceiling. According to its Receptionist help article, Jobber includes the Receptionist, with unlimited use, on its Plus plan. For a five-user firm on the Grow plan at $229 a month (annual billing, after the introductory year), Jobber's page lists Plus at $399, a step of $170. The add-on passes that figure at roughly 210 conversations a month, so a firm that expects more than that should price the Plus plan, which also brings its other features.

What the base price leaves out

Several of the cheapest prices come without something a contractor needs on the first day. Check these before choosing on price alone.

• Live transfer for urgent calls. Rosie's Professional column doesn't list call transfer; live and warm transfers start on Scale ($149), and waterfall transfers, where Rosie tries several numbers until someone answers, on Growth ($299). Dialzara lists blind transfer on every plan and warm transfer from Pro ($99); a warm transfer has the AI brief your team member before connecting the caller, and a blind one just connects. Goodcall says transfers are supported and don't count against its tool limit. Jobber transfers on keywords you set, such as "emergency" or "urgent", but the number it transfers to must differ from your business number.
• Booking into a calendar. Rosie's Professional plan texts a scheduling link instead; direct calendar booking begins at Scale. Dialzara lists Google and Outlook calendar sync from Pro, not on Lite. Smith.ai lists AI scheduling with Calendly and other tools, and Jobber books using your existing online-booking settings.
• Tool limits. Goodcall Starter allows one external tool, Growth five and Scale fifteen, and it counts anything you connect or build, such as an API or a code block. Two connections, say a CRM and a Zapier link, could push you from the $79 plan to the $129 one, so ask whether calendar booking counts as a tool too.
• A parent subscription. Jobber's Receptionist needs a Jobber plan underneath. Core is $49 a month on monthly billing, or $29 on annual billing after an introductory first year at $21, and each extra user is $29. Jobber's prices exclude sales tax.
• Texting. Dialzara's text agent lists $19 a month plus $0.05 a message, and Rosie's website texting is $50 a month for 25 conversations, then $1 each. Neither is needed to answer phones.
• Language. Smith.ai and Rosie list English and Spanish, and Dialzara lists bilingual English and Spanish from Pro up, so Lite's $29 is English only. Goodcall's and Jobber's pages don't say.
• Annual billing. Rosie advertises two months free for paying annually but doesn't print the annual prices.

The plumber-specific version of this list, including how a burst-pipe call should be handled, sits in the comparison of Rosie, Goodcall, Smith.ai and Jobber for plumbers.

Spam, repeat callers and wrong numbers on the bill

Few contractors' phones carry 100 clean calls. Say a security installer's 100 calls include 22 repeats from people chasing a quote and 8 spam calls. The vendors treat that mess differently:

• Goodcall counts numbers, not calls. The 22 repeats collapse into the same customers and spam is excluded, so about 70 unique customers sit under the 100 allowed. The bill is $79 either way.
• Smith.ai filters known spammers before the AI answers. With all 8 filtered, 92 calls are billed: $150 plus 17 x $2.50 = $192.50, which is $20 less. You can also ask for up to 10% of a cycle's calls to be removed when they are spam it didn't catch.
• Jobber doesn't count spam or calls with no real interaction. With 92 counted conversations the add-on is $29 plus 62 x $0.79 = $77.98.
• Dialzara and Rosie don't state how junk calls are billed on their pricing pages (Rosie lists automatic spam detection on every plan). Junk calls are short, though: eight half-minute calls is four minutes, about $1.80 at Dialzara's $0.45 overage rate.

A short junk call therefore costs almost nothing on a minute plan, a whole call on Smith.ai unless it is filtered, and nothing on Goodcall or Jobber. If your phone gets a lot of robocalls, the tutorial on stopping robocalls using up your AI minutes goes through the filters to switch on first.

Measure your own 100 calls before paying anyone

Everything above rests on three numbers that are yours, not the vendors': how many calls the AI would take, how long they last, and how many different people make them. A phone log gives all three in about twenty minutes.

1. Export 30 days of call history from your phone provider's portal. If there is no export, copy the recent-calls list into a spreadsheet by hand for a week and multiply.
2. Keep only date, time, direction, duration in seconds and whether you answered. Swap each phone number for a code (A1, A2) so customers' numbers never reach a chatbot. If the export is messy, the guide to cleaning messy data covers the tidying.
3. Paste the cleaned table into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini with the prompt below.
4. Check the answer against ten rows you count yourself.

You are helping a contractor price an AI answering service.
Below is 30 days of my phone log as CSV: date, time, direction,
duration_seconds, caller_code, answered (yes/no).

1. Count inbound calls I answered, inbound calls I missed, and calls
   that arrived outside 08:00 to 18:00 Monday to Friday.
2. Give the average and 90th-percentile duration, in minutes, of
   answered inbound calls.
3. Count distinct caller_code values, and how many codes called
   more than once.
4. Count calls under 20 seconds as "probably junk".
5. Estimate total minutes if an AI had taken (a) every inbound call,
   (b) only missed calls, (c) only after-hours calls.
Show one small table, then list anything you were unsure about.
Do not invent calls that are not in the data.

An invented reply for one contractor's month reads: 104 inbound calls answered and 31 missed; 22 after hours, 19 of them missed; average answered call 2.9 minutes with a 90th percentile of 6.1; 81 distinct callers, 17 of whom rang more than once; 9 calls under 20 seconds; and scenario minutes of about 392 for every call, 90 for missed calls only and 64 for after-hours only.

Three things in that reply need fixing before you trust it. The 31 missed calls have no duration, so their minutes are just the average multiplied up. The nine junk calls inflate the call count but barely move the minutes. And the 135 total is a call count, not a customer count: Goodcall would bill the 81 distinct callers, which is inside its $79 plan, while Smith.ai and Jobber would bill the calls. Read your own log against the right row of the vendor table.

Checking the first invoice against your own log

The first month's bill is the real test of every figure above. Compare each vendor's count with the log you built, and ask about any gap bigger than about five per cent.

• Jobber shows usage on the Receptionist dashboard (Manage, on the Conversations card). It emails admins at 75% and 100% of the 30 included conversations and shows a banner when 10 remain. Overage appears as its own line, "Receptionist Additional Usage", on the next monthly renewal invoice, so it lands a month after the calls.
• Goodcall keeps 30 days of call history on Starter, 90 on Growth and unlimited on Scale. On Starter, copy the history out each month so you still have it when the invoice arrives.
• Smith.ai counts every call its AI answers, and lists real calls, test calls and simulated calls as separate allowances. A plan change is billed from the following month, so an upgrade won't repair this month's bill.
• Dialzara and Rosie bill minutes. Dialzara's page says talk time but not how it rounds, and Rosie's page doesn't say how minutes are counted. Add up the durations in the dashboard and compare them with the minutes billed.

Here is a mismatch that could plausibly happen. An HVAC contractor's log shows 100 calls, but the vendor's dashboard shows 131. The extra 31 turn out to be 14 test calls made during setup, 9 calls where the caller hung up during the greeting, and 8 calls from the owner's own phone checking the forwarding. Nothing was mis-billed; each was a counting rule the owner hadn't read. The fix is to note your own test calls as you make them, subtract them before comparing, and ask support whether a hang-up during the greeting counts on your plan.

Seven ways to trim the bill without losing calls

1. Forward only unanswered calls. Most phone providers can forward on busy or no answer. In the log above, the AI would then see 31 calls, not 135: $18 on Smith.ai's free plan, about $29.79 on Jobber's add-on, $49 on Rosie Professional.
2. Shorten the script. Every question you drop saves seconds on minute-billed plans.
3. Send a text link for repeat questions. "Where is my installer?" doesn't need a four-minute call.
4. Choose the plan from measured minutes. Use the plan-by-plan totals from the call-length section, not a hopeful average.
5. Use the trials as a meter. Rosie and Dialzara offer seven-day trials, Goodcall lets you build and hear a demo agent and charges only when you connect a number, and Smith.ai's free plan includes 25 real calls. The tutorial on twelve test calls for the first week shows what to run.
6. Pay annually only after month three. Rosie's two free months are real money, but only once you know the plan fits.
7. Re-read the usage report every quarter. Call volume drifts with seasons and marketing, and the right plan drifts with it.

Matching a vendor to the shape of your month

No vendor wins every month, but the matches are clear enough to start from:

• Already on Jobber, under about 200 conversations: the add-on, because it is the only option that bolts onto software the firm is already using.
• Long calls and a predictable month: Goodcall Starter, $79 for up to 100 customers, with unmetered minutes.
• Short calls, many of them, with transfers and calendar booking: Rosie Scale at $149 or Dialzara Pro or Plus, whichever your measured minutes favour.
• Under 75 calls, or a wish to pay per call with spam filtered: Smith.ai's free plan, then the $150 plan.
• Anything involving emergencies: test the transfer on each trial before choosing on price.

The solar installer from earlier, at three minutes a call and 40 of the calls being new enquiries, would trial Goodcall Starter first and Rosie Scale second, and compare how each counted the same five test calls against the invoice. Price is the first filter; the test calls are the second.

Questions about the monthly bill

Do spam and wrong-number calls count towards my 100?

It depends on the vendor. Goodcall says spam and wrong numbers don't count, Jobber excludes spam and calls with no real interaction, and Smith.ai filters known spammers before the AI answers. Dialzara's and Rosie's pricing pages don't say how junk calls are billed, but they are short, so they use few minutes.

What happens if I go over my plan's calls or minutes?

Goodcall bills extra customers at your plan's own rate ($0.79, $0.26 or $0.15). Jobber charges $0.79 per extra conversation or lets you pause the Receptionist. Smith.ai's 75-call plan charges $2.50 a call over. Dialzara charges $0.35 to $0.48 a minute over. Rosie's page doesn't state its overage rate, so ask before relying on it.

Is a human answering service cheaper at 100 calls?

No. Smith.ai's human-answered Basic plan lists $810 for 90 calls and $10.50 for each extra call, so about $915 for 100. A human costs more but copes with calls that need judgement, which is why some firms keep a person for emergencies and use AI for the rest.

Can I keep my existing business number?

Usually, by forwarding. Goodcall and Rosie both say you keep your number and forward calls to them, and Jobber's Receptionist works through forwarding too, although Jobber still gives you its own dedicated number underneath. Smith.ai's and Dialzara's AI pricing pages don't say, so confirm forwarding, including whether it can be set to unanswered calls only, before you start a trial.

Further reads

• AI Receptionist for Tradespeople: What It Costs and When It Pays — What a receptionist costs tradespeople, and when it pays.
• AI Receptionist for Trades: Built Into Your Job Software or Standalone? — Whether to buy the receptionist inside your job software or separately.
• AI Receptionist for Construction Companies: Real Costs and Call Routing — Call routing and costs for a firm with a site office and subcontractors.
• AI Voice Agent for Contractors: What It Handles and What It Hands Off — What a voice agent should take and what it should hand to you.
• Answering Service for Towing Companies: Night-Call Cost, Human or AI — Priced night-call scenarios for a towing company: human per-minute plans against AI per-call plans, and how each hands a stranded caller to the on-call driver.
• Locksmith Answering Service vs AI: What Each Costs per Month — Monthly cost of a human answering service against an AI receptionist for a locksmith, with call-volume sums and an emergency hand-off rule.
• AI Apps for Contractors: A Phone-Only Setup for One-Truck Firms — Which AI apps a one-truck contractor can run from a phone on site, in what order, what each costs, and how to check every step is working.
• AI Marketing Agency for Contractors: What to Pay and What to Ask — Published agency prices, the ChatGPT do-it-yourself bill, a worked lead audit and the contract and reporting terms a contractor should insist on.
• AI Receptionist Pricing for Pest Control: What 100 and 300 Calls Cost — Six receptionists priced at 100 and 300 calls and across a swarm-season year, plus the set-up steps, swarm script and no-pesticide-advice rules.
• AI Receptionist for Handyman Businesses: Triage Small Jobs by Phone — Four job lanes, the minimum-charge sentence, ten triage questions, photo-by-text scripts and booking rules to paste into a receptionist's instructions.
• AI Receptionist for Roofing Companies: Storm-Day Calls and Claim Questions — A storm-week setup for roofers: six call types, an inspection cap, transfer rules, claim wording that stops short of adjusting, and twenty test calls.
• AI Software for Contractors: An Office Stack for a Five-Person Firm — A worked monthly bill for a five-person contractor: scheduling, quotes, calls and reviews priced at lean, standard and one-vendor levels from vendor pages.
• Which AI Tools Should a General Contractor Buy? What to Skip — A buy-first order, a skip list with triggers, and a hours-it-must-save test for a general contractor, priced for a six-person remodelling firm.
• AI Receptionist for Junk Removal: Costs, Photo Requests and Booking — Plan prices at three call volumes, nine intake questions, a text-for-photos flow and same-day booking rules for a junk removal company.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Smith.ai's AI Receptionist, human and hybrid pricing pages; Dialzara, Goodcall and Rosie pricing pages, including Rosie's FAQ; Jobber's pricing page, Receptionist help article (updated 28 October 2026) and add-ons help article. All read on 29 October 2026.