What an AI receptionist actually costs in India

Per-minute prices in this market range from about ₹2 to well over ₹10, and the range is not mostly about quality. It is about which costs the number includes.

A quote is not comparable to another quote until you have separated it into the same four lines. Here they are, with the ones that get quietly omitted flagged.

The four lines in every quote

1. The platform fee. A monthly subscription for the assistant existing — usually including some quantity of usage. Almost always stated.

2. Usage beyond what is included. Per minute for voice, or per conversation for chat. Usually stated, and usually the number in the headline.

3. Telephony. The actual phone line and the per-minute carrier cost of carrying the call. In India this normally means an Exotel or similar account. Frequently omitted, and it is a real per-minute cost that does not disappear because a vendor did not mention it.

4. Setup. Building the assistant around your prices, services and questions. Sometimes ₹0, sometimes tens of thousands, and the two are rarely the same product — a ₹0 setup usually means you do the configuration.

A ₹2/min quote that covers line 2 only, versus a ₹6/min quote that covers lines 2 and 3, is not a three-times price difference. It may not be a price difference at all.

Two structural things worth understanding

A very low per-minute rate is a business model, not a bargain. In this market the aggressive per-minute numbers typically come from vendors whose margin is elsewhere — recurring channel fees, or a reseller programme where the advertised rate is close to their wholesale cost. Nothing wrong with that, but the per-minute figure is chosen to win comparison tables, not to describe what you will pay.

Whether telephony is bundled changes who carries the risk. If a vendor resells you minutes, they take a margin and you get one bill. If the line is in your own name, you pay the carrier directly at cost, you can see exactly what you used, and you keep the number if you leave. We do the second. It means our number looks higher next to a bundled one and you are not paying a markup on carriage.

What we charge

Stated plainly, so you can put it in the four lines above:

Our current figures are published in full on the pricing page, and in machine-readable form on the published facts page. They are kept in one place rather than restated across the site, so what you read there is what is true today.

What does not change is the shape, and it is the shape that makes a comparison possible:

• Platform and usage are ours and are published.
• Telephony is not. Your own Exotel account, billed to you directly at cost. We do not resell minutes and do not mark up carriage.
• Meta messaging fees are not ours either — same principle, your account, at cost.

That third and fourth line are the ones most quotes in this market fold into a single per-minute figure. All our figures exclude GST.

⚠️ Three things worth knowing, since they affect how you plan. Your usage is priced into a proper GST invoice — line items per assistant and per channel, CGST/SGST or IGST from your billing profile — downloadable once it has been issued; what does not happen is one arriving by itself every month or landing in your inbox. You pay from a prepaid wallet — you top it up, usage draws it down, and every entry is visible; it does not refill itself, and an empty balance stops the assistant answering rather than running up a bill you did not agree to. And there is no published committed-term rate; if you want one, that is a conversation.

Work out your own number

Two calculators, both of which run entirely in your browser, send nothing anywhere, and are not behind an email form:

• What your missed calls cost — the size of the problem, using your own five numbers.
• What Kooday would cost you — the monthly figure for your call volume, with the telephony line shown separately rather than folded in.

Run them in that order. The second is only interesting if the first came out larger than it — and both read our live prices, so they cannot drift from the pricing page.

When the answer is no

If your missed and after-hours enquiries are worth less than what the platform costs, nothing further down the page rescues it. The missed-call calculator will tell you this directly — it compares your number against our real monthly fee and says so when the answer is no. That is a real outcome and it applies to plenty of businesses.

We would rather you reached it on this page than three months after signing.